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

Modlog visible here: https://lemmy.world/modlog/2

Or on !fediverse@lemmy.world

I have no stake in this argument (centralization on both lemmy.ml and lemmy.world is detrimental in my opinion), but I found it kind of ironic.

Not sure if this is the best place to post it, but didn't know of any "neutral" fediverse communities, so I guess this one works.

Edit: the thread itself: https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

Some examples of removals/bans: https://reddthat.com/post/20718767/11186767

72 comments

  • And you point is? Should they not ban people for spreading blatant lies?

    • 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.

      • "We should platform misinformation so we can present both sides"

        Fucking what.

        Apologia for the USSR's cooperation with the literal fucking Nazis is next level, and that's the example that jumps out for you?

        • Disclaimer: I am by no mean expert on the matter.

          Some threads I found on the matter on the regretted /r/AskHistorians

          My point was that posting those kind of links in reply to comments that are suspected to be propaganda could counter their argumentation without having to silence them.

          • My point was that posting those kind of links in reply to comments that are suspected to be propaganda could counter their argumentation without having to silence them.

            Platforming lies is platforming lies. "But someone further down in the thread refuted it!" doesn't really matter when the entire fucking point of this kind of misinformation is "Repeat a lie loud enough and often enough and people will believe it's true". It's no more worthy of staying on to show 'both sides' than contrasting vaccination with fucking anti-vaxxers.

            • I see.

              On the other side, banning people is encouraging them to create their own echo chambers (lemmy.ml being obviously one from the recent instance bans). I guess different communities will have different stance on moderation strategies, which is the way the Fediverse is supposed to operate.

              • People need to be free to be how they like. e.g., if a mod is forced to have to read constant Russian (or Chinese, or Israeli, or American, or UK or whatever) propaganda with horribly offensive active disinformation, then likely they will quit being mods. I'm not saying they are holding their efforts hostage to their preferences - but I'm not not saying that either (it is factually accurate if unnecessarily adversarially phrased), just saying that it's the normal default of the world and we would do better to bow to natural principles than to wish and hope that things were not that way.

                It is really, REALLY hard to find common middle ground - and sometimes it cannot be done. Echo chambers are a natural result of how people with opposing viewpoints choose not to tolerate one another.

                Intolerance is uniquely important, bc being intolerant to intolerance is not the same as generalized intolerance!!! In fact, the opposite is true: anyplace that is even somewhat vaguely neutral towards intolerant behaviors, in general, will quickly become intolerant overall. Imagine a room with screaming toddlers - those who scream loudest get noticed, and the behavior spirals forward feeding off of the other behaviors to become more pronounced, not less so. A space quiet enough to be heard is not normal. Entropy must be fought against if order is desired. There is a balance somewhere between letting toddlers do nothing at all fun, vs. letting them do whatever crosses their minds at any given moment, thus inflicting their tendencies upon others nearby.

                Take Chapotraphouse for instance: I would not dream in a million years of trying to shut that place down. Maybe I should? But I don't. That said, neither do I want to go there, and the Fediverse would be a much more welcoming place overall if it would warn people about what goes on inside of it. If they are willing to be fair-minded, they could even contribute towards writing up the content text of such a warning? They should not be solely in charge of that endeavor, ideally, yet neither do I see any legitimate reason to lock them out of such a process?

                I don't know how the Fediverse expects to survive when we mix together the equivalent of 4chan and Wikipedia, but don't label any of it, and then try to get people to come and enjoy their time here. Especially with it being so confusing - e.g. was a comment removed by a community mod or an instance admin? (fortunately v0.19.4 looks to entirely solve that latter one, yay dev efforts on that one - they really do so much for us all, for free!:-D)

                Note I am not advocating for a common middle ground here - I do not believe such exists (e.g. if someone wants to make fun of me, but I don't want that, why would we presume a "middle ground solution" should be the default?). I am rather advocating for labeling things what they are. Imagine going to a website to watch videos, but some videos are porn and your friends are all prudes, or moreover let's even imagine some are nonconsensual pedophilia - will you send them there? Sending people to Chapotraphouse, or a place that federates with it - crucially: without labeling it - is like that.

                Some places on the Fediverse are like porn - they are (/ may be?) fine to exist, but are considered offensive enough to need to be labeled, if we want to reach out to a more common audience (of e.g. non-Arch-Linux users:-). And then yeah, label Lemmy.World as likely to remove content that goes against Western standards? (Except you picked bad examples imho, being community mods rather than instance admins) And do similarly for Lemmy.ml as well - again, hopefully with their own participation in writing up that label?

          • No. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

            Asking mods to debunk it if they want to remove it is absurd. It takes more effort to debunk something than the effort it takes to spread lies, so your "neutral" suggestions are basically saying you want tankie propaganda to take over. Bots would just keep posting more and more propaganda and the mods would fall further and further behind.

        • I think this illustrates the core problem very well. Attacking the character of the poster, and their motivations, rather than the content itself. Is very problematic for open discourse. And that's probably fine at the comment counter comment level. But when we are talking about banning people the bar should be higher than ad hominem

          • You want to explain to me how historical misinformation is just an 'ad hominem'?

            Like, at the fucking core, that is objectionable content.

            • I don't particularly care to debate world war II politics, but I think there is enough data there to have a discussion, rather than questioning somebody's character for even bringing it up. I don't actually care about community level moderation decisions, I only care about instance level bans.

