Banned for criticizing the protectors of child rapists in LW World News

Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?

What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?

I had my comment removed and received a one-day ban.

Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).

Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).

Original post: Pope is in ‘critical’ condition after suffering ‘asthmatic respiratory crisis,’ Vatican says

Like many of us on Lemmy, I think the Catholic church is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, including the way they were/are directly involved in blocking access to contraception leading to the needless death of millions of Africans due to the AIDs epidemic, the endless cases of child sex abuse, along with the ongoing coverups, and honestly too many awful things to mention in detail here.

So I left a comment that said:

The Catholic church at this point has all the moral authority of a child sex cult.

Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.

Amend community rule 4 to remove the reference to religion. WTF is it doing there as a rule in a news community in the first place? Is LW being run as a theocracy now?

Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ~~anti-religious,~~ or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.

The mod in question is also a religious weirdo (see below during a discussion about Luigi), so perhaps that is why they have the rule in place. But if that community not going to accept fair criticism of religion then it isn't a serious news community imo.

I fully acknowledge it wasn't a long ban and the rule was in place, so it was perhaps a BPR or YDI in that sense. But the rule shouldn't be there in the first place. How on earth is it justified? And looking at the other votes and comments on that post, it's clear that the the vast majority of folks hate the Catholics church as much as I do. So why is this mod running defence for the famously morally bankrupt Catholic church in a world news community?

31 comments

I saw this in the modlog and it also came off weird to me. It’s definitely BPR or PTB but you got the ban reason wrong? It says rule 6 right there, not rule 4.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
So… I kind of see this? The original post was about the pope’s health. Your comment was removed along with a slew of other much less defensible and off topic comments so I can see how a mod might just go in there and remove them all for being off topic.
TLDR, you didn’t deserve a ban but I think you mischaracterize the reason for the ban and it’s not as serious as your title portrays it. Make those comments in a place where it’s relevant (i.e. under a post about sexual abuse) and you’d be a-ok I’d wager.

I think there's a difference between criticizing religious people, and criticizing a religious organization.
Criticizing an organization isn't discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs, and should be allowed
I feel likw this could be a case of a rule being written (a bit poorly) with reasonable intent, and then interpreted to the letter rather than the spirit.
I do get its important for mods to be consistent around rules if they want to avoid burn out and getting too pulled into disputes, but I think the rule is misworded around the important part- discrimination based on a person's religious identity
- Agree with all of this.

PTB for sure.
Anti-religious sentiment is something that a lot of people get really, really wrong here. Because they don't understand the difference between three things:
The religion itself - a set of moral and epistemic beliefs, rituals, behaviours. e.g. "Christianity"
The religious community - people who claim to follow #1. e.g. "Christians"
Religious institutions - a power structure using #1 to rule over #2. e.g. "the Catholic Church".
OP is clearly criticising #3 and only #3. That's completely fine. Discrimination would target #2 instead. And it's clear that rule 4 is about discrimination, otherwise "anti-religious sentiment" wouldn't be lumped alongside homophobia, racism, etc.
Amend community rule 4 to remove the reference to religion. WTF is it doing there as a rule in a news community in the first place? Is LW being run as a theocracy now?
Ideally this should be amended in a way that people can still criticise #1 and #3 just fine, but doesn't let you to target people based on their religion or lack of. Things like [for example] "Christians are all disgusting and rotten" should still not be allowed; but things like the mod's comment towards Atheists should not either.
...in any other instance I'd propose people to escalate the issue to the admins, but given LW's tendency to screech at people not willing to put up with crap, that is likely useless.
- “Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.” -Lenny Bruce

Look, I agree with you about religion in general and in particular Catholicism.
That being said, the opinion I now present is a bit of a Devil's Advocate position:
The moderators of lemmy.world's worldnews community want to create an inclusive environment, and doing so means that they have to accept that the majority of the world (up to 85%) identifies as religious. (Stay with me, this is going somewhere)
Whether I like religion or not, I've met a lot of those people, and I'd say at least a quarter of them are decent people, religion be damned. They practice what they preach, so to speak.
So perhaps the moderators are doing their best to give users, including religious users, charitable interpretations of their interactions with others. Meaning that disparaging the entire religion might set off a lot of fighting that they would rather not moderate, and they also don't want to make the moderately religious feel unwelcome.
I agree with your assessment that the comment probably shouldn't have been removed, it's a bit overkill.
I'm just trying to put myself in the shoes of a moderator who wants to keep the amount of moderating they do to a minimum, and they could either accept that the majority of people may very well be religious or they can make an echo chamber full of atheists like us.
I think the rule is fine and getting rid of it is just asking to make a large portion of the world in a world news community feel unwelcome. Not every person inside the Catholic church is literally a child rapist, no matter how much they have done to enable child rapists in their ranks.
Like I said, I think removing your opinion (that could handily be backed up with evidence) is overkill... but at the same time maybe it was to prevent a flamewar from being started. Who knows.
Finally, Pope Francis sucks but is still a lot less sucky than most of the right-wing Cardinals who are closer in politics and ideology to that of Donald Trump and want to get back to sitting on gold thrones. Francis has at least tried to change the church marginally for the better, no matter if what he's done fails to come close to what needs to be done. He's literally up against his own theology and half of the Cardinals (if not more) of his own church. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that nonsense.
Anyway, that's my two cents and me trying to give charitable interpretations to the actions of the moderators.
- Your take is reasonable as a devils advocate type of thing, but I don't think having a rule against anti-religious sentiments is a good thing regardless of what instance it's in.
  I get not wanting to form an echo chamber, but it's not our fault that online spaces largely became a refuge for atheists and people who are critical of religion. I say let the dice fall where they may in a space where both theist and anti-theist opinions are allowed.
  And aside from that, lumping anti-religious sentiments in with racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia is just ridiculous. At the very least they could have worded it better.
- The moderators of lemmy.world’s worldnews community want to create an inclusive environment
  That's a stretch, from what I've seen.
  
