The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.
Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.
The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.
I decided to block the lemmy.ml instance entirely to avoid any further interaction.
I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here
- https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
- https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
- https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
- https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
- https://lemmy.world/post/43978041
Log screenshots
The comments in this post are turning nasty and I’ve already banned two users for their behavior. Locked.
The path to enlightenment.
Reminds me of some zio article I read lately that says in reality democrasy does not work in the middleast and that Israel is the only democrasy in the middleeast…etc ,… without mentioning that in reality the US steps in to slaughter every middleastern country the moment they try democrasy, and forces them to install a puppet dictatorship government that works for the intrests of israel and US.
It is so blatantly obvious. Worse than the_donald was on reddit. Pure Chinese and Russia propaganda. Overtly negative on anything from the west and won’t allow anything negative about Russia, China, etc.
The authoritarian bootlicker server is doing authoritarian bootlicker things? Shocked, I say. Shocked!
The mods do whatever they want, many break their own posted rules with regularity.
In my experience, in Lemmy they are more apt to delete a comment then ban, so that is nice.
There’s no logic to it. I’ve said “The nation ___________ says this, their motto is ___________ … (and then repeat their own slogan from their own officials).”
Delete. 100% true, easily verifiable everywhere, public information pertaining to the discussion, deleted.
So, if you’re censored or banned, that just means that you’re a thinking person with reasonable opinions who bases your conclusions on the factual information available to you.
It’s a good thing. Thank God.
If they agree with you, please get help immediately. Time is short.
Just defederate yourself from those instances (block them.) Idk why you think spending all this time and effort on an instance you really don’t like is going to do anything positive for you.
I’ve blocked all .lm instances and even now piefed. The creator or piefed bans anyone who criticizes his dumb ass decisions. Well that’s fine, there a reason the entirety of piefed as a software has been decreasing population.
Also there are occasional mods that just love to jerk themselves. The dumb taco truck mod on the Star Trek instance will ban you if you say you don’t like new Star Trek, but that dumbass just moderates two mostly dead communities, so it’s okay
I’m just a user here but three days ago I was banned from some community without any explanation. Some moderator accused me of being a rapist because of one comment that they deleted and no one could read. After some comments trying to find out what was happening, I was banned. I didn’t see before, but in that community, in the blahaj something instance, they warn something like ‘no tankies’. I’m in lemmy.ml, and I guess that makes me a tankie.
These instance wars are bullshit.
If you root for murderous authoritarian dictatorships just cause they are anti-west, you are not a leftist, you are not a tankie, you are a fascist and should be treated as such.
It’s basically a rite of passage for a new lemmy user to get banned from half of .ml for a completely mundane comment they made.
There needs to be a list of instances that defederate lemmy.ml by default. It’s not just a single community, it is at the admin level.
Be the change you want to see in this world. Make your own instance and defederate.
You must be new around here. This is old news and a reason a lot of places block ml
It’s important to document their behavior anyway, because not al places block ml.
I knew that lemmy.ml is tankies, but removing comments/posts that don’t serve their agenda is new to me.
In large part that is what the word “tankie” means - denial of reality, instead substituting their own, which can only be done inside of a controlled echo chamber. Tankie is no way is synonymous with Communist.
Think MAGA but on the left - it’s otherwise identical in terms of behaviors, merely different talking points.
You may find this illustrative:
It’s pro-authoritarian. That means this control is not really a contradiction. They say they’re leftist, but I think it’d be hard to actually justify that based on the groups they support. Russia isn’t leftist. The USSR may have been, but it’s long gone. Russia is anti-LGBT+ and doesn’t protect workers. It’s an oligarchy.
There are only two consistent things they follow. They’re pro-authoritarian and anti-west.
You may find this illustrative:
404 not found
Here let me help
Whatever the fuck tankies are -------● doing / / ● Far \ /Right \ / ●----●Center●/ Far Left™Images barely working, ascii art, threaded structure, federation…
close enough, welcome back usenet.
Thanks. I still have no idea what I’m looking at though. A left-right scale of some kind - is it just randomly drawn lines in the classic political compass?
It is labeled “stethoscope theory” and the image is just regular horseshoe theory, but with “far left” replaced by Tankies and moved to its own special branch that continues off to the left instead of circling back around.
Thank you! That at least gave me enough context to find this image (let’s see if it works)
deleted by creator
They are not really leftist. They call themselves that, but they support the authoritarian oligarchy of Russia. That’s not what a leftist would do. They are anti-western and pro-authoritarian, and that’s about it.
Tankeis are not leftists.
I never paid attention to the word until I came to Kbin and subsequently Lemmy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie says:
Tankie originated in the UK as a term for hardline members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who continued to pledge support for the Soviet Union even when doubts had begun to emerge elsewhere in the party.
