Lemmy is federated and decentralized and that means that we can all coexist regardless of our differing political opinions. I think it's important to preface this by saying that I am not offended by or concerned with anyone's politics, and I'm certainly not here to argue with anyone about them.
My concern is that users are being banned and content is being removed on lemmy.ml citing a rule that is not publicly stated anywhere that I have seen.
Moderators of lemmy.ml are removing posts and comments which are critical of the Chinese government and are banning their authors.
This came to my attention because of how lemmy user bans are federated just like everything else, and I was confused about why my instance had logged a lemmy.ml user ban citing "orientalism" as the reason for the ban.
Here's the article that was removed, titled "China may face succession crisis". It was published by axios.com, which mediabiasfactcheck describes as having "a slight to moderate liberal bias" and gives its second-highest ranking for factual reporting. The article writes unfavorably of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
I had not remembered seeing anything in lemmy.ml's rules that would suggest that "orientalism"—meaning, as I understand it, the depiction or discussion of Asian cultures by people in Western ones—was against the rules. So I checked, and I found that there was not. Not on the instance's front page, and not in [email protected].
There is a stated rule against xenophobia, but I think that xenophobia is not widely understood to include Westerners writing critically of the actions of an Asian government.
This is where I went from confused to concerned.
Lemmy instances have public moderation logs, which I think is a very positive thing about the platform. So I looked more closely at lemmy.ml's moderation log.
Please note that moderation logs are also federated. It's hard to be 100% sure which instance a mod action is actually associated with, looking at these logs. The previously mentioned user ban and post removal were, I think, definitely actions taken by lemmy.ml moderators. My own instance's mod log identifies the banning moderator as a lemmy.ml admin, and the removed post was submitted to a lemmy.ml community. I've done my best to verify that all of the following removals were really done by lemmy.ml moderators, but I can't be absolutely certain. Please forgive me if any of them were actually made on other instances that do have an explicitly stated rule against orientalism.
Removed Comment Ah yes. Being against China's racist genocide is racist. China, the imperialist ethno-state, is clearly innocent. by @[email protected]
reason: Orientalism
Removed Comment Lol. Thinking some countries have better governments than others is supremacist? Whatever, dude. By the way. If there are any countries with decent governments, I don't know of them. But like. If there were decent countries, they wouldn't behave like China. by @[email protected]
reason: Orientalism
These following moderator actions did not specifically cite orientalism, but did not seem to be breaking any of the instance's or community's explicitly stated rules.
Banned @[email protected]
reason: Only makes anti russia and anti china, crosspostst from reddit. 2nd temp ban
expires: 9d ago
Removed Comment Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are all Colonies of China, which it treats as Colonial Territories, by - Forcibly destroying the local culture. Forcefully extracting to harm of the locals. Genocide, abuse, kidnapping, rape. But there is no point in engaging to you. You are a liar. You know you are. When you deny genocides, you put yourself on the same side as the fascists and reactionaries of the past. by @[email protected]
reason: Rule 1 and 2
I have no affection for the Chinese government and I do not call myself a communist. I would not enforce a rule against orientalism on my own instance. But I think that lemmy.ml's moderators are entitled to enforce whatever rules they please. It's only that, as the largest single lemmy instance so far, I believe that they have an obligation to disclose these rules, and an obligation to not ban users or remove content for failing to follow unobvious and unstated rules.
I'd like to raise some awareness about this, and I'd like to openly ask the moderators of lemmy.ml to state the rules that they intend to enforce clearly and explicitly.
I will be very clear and state it again: I am not asking for anyone to change their opinions or to not enforce a rule that they believe in. That is the great thing about lemmy, that we can coexist in this federated community even when we don't share the same opinions. What I am asking is for lemmy.ml's rules to be clearly stated, because I think it does not reflect well on the broader community if the predominant instance moderates its users and content according to rules that are not being explicitly disclosed.
Locking this thread as the discussion isnt going anywhere productive. If you dont like the moderation in [email protected], you can subscribe to a different one or create your own.
Locking this thread as the discussion isnt going anywhere productive. If you dont like the moderation in [email protected], you can subscribe to a different one or create your own.
I have not complained about the moderation in [email protected]. I am not asking that there be any change in moderation. I feel that I was very careful in making this clear, in the post.
What I have asked is that the moderation policy be stated more clearly and openly. I believe that it is in everyone's interest that people coming to lemmy.ml understand the rules that they are expected to follow.
This is a teachable moment for Lemmy users, and Lemmy itself as a whole.
I'm not here to judge anyone's opinions but to clearly state the facts. And the fact is: at least one of the admins of the largest lemmy server considers anti-CCP/Russia sentiment/argument to be harmful and worthy of a ban. That is their decision.