  It's their own definition of inclusive

They're calling Luigi supporters tankies because... The middle/lower class cheered for the worst of the bourgeoisie being taken out???????
@teagrrl@lemmy.ml Maybe you were right lol. Like seriously, I'll stop using "tankie" as a shorthand for "authoritarian apologist".
Also, ~~PTB~~. Well, it was written in the rules... But the rule itself is power-tripping IMO.
- Just like "Nazis" is misused, but also a very real thing, so too with "tankies".
- They’re calling Luigi supporters tankies because… The middle/lower class cheered for the worst of the bourgeoisie being taken out???
  I know right, these mods are such social conservatives. They have no idea what the majority of their users think, or if they do, they disapprove of it. It's such a condescending attitude of "we know best".

PTB
"If you wanted not to be accused of sex abuse, you shouldn't have sexually abused all those children."
Just a statement that hurts someone's feelings doesn't mean it needs to be silenced. Especially since no one is really disputing the facts at this point. This is my problem with "civility" in general as a metric of allowed-ness. Sometimes the truth is not civil. As long as you're not being deceitful or picking a fight for no reason (Which, I realize some people might disagree and say this is. To me it is not.)
Here's Bill Burr clapping back in a very classy and very ruthless way at a morning show host who is trying to give him grief about being mean to the church: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBE9vyQEa8E&t=65s
“There is only what is and that's it. What should be is a dirty lie.” - Lenny Bruce
Also, related: “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” - Also Lenny Bruce
- Nicely said, Philip.
  
  Thanks. I had never heard the second Lenny Bruce quote until I went looking for the first one to get the wording, and to me it gets to the heart of why I don't like "civility."

A removed comment and a temp ban. A very short temp ban.
That's well within reasonable actions for any mod.
They point to rule 6 in the removal log, which is weird since rule 6 wasn't broken.
But the correct rule, rule 4 was there. You broke it. There's no power tripping when the action taken is reasonable and in scale with the offense. It was
See, it doesn't matter whether or not what you said is true, whether or not you agree with an established rule, or even whether anyone here agrees or not. What matters is the mod action based on its own merits.
If you want an established rule changed, you go about trying before breaking the rule. That's just common decency in a forum. Did you contact the mods before breaking the rule and get some kind of response that would merit breaking the rule in protest? That might shift things back to PTB if they didn't handle it well, but if you make a protest comment, in not sure why you would expect anything other than bare minimum mod actions.
Sorry, I really want to call PTB bedded because fuck religious edifices that are like a cancer to society, the Catholic church in particular. But me agreeing with your opinion doesn't make their choice of action regarding an established and easy to find rule out of line, it just doesn't
Tbh, anyone posting here about a 1 day ban would likely get the same answer, because that's a cool down ban. It's a way to give a user a chance to chill out and not stir drama and merit a permaban. One day bans simply aren't power tripping, it's surgical use of mod authority, it's judicious and careful.
- I'm not protesting the ban, which was I suppose reasonable as you have described, though a simple removal would have been appropriate imo. I'm protesting the rule. I think I was fairly clear about that in the original post. I've commented elsewhere in this post about why I find this rule highly problematic, so I won't repeat it all again here, but the attitude that it's ok to protect religion institutions from fair criticism in the name of civility is what leads to church abuses in the first place.
  If you want an established rule changed, you go about trying before breaking the rule. That’s just common decency in a forum.
  Dude, have you ever tried speaking to LW mods about why their rules are stupid? The only thing they ever respond to is user protests because they dont like how the majority of their own users think.
  
