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
it should be noted that these bans are community bans, not instance bans. your title makes it look like people are getting instance banned from lemmy.world, while the examples you’ve shown are about community bans.
if i’m not mistaken, several/most of the lemmy.ml bans/ban complaints have been about instance bans, which affect all communities on the instance.
Anyone characterizing the Soviet invasion of Poland as “bloodless” deserves to have their bullshit posts nuked
Holy fuck, looking down through, how the hell do you not find these removals reasonable? “Poland forgave the Nazis for genocide, but not the Russians for a bloodless invasion”? A bloodless invasion?! “Poland were the REAL Nazis, the Soviets had to invade them”!? “You’re just a racist Nazi Pole”!? What the ever-loving fuck.
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).
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.
The shills don’t want a real debate, they want to frustrate, waste time, and distract you from engagement with a real person or in a more visible comment.
I learned about the Katyn massacre from your comments. Horrifying.
they completely ignored to call me a racist nazi
Yes, I just read the whole thread again, that was completely unnecessary. I guess they just implied that you hated Russians based on your criticism of USSR actions.
Anyone who has a border with Russia hates them…
Russia is never reformed its governance that it has inherited from mongols and we see this reflected in their foreign policy today.
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?
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–Ribbentrop_Pact
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™ 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.
Disclaimer: I am by no mean expert on the matter.
Some threads I found on the matter on the regretted /r/AskHistorians
- https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3l7lba/how_credible_are_the_claims_that_the_soviets_were/
- https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/doglqq/some_historians_describe_the_nazisoviet_pact_as/
- https://news.nd.edu/news/historian-offers-first-deep-dive-into-secret-german-soviet-alliance-that-laid-groundwork-for-wwii/
- https://www.historynet.com/devils-agreement/
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.
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.
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?
“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.
What was wrong with the post specifically? It all looks true and sourced to me. A non aggression pact is not the same as being allies with the Nazis unless you think Sweden, Switzerland, and the US were allied with the Nazis, too, for a time. The USSR needed time to build up their forces and get a buffer zone since the people they wanted to ally with refused to fight the enemy they were scared of, an enemy they had to prepare for.
It’s ridiculous, on its face. They wanted a “buffer zone?” So that gave them the right to violently invade people’s countries? Justified the next half century of murder and torture after the Nazis were defeated? Come on.
Regarding the non-aggression pact, if they were scared of the Nazis they would have fought them while the Allies fought them. Hitler broke the Ribbentrop Pact, not the USSR. More revisionism propaganda.
They did both of those things because the Kremlin is a violent imperial power that has put many millions of innocent people under the ground, with or without the facade of communism. The gulag isn’t just a meme, and there are good reasons their neighbors hate them.
I don’t think it gives them right, nor do I think it was the right thing to do, but it does explain it from a real politik point of view, especially after being left alone by western countries. Countries do similar stuff all the time, and I think it’s more morally justifiable than the US extending their reach by bombing the hell out of Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, most of South America, etc. They can’t even justify those things with self-defense.
They didn’t attack at the same time because they were weren’t strong enough yet and knew it. I thought that other comment already established that. It makes sense. It would explain why Hitler pushed so far into the USSR on their military campaign. Entering a war is a hard thing to justify for people at home. It’s easier when you are provoked. Hell, the US didn’t start attacking with their troops at the same time, either, for the same reason. They had to wait until Pearl Harbor. In fact, didn’t they even officially enter even later?
The USSR had some major problems, but the issue I have noticed is that people always talk as if the USSR is some extra ordinary evil empire, but when you look at everything, it’s not too much worse than the US. The US also had prison labor camps with a vast amount of people in it, except it had a racial component. They also had a huge, surveillance state (just ask MLK, Jr, or Fred Hampton). They also had internal purges (see Hollywood). They also deployed troops and bombs around the world, spreading murder and torture, in an imperialist fashion. The only thing is they don’t have to worry about being invaded, so they don’t have to make those same kinds of decisions with the fear of the safety of their citizens close to home. And yet no one talks about the US with the same vitriol. I’m kind of appreciating the even handed view of being in the middle of these multiple echo chambers between lemmy.world and like hexbear or lemmygrad lol.
You have a twisted perspective… are you getting your info from YouTube or something?
Those mods are… special.
I wouldn’t care if other instances just blocked them outright. It would suck for those who are registered there, but to me, it’s no different from defederating from Nazi apologists.
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.
!fediverse@lemmy.zip, created not long ago, exactly due to similar reasons.
Sorry mate, I’m with @PugJesus@lemmy.world on this. There’s no benefit in platforming misinformation.
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.
"Mao and Stalin did nothing wrong and if they did, the undesirables deserved it.
The West is a disgusting generacy oppressing the working people"
Banged out a tankie from while enjoying his soy latte in Brooklyn coffee shop. Dreaming to escaping to the socialist Paradise and leaving the shit hole behind.
Banged out a
tankieKremlin shill from while enjoying hissoy latteborscht inBrooklyn coffee shopSt Petersburg.