Thus, anyone who disagrees with that, would best move to another server if they wish to discuss those opinions. A worldnews sublemmy on another server such as lemmy.one can be the place where anti-CCP and anti-Russia attitudes are not considered harmful, possibly encouraged at lemmy.one admins and mods' discretion.
This probably will not affect apolitical areas like lemmy.ml/c/pokemon for the most part. However as annoying as this situation is for some, this is why federation is a great thing. Otherwise all of Lemmy would be under rule of admins with these opinions.
The thing I find wild here is that this presumably Marxist mod is banning criticism of 2023 Russia and China. Russia in 2023 is straight up fascist and China while with more communist dressing is also a capitalist hellscape - like most of the world.
Now, when I joined, I was somewhat taken aback by the sheer amount of propaganda on Lemmy in general, and the somewhat belligerent attitude of some users.
With the new users it should change to be more centrist and we should see less and less this kind of post as they will get downvoted
The one thing I'm hopeful about is as you say, these issues will sort themselves out in the long term. Lemmy.ml gets to be the popular one out of virtue of being first, but other instances have the ability to grow a lot over time as well.
Lemmy isn't perfect, it has many issues but I think it's got the right structure and ingredients to allow for thoughtful, active communities.
A worldnews sublemmy on another server such as lemmy.one can be the place where anti-CCP and anti-Russia attitudes are not considered harmful, possibly encouraged at lemmy.one admins and mods’ discretion.
I'd just noticed something similar to this myself, a user banned for saying something about "Russian Trolls" and another banned for saying "I hope so. All the russian and chinese apologists on here make me mad."
This feels quite extreme and I am wondering "will commenting on this get me banned"
I think calling someone a "Russian Troll" should absolutely be a bannable offense unless you actually have evidence that they are a Russian troll and not just someone saying things about Russia you don't agree with. "Apologist" has negative connotations but I personally don't agree with banning someone for that.
In any case, if you can resist namecalling, it sounds like you'll do fine?
That's alarming behavior, and it's coming from the core Lemmy developers. I had hoped they would keep it confined to LemmyGrad, but I'm not feeling so confident in that any more.
I fail to see racism and orientalism present in this thread. What I do see are people linking to lists of human rights violations committed by the CCP, people complaining that unequivocally pro-CCP messaging is disingenuous, and people upset that a ban reason was not adequately explained.
I'm a card-carrying communist who sees a lot wrong with China's handling of political dissidents and ethnic minorities. From what I'm seeing about lenny.ml, it seems like milquetoast criticisms are being met with bans and censorship, and I see prominent users defending this practice citing "imperialistic anti-China propaganda" as being the reason why the uninitiated doesn't blindly praise the CCP. This belief is rooted in some fact - American media tends to portray eastern countries in a harshly negative light - but I hardly think that means that all criticism is made in bad faith.
I'm reminded of unequivocally capitalist sites banning mentions of communism and critiques of capitalism, and I believe that this trend does nothing besides foster the echo chambers that I, at least, have been trying to escape from.
Poor ban reason is absolutely a major issue, and unfortunately not a new one.
While some of those posts actually do deserve bans under existing rules, even those are very poorly done.
The last example correctly cites a clear violation of "[Global] Rule 2" in the deletion, albeit confusingly not mentioning Global and a flimsy citation of Rule 1, and also gives a justified and appropriate 1d ban for [global] Rule 2. But even so, this is confusing when there are global rules and community rules. So staff should make an effort to mention whether the rule they enforced was global.
Another example [EDIT- see reply from CriticalResist8] of a justified but poorly given ban was this recent one. It's a clear global rule 2 violation, but the reason "not nice" comes off as if no rule was broken, they just didn't like the post. Ideally, it would be something like "Global Rule 2: Disrespectful"
Unfortunately it's hard to know who is responsible due to the username redactions in the modlog by default (is it an individual rogue moderator, or accepted staff policy?) and therefore harder to resolve. Tagging @[email protected] and @[email protected], because this is a systematic issue that potentially affects the global staff, with significant negative impacts.
While I know there may be more pressing development issues, I think it would be excellent to add to the roadmap a feature for instance staff and community staff to write a list of rules, and have them as selectable options in the ban reason/length form. This will incentivize staff to give descriptive, valid and more consistent bans and deletions, which don't give the impression of arbitrary and personal deletions.
I believe the log entry you shared comes from a beehaw moderator, as the comment was made on one of their communities and I know they sometimes remove comments or ban people with this reason.
The moderation log is shared across all federated instances. I.e. since Lemmy.ml federates with beehaw, they both contain each other's entries. It's a bit confusing and I'm not sure why this feature was added, it didn't use to work like that lol. But it wasn't a removal done by the lemmy.ml team.
While some of those posts actually do deserve bans under existing rules, even those are very poorly done.
Those posts / comments were reported and removed for orientalism, which is breaking rule #1. If you would have left those posts stay on your instance, that's fine! We're not demanding that you moderate according to our standards.