              Banning somebody from an instance for referring to historical events, seems questionable for a cornerstone Lemmy instance to do. And that is a valid discussion to have here.

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact

               In mid-March 1939, attempting to contain Hitler's expansionism, the Soviet Union, Britain and France started to trade a flurry of suggestions and counterplans on a potential political and military agreement.[\[45\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-FOOTNOTECarley1993-48)[\[46\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-FOOTNOTEWatson2000696%E2%80%938-49) Informal consultations started in April, but the main negotiations began only in May.[\[46\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-FOOTNOTEWatson2000696%E2%80%938-49) Meanwhile, throughout early 1939, Germany had secretly hinted to Soviet diplomats that it could offer better terms for a political agreement than could Britain and France.[\[47\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-FOOTNOTERoberts200630-50)[\[48\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-tent-51)[\[49\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-Grogin-52)
                  

The Soviet Union, which feared Western powers and the possibility of "capitalist encirclements", had little hope either of preventing war and wanted nothing less than an ironclad military alliance with France and Britain[\[50\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-FOOTNOTECarley1993324-53) to provide guaranteed support for a two-pronged attack on Germany.[\[51\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-FOOTNOTEWatson2000695-54) Stalin's adherence to the collective security line was thus purely conditional.[\[52\]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact#cite_note-55)

              • I don’t particularly care to debate world war II politics,

                Yet here you are. Funny way of not particularly caring.

                but I think there is enough data there to have a discussion, rather than questioning somebody’s character for even bringing it up.

                Oh, cool, as long as it's Just Asking Questions(tm) it's okay. Next up, we'll do "Was Hitler REALLY a BAD guy?" and "Did the Holocaust REALLY kill millions of people?"

                Banning somebody from an instance for referring to historical events, seems questionable for a cornerstone Lemmy instance to do.

                "Referring to historical events"

                By calling the Soviet invasion of Poland 'bloodless' and accusing the Poles of being the REAL Nazis, who the Soviets had to invade to defeat fascism?

                Yeah, that's not 'referring to historical events', that's 'referring to pure fucking fantasy and passing it off as historical fact'.

                It's curious how many times I run into defenders of people like this who insist that they have no skin in the game but still bend over backwards to accommodate the most horrendous views. I must just not be enlightened enough to understand.

      • The first two are sweeping generalizations that are like that simply not true and only serve to attack the work of the moderators. If you want to critizise something you need concrete examples.

        The last one... the historical accuracy is debatable, but was it even posted on a thread that discussed pre-ww2 history? Usually such cut&paste comments are made to derail justified complaints regarding ML propaganda about recent events.

        • The first two are sweeping generalizations that are like that simply not true and only serve to attack the work of the moderators. If you want to critizise something you need concrete examples.

          Ironically, the moderators created those examples themselves by removing those comments.

          The last one… the historical accuracy is debatable, but was it even posted on a thread that discussed pre-ww2 history?

          It was not, but as you know, the lemmy.ml moderation discussion always brings up political questions.

          Usually such cut&paste comments are made to derail justified complaints regarding ML propaganda about recent events.

          Indeed. The fact that lemmy.ml bans people about mentioning Tienanmen is still crazy. But that should probably not be a justification for lemmy.world moderators to remove any debatable historical thesis and ban users for that, especially on a community dedicated to the fediverse.

          • But that should probably not be a justification for lemmy.world moderators to remove any debatable historical thesis and ban users for that, especially on a community dedicated to the fediverse.

            Jesus fucking Christ, the users in question are outright denying massacres, a matter of historical fact not seriously questioned by mainstream academia, performed by a totalitarian state in WW2 on a civilian population, but it's okay because the totalitarian state isn't Nazi Germany? It's just a 'debatable historical thesis'?

            This is fucked, and it's extremely strange that you don't see that.

            • The debatable part is that the USSR might have considered it a valid tactic to buy time, which is the main thesis of the specific post quoted above. I think it is a postwar rationalisation and Stalin had no qualms about working with Hitler, but that is also debatable.

              What however isn't debatable is that community moderators can and should remove comments that are only made to derail discussions.

              • The debatable part is that the USSR might have considered it a valid tactic to buy time, which is the main thesis of the specific post quoted above. I think it is a postwar rationalisation and Stalin had no qualms about working with Hitler, but that is also debatable.

                Indeed, thanks for pointing it out.

                What however isn’t debatable is that community moderators can and should remove comments that are only made to derail discussions.

                I read the whole chain of comments, it actually was started by another commenter that mentioned Poland, and then started the whole thing. You can have a look here if you are interested: https://slrpnk.net/post/10244872/9112924

      • I 100% agree with removing the historical revisionism.

        I don't quite agree with banning the first two comments. But I do agree they are misinformation. Unless we can surface mod logs about historical facts the mods/instance admins don't like getting people banned from .world?

        I'm with you on choosing a smaller instance, though. I moved to .world after I mistakenly had an account on .ml, so I was still pretty new to Lemmy.

        This gets back to the original point made in that thread: I chose to move because I had been banned for I don't even know what. Meanwhile the other person was expressing that any amount of collateral damage to minorities is justified as long as he can see white "crackers" suffer and be killed under a Trump authoritarian government.

      • "You don't understand!! The USSR was allied with the Nazis because they were fighting the Nazis!!!"

        I've seen you post a lot of fantastic stuff on here and appreciate the good changes you're actively bringing to the Fediverse, but I have to disagree on this one.

72 comments