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Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments.

feddit.org

Regarding Mid-East-related Comments on !europe - feddit.org

Feddit.org announced today that they are changing their rules to match German law despite their server not being hosted in Germany.

Feddit.org now bans

  • The sentence "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"
  • Comparing Israel to the Nazis
  • Calls to end Zionism
  • Calling for the dissolution of Israel

And much more. The full original post can be found here, or

117 comments

  • Genuine freak shit. Maybe wait until the government bothers you, don't preempt them

    • Says the person not at risk of early moring police raids of their home including months long confiscation of all their communication devices and costly legal proceedings to get them back.

      • You would have turned in Anne Frank.

        • Right, people arguing to not expose others to the risk of police raids are "asckually Nazis". You realize how absurd that is? Anne Frank was found during a police raid...

      • ~ Average german defense for their complicity in the 1940s.

      • I'm a communist trans woman with guns who helps house people for free in the USA. I've had ICE and police show up to my doorstep before. For some reason, I doubt a bunch of cishet white nerd guys in Germany are about to have as many problems as I do for hosting anti israel content on a small social site.

        • Great, more power to you, but you do realize that this is still quite a different situation? What you are doing is not illegal (for now at least) and you have some control over the risks you personally take.

          Hosting a space for others but still being legally responsible for what they do in that space has different requirements. You would probably also ask people you host to not set up a meth lab in your place.

          • What I'm doing is illegal in my jurisdiction, ICE showed up for a reason. The law can eat my ass no one should be homeless

            • Fine, I don't know your situation, but there is still the difference that you chose to take that personal risk intentionally, while the feddit.org admins did not.

              • Unforced error really, there's a lot of secure hosting providers that take anonymous payments. Could easily say you transferred domain control to someone else to avoid liability when the law passed. They're doing this because they have no convictions and are lazy at best, at worst they support Israel.

                • Not really.

                  You can't become anonymous and retain site ownership. The site would've needed to be shut down and a new, somehow completely unrelated site would have to be started.

                  Besides, even if that were done you bet your ass a random German lawyer would immediately sue the new site for violating Impressumspflicht. That's one quick way to get the police investigating your site. Your OPSEC better be close to "hosting an illegal streaming site" level.

                  Even German forums about piracy would rather have an impress and remove illegal content than remain anonymous and evade police - see tarnkappe.info.

                  • I'd argue every small social site should run on the principal that they will be prosecuted like an illegal streaming site. You can divest yourself of liability and doxing with basic opsec.

                    An example: host on 1984.hosting and pay with mined or donated Monero. Only access the site through a computer specifically for that purpose, and only with Tor / Tor Browser and a Linux distro such as Qubes, Tails, or less suspiciously, Fedora Atomic. Memorize credentials if possible, if not encrypt them on drive with a strong password via a keepassxc databases. If you are hosting the site properly, you can transfer the site podman/docker container and url with databases and info intact with no effort. Make sure the computer for managing site management stuff wipes itself on every shutdown sans credential info, has secureboot, and an encrypted drive. As an admin account, only access the site through base Mullvad Browser with a VPN (ideally Mullvad) or Tor Browser on a computer of your choosing.

                    You can easily say the site is no longer yours and your payment information will reflect this. This has been done before. Germany can ban the site but it'll be easily discoverable through other fediverse servers, Tor, and VPNs. They would have to ban anything that uses acitivitypub, and again, even in that scenario you can use a VPN or Tor or self host a vps with the instructions above to access it normally anyways.

117 comments