… Politically speaking, tankies regard past and current socialist systems as legitimate attempts at creating communism, and thus have not distanced themselves from Stalin, China, etc.
Practically speaking, tankies are pro-fascist and pro-genocide, plus individual (literal) murders, so long as it is done by their favored in-groups (e.g. Russian aggression vs. Ukraine portrayed instead as poor whittle russia forced to defend itself, whoopsie), and opposed to anything (even outright socialism) when done by their opposed out-groups - chiefly Western Civilization.
So their cries of “Death to the USA” are meant literally, and also inclusive of other NATO states.
Source: go visit Lemmy.ml, which unlike most other instances by default without being logged in shows only Local rather than Global content, and see for yourself, it should only take a couple of minutes to find such evidence. Or possibly better yet lemmygrad.ml, except that most instances actually defederate from that one whereas almost none defederate from Lemmy.ml.
One of my first experiences in the Fediverse was mentioning the Uyghur genocide and having my comment promptly removed by the .ml admins. They’ve been doing this all the time.
When I first got on here I waded into a thread praising north korea and got so many downvotes for not knowing how awesome the Kim regime is. Fucking tankies man
It’s a rite of passage here 😁
imagine you mentioned the tianamin massacre, it would get thier panties in a wad.
A lot of instances are curated, they’re the supreme mods after all. Some delay your posts until they can curate them, and some just remove them. It’s the way it be.
This isn’t said and understood enough. Instances on the Fediverse aren’t free-for-all, apolitical places without ideology. Some try to be (with varying success) but being active in the Fediverse and especially running an instance is in itself a fairly ideological and political act. So chances are instances reflect their owners’ ideology. And that is great because one has places to be if an instance doesn’t suit them, unlike corpo platdorms where one ideology drives most of them.
The only thing that bugs me about it is that the largest instances can control what most people see.
True. It’s definitely not a perfect, problem-solved thing. Merely an (significant?) improvement from the corporate status quo.
The great thing about lemmy’s design is that that’s not really true. I’m seeing this criticism of .ml despite being on .ml, because most of the posts that I see on lemmy are not on my home instance. At least half the time, I’m having discussions outside of my “home turf.”
When you have a space that agrees on certain base assumptions, it becomes easier to have more in depth and thoughtful discussions, because you don’t have to focus on just proving or advocating for those basic assumptions over and over again, and watching every word you say to make sure it can’t be twisted or misinterpreted to paint you in a negative light. By contrast, sharing a space with ideological opponents often means people tend to dig in and just make snipes at each other, everybody’s just grandstanding and trying to get owns in, and the level of discussion is brought down to name-calling and accusations.
At the same time, yes, echo chambers are a concern. If you’re never exposed to opposing viewpoints, obviously that’s not great either. We can see that happen on any number of subreddits. And if we were on different subreddits instead of on different instances, I wouldn’t be seeing this criticism, and you wouldn’t be seeing my response to it.
The way the fediverse is designed inherently addresses both of those concerns. You can have a space where the discussions assume a shared ideology allowing for in depth discussions, but then you’re also federated with other spaces with different shared assumptions. The “tankie” creators of lemmy designed it this way on purpose, for that reason. To allow minority views (including but not limited to their own) to have spaces for discussion, without becoming isolated. To allow for higher level discussions with shared assumptions while also allowing for interactions between groups with different assumptions.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies, and that is not in spite of what the .ml’s admins want, they literally designed it that way on purpose.
The only censorship that really matters on the fediverse is defederation.
and those other instances can also moderate and delete comments and posts for all other instances unless archived or crossposted. If a lemmy.world mod deletes a comment in a lemmy.world post, I won’t be able to see it from over here in db0
Tbf this is true for all instances - it is simply how the ActivityPub Protocol works. The home instance “owns” the content, so if e.g. a Lemmy.world user submits a post to a community on Lemmy.ml, then other LW users won’t be able to see it if it gets removed, but the same is true vice versa if a ML user submits a post to a community located on LW.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies
Literally nobody has ever claimed that users on Lemmy.ml are not allowed to see content on other instances - this is not merely a strawman argument but an absolutely ridiculous one.
Please don’t bother to reply to this if this is the level of content that your messages will contain.
For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed - a community of people discussing FOSS comes nowhere close to mentioning that you are not allowed to come close to criticizing Russia, China, or North Korea - e.g. it is not allowed to state that Ukraine is not the aggressor and that rather Russia is, or to state that Uyghurs are being killed by China.
I really really really really really really really really wish that Lemmy would implement a true instance block so that I did not have to spend time reading such comments as this. But for some reason that option is denied to me. Go figure.
