Dear Admins and Users of lemmy.world,
I am writing to express my concerns about the impact of lemmy.ml on our community. It has come to my attention that lemmy.ml frequently disseminates propaganda and engages in historical revisionism. Moreover, there have been instances where their admin privileges were used to suppress dissenting views, reminiscent of the already defederated lemmygrad instance.
While personal blocking of lemmy.ml is an option, it does not address the broader issue of new users potentially being influenced by misleading content. It is crucial that we protect our users from a continuous stream of biased information.
To illustrate these concerns, I have provided a link to a detailed post on the Fediverse that documents these issues comprehensively [Here].
Given these points, I urge the admins to consider a defederation from lemmy.ml. If their users wish to remain part of Lemmy.ml, that is entirely acceptable, but we should take steps to prevent the propagation of harmful misinformation, especially in their comment sections.
Thank you for your consideration.
To what extent is this actually an issue? What examples do you have so far?
Pardon me but have you read the Post i linked? He talked about politics, granted, but banning him from non-political Communities (in fact, ALL Communities) is completely out of proportion. And that is just for reciting established facts!
Yes I have, which is why I’m asking. While I agree that the admin response was totally out of all proportion, this is not evidence of either of the things you previously claimed.
If you’re going to justify defederation based on non-political communities being policed and injected with propaganda, you need to provide some concrete examples of that happening.
First and for most my main reason for defederation is that they straight up lie and mislead.
If you demand prove I will unblock ml again and will try to find it. I would have thought that you would have seen this yourself since you seem to be more on ml than I was.
I’ve seen it in the obvious communities like worldnews@lemmy.ml, sure. But in non-political ones? Not once.
https://lemmy.ml/post/16185014
https://lemmy.ml/post/7981013
https://lemmy.ml/post/15667300
Here are three posts from the memes-community. They got downvoted to oblivion (from the Users) and contain propaganda, but were not removed or anything from the moderators or admins. The People who posted thisdid not got punished or anything.
Here is a Comment from someone who tells about his own experience in communist Hungary. His Comment got removed for violating rule 1 “Be civil and nice.”. Why does this comment of his own experience get removed for being not nice, but posts which contain propaganda and clearly insult people in an non-political Community like Memes did not?
This Comment (even though I disagree with its content) got removed for “Bourgeois Bootlicking” despite having Rule 2 in place, which states: “Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.” His Comment was as, if you ask me, maybe not totally polite but still acceptable.
The Admins on lemmy.ml are totally willing to turn a blind eye towards propaganda, Insults and lies “for their side” even in non-political communities but they will strike you down if you disagree.
Of course, I can’t cover every community and I’m sure there are many people who are not like this but there is a huge trend towards this style of moderation.
PS. : Sorry for light-mode. I somehow could not turn it off on lemmy.ml.
I appreciate the effort you’ve put in here, but still I do not see grounds for defederation. You’ve just given me three examples from a single community that is obviously political.
Look, the question isn’t “are there communities on lemmy.ml that are ideologically censored”, because of course there are; the question I am putting to you is “is the average user going about their business and not actively engaging in politically-oriented communities affected enough to warrant the largest Lemmy instance completely defederating?” I would still say no, personally.
I see more than enough justification to defederate. Being banned from every lemmy.ml community such as the Linux community because you dared to make a critical comment about China or Russia in another lemmy.ml community is ridiculous and unacceptable.
lemmy.world should only support communities with reasonable moderation policies that do not punish users for merely contradicting a lemmy.ml moderator’s political stance.
As a user subbed to multiple communities there, I never see this stuff. Ever. I stay far, far away from news and current events though. I actively seek news from sources, not aggregation platforms.
I would prefer to have the option to interact with those communities rather than have a few users brigade the admins into defederating. There’s a reason one of the SCOTUS cases that is cited as binding precedent in freedom of speech cases relates to the distribution of Communist propaganda. The marketplace of ideas is meant to be freely available to all, not curated by the most opinionated or noisy.
The political content published in lemmy.ml isn’t the main problem, it’s the fact that lemmy.ml moderators are banning users from general interest communities, including non-political communities, when they criticize China or Russia elsewhere. This happens not only when the criticism is posted within a lemmy.ml community, but also when the criticism is posted outside of lemmy.ml.
The behavior of these lemmy.ml mods corrupts the “marketplace of ideas” that you’re describing. lemmy.world should not present or promote general interest communities that only allow users to participate if they avoid making comments critical of China or Russia on the fediverse. This kind of bad moderation creates a chilling effect.