  Well, if you're on PTB and aren't actually asking about what the C/ is really for, maybe elsewhere.
  As far as LW mods go, don't talk to them. Find an instance, start a C/, and run it how you want.
  That's the answer. Decentralize, make better options, then lw doesn't matter as much.
  But going into any forum, be it on lemmy, on reddit, some website, whatever, and expecting then to change for you just isn't realistic. But you don't just ignore rules like you're entitled to do whatever you want without consequences. If you don't like the rules, fine, talk to the mods or go somewhere else. It really is that simple
  
  Dude, have you ever tried speaking to LW mods about why their rules are stupid? The only thing they ever respond to is user protests because they dont like how the majority of their own users think.
  I would amend this: I don't think LW mods respond to anything in substantive ways. They will occasionally reverse themselves on a really objectively boneheaded decision, but most of the time it's just a big hue and cry, and no particular resolution other than "You get what you get, and you don't get upset." Most of the things that people feel most strongly about, banning UniversalMonk being the most glaring example, they simply tell the community to get fucked. You are absolutely correct that they simply don't like how the users want things to be, and don't give a fuck that they are so far in the minority about it. As far as I can tell.
  I think they are imitating from Reddit the paradigm that they have a monopoly on what's going on, but Lemmy doesn't work that way.
  Lemmy.world definitely does have some fine communities and I am subscribed to many of them. Whatever is going on in the little clique of mods that runs !news, !politics, !world and friends, though, is just best avoided, rather than making any kind of attempt to fix it.
  !world@quokk.au
  !politics@beehaw.org
  !technology@lemmy.zip
  !usa@ponder.cat shameless self promotion
  There you go. Every one of these is a far more pleasant experience than the LW subs. !news@lemmy.world is still tolerable to me, but the other ones are literally so overrun with hostile irrational people and bad moderation that I get for-real disoriented when I go into one of the comments sections and start to see what people are saying and how they interact with each other.
  Edit: I wondered if I was being fair. I looked for a story from the front page of !world@lemmy.world at random, and picked this one: https://lemmy.world/post/25964593, "Trump envoy can’t name a single concession Russia will make in peace deal"
  Second top-level comment, by the default sorting, as of the time of this writing:
  Didn’t see Biden make an effort for a peace deal.
  Not only is that not what I want to read about the Ukraine negotiations, it's not even an effective effort to mount propaganda. No one will read that and somehow think "You know what, that's true, Trump kind of is doing better, at least he's trying." It literally has no purpose whatsoever other than to annoy and inflame. It's just a little turd sitting there in the comments section, stinking up the place.
  Is it the lemmy.world moderators' fault that it is there? Certainly not. Are they putting monumental amounts of effort into making sure that various cockamamie goals and restrictions are put into place into what people can and can't post in the comments section, while doing nothing at all about little turds like that which I will have to step in constantly if I decide to navigate the comments? Yes. Yes, they are.

counterpoint the mod should ban everyone who downvoted my comments
- ok let's add that to the list of remedies
  
  thanks i support you now
  ptb 100%

BPR, or mild PTB for not giving you a warning first. While I agree with you on the moral authority of the Catholic church, that is an inflammatory position to take, and that not everyone wants to deal with that particular conflagration on their comms. If someone said "Islam has all the moral authority of a pedophilic prophet", it would probably be the same reaction.
I lean towards "Let Them Fight" when it comes to moderating delicate topics, but I also understand why not everyone likes to go down that route. The news and religion are not entirely separate, but wanting to keep the more bare-knuckle religious discussion out of a news sub is not an inherently illegitimate position to take.
- It's literally the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the Catholic church tbh :(
  I agree with your assessment, but in my view the moment we start shielding religions institutions from proper scrutiny and criticism, that's exactly the sort of thing that enables and leads directly to church cover-ups of child sex abuse, for example. In a functioning democracy, religious groups should have no special privileges beyond what applies to civil organizations.
  
  In any other context, if someone brought up the leader of an organization that had its most trusted members raping children and the whole business actively covering for them and shielding them from justice, for decades, it would be the first thing people came back with.
  And yes, shielding them from scrutiny for this kind of thing because they're special is exactly how the situation developed and went on for so long in the first place. Fuck 'em. If someone wants to be going out and doing God and good works, I'm all for that, I have no problem with it. Sincerely, I don't, I think it's really good. If they choose to be doing it within the organized structure of the Catholic Church, then they've chosen to join with child rapists and they need to be reminded of that frequently, without any kind of hemming or hawing.
- If someone said "Islam has all the moral authority of a pedophilic prophet", it would probably be the same reaction.
  Except it's not quite the same. Catholicism is not a religion, Christianity is. Many/most religions have sects that should be admonished for reprehensible behaviour, while not disparaging the wider religion. Zionists also come to mind.
  (This is all said by someone who was raised in the Catholic church.)

31 comments