It’s not really a strawman in that I never claimed anyone said it. It’s just that people talk about “censorship” and “echo chambers” and “they have to remove things to keep their users brainwashed” or whatever nonsense, ignoring the fact that the structure of the fediverse, as designed by the .ml admins, makes that more or less impossible.
For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed
OK, fair enough, they could afford to clarify the rules somewhat. But I don’t really consider that a huge deal. I’ve been banned from communities on .world for things that aren’t enumerated in the rules too. I don’t see why rules have to cover every possible thing.
Why are you writing tankie in quotes?
Because I disagree with the term. The admins are not “tankies,” they are Marxist-Leninists.
What makes someone a “tankie” is that they “defend” certain states. In practice, “defending” often includes just refuting misinformation, for example, if I refute that “everyone in North Korea gets the same haircut” then I’m “defending” it and therefore a “tankie.” It can also mean acknowledging accomplishments, saying any good thing about any socialist state, like, “Cuba had a very successful literacy program,” which is just an objective historical fact. “Tankie” is supposed to mean someone who blindly supports everything a socialist state has ever done, in practice, it means someone who supports anything a socialist state has ever done.
Before it was “tankie” it was “pinko,” and before that “red.” That kind of red scare bullshit has allowed blatant misinformation to run rampant, because even rational people avoid pushing back on it for fear of being labelled a “tankie.” As stories about how all communists eat babies or whatnot run rampant, it has in turn hurt the reputation of both leftists and liberals, because it literally doesn’t matter how hard you try to distance yourself from the far-left, you’ll still get associated with it. Joe Biden got called a communist for Christ’s sake. To put it another way:
Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.
The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
That is why I put “tankie” in quotes.
This. Just imagine if all of Lemmy was like one instance or another. The whole point of the fediverse is that there can be multiple instances, and you can just gravitate towards the ones that align with your own views.
Except it would be nice if the instances were honest about their rules, or at least that they would be described somewhere written down, rather than people having to continually find out the hard way (such as OP).
They’ve always done this. “Rule 1” Is pretty much a .ml meme catch all for “you aren’t allowed to use facts here. Agree or be removed”
You might be thinking of lemmygrad?
they have been doing that, maybe you dont visit thier posts often. hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml are all super tankies. others ones you may want to avoid is dbzero, or equivalent, startrek website comm, and some of blahj ones.
LOL, startrek.website? IIRC the whole hubbub about them was that they defederated from dbzer0 in the first place.
What part of “tankies” do you not understand?
Im glad youre taking the steps to enjoy lemmy your way. Take care stranger.
Defederate lemmy.ml
I had one .ml mod delete a comment of mine because I listed events that disagreed with them minimizing the horrors of 1986 republicans. They stated your average '86 republican was further left than 2026 average dem. So I blocked that mod and that channel.
So I guess .ml are apologists for the '86 gop now?
Tankies: we’re leftists!
Also tankies: Reagan wasn’t that bad
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
Y’all really need to come to terms with the fact that tankies are just conservatives larping.
Why do you need the admin of your server to manage your block list for you? Perhaps youre unsure of how to take personal responsibility of your own lemmy account. Dont worry stranger, I got your back.
Welcome to a tutorial on how to block .ml on your personal account.
In the top right corner of the top of the page, there are 3 horizontal white bars. Click it.
This will open up a drop down menu. At the bottom of that menu, you will see your username. Click it.
This will open another drop down menu with 3 options. Click “Settings”.
At the top of your screen you will see 2 tabs. Click the one that says “Blocks”.
Here you will see “Block user” “Block community” and “Block instance”. Click the down arrow below “Block instance”.
This will open up a search bar. Type “lemmy.ml” and click it after it shows up. That’s it! You’ve blocked .ml and will never see content from the instance.
But wait, we aren’t done yet in this menu. Click the down arrow under “Block user”. Now type “UltraGiGaGigantic” Make sure you select my .ml account as the other ones I no longer use. Thanks, appreciate it.
Funny, I just had a thread going about the same thing happening in the “LateStageCapitalism” instance……
u/godlesscommie, where are you? Gonna come onto this thread to bitch and moan as well?
So you went into a community, you made a bunch of posts that are literally against the rules of the community and frankly the tone of the posts are antithetical to the point of the community. It’s called late stage capitalism. What did you think they thought?
This is straight up troll Behavior. I would have banned you too.
I mean these people are incredibly stupid but I probably also would’ve given a temp ban (but I also probably would’ve banned the people saying “both sides!!!”). That community is there to moan about capitalism’s failings, and your posts didn’t really fit there. It’s like going into a support group for women and saying men also have these problems, even if you’re right these people feel like they’ve been failed by the system so you have to take a softer tone.
This literally just happened to me in the memes instance of .ml
