I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.

I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Lemmy should tell you the text of what was deleted and the mod who deleted it, cause there was nothing uncivil about what I said.

        • Unruffled [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          I don’t know what to tell ya, I don’t find the word that rhymes with “hanky” offensive at all, especially when it’s applied to someone who seems to fit the bill. I think the main difference between MLs and liberals is that liberals are well aware their governments are flawed and are willing and able to criticize them and protest against bad policies, whereas the MLs are dedicated to the idea that it’s wrong to criticize non-Western governments, because “left unity”, “critical support” etc. This, despite the fact (or maybe because of it) that most of the governments they defend are totalitarian states where government criticism lands you in jail, in a re-education camp, or falling out of a window. This quote sums it up nicely:

          Authoritarians, having argued so doggedly for the domination of a paternalistic state and having therefore turned themselves into ideological infants, then develop a hyper-reductive view of geopolitics; precisely the one, in fact, that a state would like for them to have. “Socialism” becomes pathologically confused with “opposing capitalist nations” or more appropriately, “opposing all states aligned with the United States.” They attempt to simplify the struggles of the entire planet down into two camps, the “bad guy imperialist states” and the “good guy anti-imperialist states.” In doing so, worker emancipation is simplified into a single question: “do you support the imperialists or the anti-imperialists?” Woe be to those who do not submit to their reductive understanding. The statists who advocate this position are completely incapable of even understanding what an “anti-imperialist” entity might look like. They, in fact, simply support one imperialist bloc over the other in a battle of two power-hoarders.

          Daniel Baryon