Well, I think (since it's a common offense and not one a typical newcomer will understand as 'racism' or 'bigotry' in typical western discourse) I think it would be helpful to add the word "orientalism", maybe even with a link to an explanation, in the rules.
While it may be obvious to us, I think it's reasonably expected that a new reddit-refugee wouldn't understand that. It would prevent avoidable drama, lowering mod workload.
My objection isn't the actual decision to take those posts down, it's that the ban message leaves a typical user guessing and the rules can make it more clear to newcomers what not to do.
Yeah, I heard rumors* about it but I'm hoping their admins and moderators can be better people and... Allow criticism of government? Like, as a minimum bar?
*Rumors being in regards to denying genocide, which, ouch.
Imma shrug off the tankie part and maybe leave it at "don't take down posts critical of China like you work for them"...
The truth is unfortunately worse than genocide denial. One of the main lemmy.ml admins has spoken seemingly in support of the Xinjiang genocide (and presumably, implied, is also pro other genocides carried out by the Chinese State).
At no point did I support a genocide, I just agree with most of the world, including the Islamic world, that disagrees that a genocide is taking place.
White supremacists are convinced there's a white genocide going on. If you were to disagree, does that make you a genocide denier?
Also you should consider the source. The US dropped an average of 60 bombs a day, every day on the middle east, during the Obama era, and western media was 100% complicit. Are these trustworthy sources to tell you what their enemies are up to?
I feel like the part (the flagship instance, lemmy.ml) and the whole (this "chunk" of the Fediverse - including lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.one, and so many more) should have different names. Because what's happening is that people invite each other "to Lemmy" (the whole), people hit "lemmy" (the part) and that creates some conflict. It's simply a matter of clarity.
Regarding lemmy.ml itself, and its rules: the logical consequences of a rule might be obvious for someone who's better informed, but not for someone less informed. As such, perhaps "orientalism" should be explicitly listed as an example of rule #1. It would further discourage those people to come to lemmy.ml, and instead join or build other instances; thus reducing overall moderation work for the admins, and I feel like this would be rather quick to implement.
Yeah once I discovered the general lean of that instance, I made a decision to make my account over at Beehaw given the more inclusive policies and structure. I'd direct more users to either sign up there or consider creating a new instance.
To your point, they are entitled to their leanings and I welcome that (also follow some of their communities), but overall I don't think it's a great first representation of whats possible on Lemmy.
Yep, will do the same, ain't no fucking way I'm staying at this instance. Hopefully tankies get crushed with number from reddit soon because this community of chinese/russian propaganda is depressing as fuck
Good on you for trying to find a solution in a very respectful and diplomatic manner so that everyone can gain something from this :)
I would be curious to know if the admins responsible are the actual lemmy devs or someone else administering the lemmy.ml instance.
I remember first browsing lemmy without an account on jebora and being a little bit scared by some of the content that was showing up. Which is why I ended up making an account on beehaw.
Political discussion is crucial for the success of this platform. I hope it is just an outlier and they can address this. Perfectly valid concerns.
Nobody should be banned for expressing political beliefs. I prefer a platform that allows people to have some freedom over reddit. Though if that were true I'd be happy to move my ass over to another instance.
I did like the look of beehaw but I noticed you can't create your own communities which I'm a little sad about.
I'm not 100% sure what you meant, but that would actually be pretty awesome if China funded the development of free, open source, federated services like Lemmy. Imagine all that could be achieved.
I got banned for "trolling" when all I did was participate in shitty ask lemmy. I created that place with the vision of being like shitty ask reddit but shitposting isn't allowed here and setting up a custom instance is really hard. Fuckin bullshit.
You joined a site and didn't read the global rules. There are many places for shitposting, some that even embrace it, and this place makes it as clear as possible that this isn't one of them.
Don't want to be that guy but...
Historically, lemmy.ml was a leftist place (like radical left). The first surge of user was when a pro-CPC subreddit was banned. They created an instance that was the biggest for some time if I recall correctly (for the curious).
"orientalism"—meaning, as I understand it, the depiction or discussion of Asian cultures by people in Western ones
That's not what is meant here.
Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, much academic discourse has begun to use the term "Orientalism" to refer to a general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies.
China is none of the above outside of a definition of imperialism I think most of the newcomers here, and certainly anyone making those claims, would be unfamiliar with.
The combination of those claims suggests a highly xenophobic sourcing that has little to do with understanding China and a lot to do with a new cold war mentality that exploits Western, and particularly American, ignorance of other countries, e.g. being successfully targeted by the Western-facing Radio Free Asia government-affiliated media and/or the related complex of think tanks and hacks that get mileage not because they're well-grounded in knowledge or academic work, but because they vilify the new "enemy". This is in no way new and Westerners never seem to acquire generational skepticism, instead always getting duped into the intended hatefest, even while acknowledging they got the last ones wrong (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan).
