Lemmy.world community banned people for misinformation on the post complaining about Lemmy.ml instance banning people for misinformation

I was the guy that was called a nazi pole in that thread. I posted multiple links to counter the "bloodless invasion" bullcrap which they completely ignored to call me a racist nazi. No response to Katyn for instance. Total stonewalling, like they were having their own conversation that didn't include me.

For the sake of this discussion, I went back to the 800 comments thread and found the actual exchange on that topic.

It starts here: https://lemmy.world/comment/10475023

Tl:dr: Polish commenter is upset at banned user for

• categorizing the impact of the Poland invasion by USSR as "bloodless"
• denying that USSR and Germany were allies
• pointing out that there were Nazis in Poland

On the other hand, banned users is upset at the Polish commenter for

• Denying that there were Nazis in Poland (on that topic, I found an interesting thread on /r/AskHistorians: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2qd9f2/polishjewish_relationships_before_and_during_wwii/cn53yic/?context=3

Before WW2, Poland was pretty antisemitic. In the 1930s, for instance, youth nationalist movements had advocated for "ghetto benches", so Jews couldn't sit with Poles in university classrooms, following growing violence against Jewish university students. Which given the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe, wasn't exactly shocking, but antisemitism did certainly exist in Polish society. It's certainly different than American university antisemitism of the era, which was limited to quotas (which were sometimes only subtly enforced)--Poland didn't have university quotas at all for several years after WW1, but they returned.

During the war, a great deal of the Holocaust was perpetrated and assisted by local collaborators. However, this was much more common in other countries, like Ukraine and Lithuania, than in Poland.

And after the war, there were incidents of antisemitic violence among Poles. The most famous is the Kielce Pogrom. These effectively ensured that survivors would not return, barring any chance at a revival of Jewish life in Eastern Europe post-war.

On this subject, I would highly recommend Antony Polonsky's My Brother's Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, which is a discussion of essays/articles/etc which were written in the 80s when a flurry of debates/discussions on this subject in Poland occurred.

• Denying that millions of Soviet soldiers died during WW2 to fight Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_in_World_War_II#Soviet_push_to_Germany)
• On the accusation of the Polish commenter being racist against Russians, that seems like an exaggeration from the banned user.

Reading the whole thread again, there doesn't seem to be much "harassment" as stated in the modlog, as much as a heated debate between the two parties.

From a lemmy.ml user perspective (which I'm not), I could see why they would complain about a political bias against the USSR.

One potential improvement point might be for mods to add historical sources to why they consider a comment misinformation. Also, banning this type of users and removing those comments (and leaving the others) might lead to an echo chamber effect on lemmy.world (mirroring the one on lemmy.ml).

It's fine!

I really see where they come from, and why they prefer a strong moderation on this kind of topics. I guess it starts to get blurry once you have to define what is misinformation. Historical accuracy is hard to achieve (this is why I still go to /r/AskHistorians, and I linked a few threads in the other comments).

I saw some time ago a graph showing how the perception of the USSR changed a lot in Europe during the Cold War compared to just after WW2.

The following statements might be all true at the same time

• USSR committed imperialist massacres
• USA committed imperialist massacres
• most of the Western European nations committed imperialist massacres

Sometimes I'm wondering if those three statements can be compiled in a single comment and not instantly start a comment war with everyone trying to push their own agenda, and mods having to interfere following their own views.

Preach to the choir.

One example of comment removal that caught my eye:

They can’t engage with any topics or offer counter arguments. Every response is: Calling people fascists, insulting and using ad hominems is lemmy.world's thing. The comment section to this is mind-blowing, really. All the things of which users of lemmy.world are accusing other instances, is exactly what your instance is doing. And you don't even see the hypocrisy...

Reason: Misinformation

ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs That's exactly what lemmy.world is doing.

Reason: Misinformation

Not being able to criticize an instance on that instance seems counterproductive to me. You are convincing people that they are right claiming you apply censorship as they are being censored.

One ban example that caught my eye:

The whole "USSR allied with the Nazis" thing is actually Nazi propaganda and historical evidence proves this repeatedly. Before the war started, Stalin offered to send 1 million soldiers preemptively to England and France, together with artillery and aviation, if they agreed to a mutual defense agreement against Nazis. The soviet union wasn't prepared industrially for a war like that, again as proven by the 20+ million deaths in the war, and wanted to postpone it as much as possible, and join the allies as soon as it started, but France and England were too eager to see communism destroyed and didn't care about mutual defense, especially England. The fact that the Soviet Union later invaded some countries to the east of Germany was in preparation for war, to prevent Nazism from rising in these places and the military there allying with Hitler, as Finland did for example (there were plenty of Finns sieging Leningrad). Equating Nazism and the USSR is a revisionist, fascist talking point based on purposeful misinterpretation of some data like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and outright omission of other data such as the attempted Collective Security policy attempted by the USSR since the early 30s to protect Europe from fascism, that England and France conveniently didn't agree to since nazis and fascists were enemies of communism as they were.

Reason: Misinformation / Harassment

That user was later banned.

This comment has a source (The Telegraph, might not be the best, but still). Seems more interesting to keep the comment, show them why they are wrong, so that people reading the whole conversation can see which side is more reasonable, than removing the comment and banning the user altogether.

Based on this, I would almost suggest creating a third "Fediverse" community, be it on lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works or reddthat.com, communities known for honest admins, and with a group of mods that could be trusted.

However, I guess finding people wanting to mod that kind of place would be very difficult based on this kind of threads.

Calling out that bombing a population makes it more likely for people who lost families and homes to radicalise seems sensible. Under the post, there is a lot of criticism of Israel, which in my eyes isn't necessarily antisemitism, which of course doesn't mean that there aren't antisemitic critics of Israel.

Of course, Israel is allowed to defend itself against attack, but what it has done and is currently doing in Gaza cannot in good faith be called defending itself.

Regardless of all that, as long as it isn't very clear that there is no effort made to moderate incitement of violence and hate speech, it is rather difficult to hold a platform accountable for the speech of it's users.

Can you provide an example of this?

Because anti semetiam is just political tactic that is generally used to discredit people who criticize Israeli war crimes and other gross misconduct.