Those claims are also highly projecting, as many do describe many Western/ally countries and cynically draw from a misuse of the language of the left.
Imperialism, particularly as an accusation like this, is about the forcible export of capital such that capitalist exploitation becomes transnational, witg structurally underpaid labor being extracted from one country to the one exporting capital. This is closely tied to the colonialism of Europe and America, but also applies to "inter-imperialist" conflicts. China lacks the apparatus to coerce, an apparatus that absolutely is used by the US and its clients to vilify and destroy countries not falling in line, as well as accept IMF terms that neoliberalize their economies. Rather, the left critique of China on this is more often that its survival strategy (which is working) requires the exploitation of its own labor and the import of capital. Luckily, this is changing.
China is simply not an ethnostate, this is pure projection and orientalism. Chins is an explicitly multi-ethnic country snd has widespread state support for ethnic diversify and what would be described by Westerners as affirmative action programs that are more generous and effective than Western ones. Attempts to pretend that being Han is akin to whiteness are absurd and, in addition to mischaracteeizing China, bely a problematic ignorance of how white suoremacy was invented, and why it had to be invented, as those histories don't apply to the Han in China. The simplified version is: it's a condition of racialized labor divisions to feed capitalism and particularly European colonialism, and in the US, settler-colonialism. You can find a modern ethnostate in Israel, a Western forward base and settler-colonial project engaging in apartheid.
Re: totalitarian, this term means very little as an accusation and is so overused and selectively justified that in this context all one can really infer it to mean is "bad". Often, it relies on a false consciousness of coercion or societal violence that arbitrarily vilifies state violence while tolerating the private violence ubiquitous in countries dominated by the capitalist class. Example: it is "totalitarian" for there to be government censors on certain topics in [bad country], but not totalitarian for stories supportive of ruling class interests to be favored by privately-owned media (i.e. the dominant media in the West) and for those perceived as a threat to those interests to be systematically downplayed, unfunded in the first place, selectively misrepresented, and coopted and misdirected. Anyone active in, say, the George Floyd protests got to watch the lying happen in real time, with the cop-and-pricate-property-friendly "uncensored" media playing the lead role. Lazy accusations of totalitarianism are really just dog whistles for unexamined hypocrisy and a lack of awareness of the ubiquity of social violence.
Do you know what the most common profession for members of the NPC, the national people's congress, the main governing body of the PRC, is? Industrial engineer
Guess what the most common profession is for liberal democracies? Lawyers.
I don't say this because I don't like lawyers 🤣 , I have one in the family. I say it only to point out that most of what you've learned about China, is coming through a heavy media filter, from a media who only seeks to demonize a country they're in a trade war with.
This is the case, yes. Orientalism is the condescending and patronizing attitude (think rudyard kipling) many westerners (especially those from the US, who have been pumped full of sinophobia non-stop since the trade war began) towards other peoples they view as inferior. Anything from a Middle-eastern, Chinese, Indian, or Russian source is seen as illegitimate, evil, sinister, "authoritarian", whereas anything from a western source is seen as cultured, measured, dignified, etc. Its 100% an instance of breaking rule 1: no bigotry, and alienates most of the people on the planet.
Side point, but I was watching a documentary from 2011 (I think inside job? about the 2008 financial crisis), before the trade war began, and its night and day. Not a single negative thing said about the PRC, and this was just a few years ago.
The ML stands for Marxist-Leninist. You are for the first time encountering a forum that isn't explicitly catered to your NPC-esque liberal beliefs. I suggest you simply move on and go back to forums with moderation you agree with, such as steve huffman's libertarian csam apologist r*ddit.
Rule 1 says no racism or xenophobia. May the new Reddit users learn to recognize their own chauvinist positions are both and bannable, whereas on Reddit they are structurally promoted at the highest levels.
Rule 1 says no racism or xenophobia. May the new Reddit users learn to recognize their own chauvinist positions are both and bannable, whereas on Reddit they are structurally promoted at the highest levels.
Okay. My position is that they should be informed of this up-front, and that it should not come as a surprise after they have already unwittingly broken the instance's rules.
It's literally the first rule in the sidebar. If you want to create a "how to not be racist and xenophobic" post to help racist and xenophobic Redditors here, you can always do that.
I don't think that's how social policing really works, though. You don't learn because someone gives you a guidebook, but because you get called out for spitting in public or feel unsafe if you show off Nazi tattoos. And all the schools theoretically say Nazis are bad, but I see tolerance for Nazis rising, and tightly bound to this is a lack of social policing. Look at the people who took so little convincing that the Sonnenrad isn't so bad so long as the Good Guys (TM) are wearing it.
You can help out with this by calling out the orientalism on display in this thread as well.