Ahoy mateys!
A few of our users have recently pointed out that a lot of the pro-Zionist accounts on the fediverse nowadays seem to come from the feddit.org instance.
Feddit.org’s explanation for this situation seems to fit into a few common variations:
- They accept both pro- and anti-Zionist members, so it’s not proof of a bias.
- They [choose to] comply [in advance] with strict German / Swiss / Austrian laws regarding [overly broad] “antisemitic” language, or they might get in trouble.
- Calling for the destruction of Israel must obviously mean you want to kill every last man, woman and child, rather than simply wanting to overthrow Netanyahu’s genocidal fascist regime. Because [bad faith] reasons.
- Lots of Euros (and Germans specifically) are pro-Zionist, so they feel like they have to accommodate this view.
But whatever the excuse happens to be, they need to do better imo. Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the Middle East (if you exclude the US military bases there). And yet feddit.org seems to regard the Palestinians fighting against Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation of their land as the real terrorists. As such, I am calling for feddit.org to:
- Explicitly prohibit pro-Zionist accounts from joining.
- Take measures to resolve their claimed legal issues, e.g., moving their server location to a less regulated jurisdiction, and ensuring that admin accounts remain anonymous regarding their location.
- Stop referring to folks who call for “Death to Israel” or similar as though they are the terrorists or violent extremists. The Zionist Israeli settlers, the murderous IDF rapists, and the entirety of the Israeli government are clearly the violent ethnostate extremists we should be worried about, not the Palestinians in Gaza who are fighting for their lives every single day against completely disproportionate levels of Zionist violence.
More context
Our instance already voted to ban pro-Zionist accounts (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60585441 for reference) and the rule that was implemented is here: Golden Rule #8.
As further context, you can find relevant comments and discussion in this post by a banned feddit admin in MoG (that fact they chose to post in MoG is in itself quite telling), and this post about their defederation from quokk.au over anti-semitism allegations has recently become active again.
I’ve also pulled out some choice morsels from the modlog to illustrate the sort of thing we are talking about:
This one says it all… mrdown@lemmy.world being banned for calling out feddit.org users for being Zionist apologists. It’s apparently “xenophobic” to state a few hard truths.
If you have had similar experiences on feddit.org, please feel free to share in the comments.
Voting instructions
I am proposing to ban the following communities from feddit.org, which seem to be the most problematic communities in terms of hosting pro-Zionist posts/comments:
- https://feddit.org/c/YUROP
- https://feddit.org/c/europe
- https://feddit.org/c/buyfromeu
- https://feddit.org/c/europa
- https://feddit.org/c/dach
- https://feddit.org/c/deutschland
- https://feddit.org/c/germany
Upvote this post if you want dbzer0 / anarchist nexus to ban these communities.
Downvote this post if you’d prefer not to ban these communities.
Note 1: Votes from external instances do not count, unless one of our admins has vouched for you.
Note 2: If you think feddit.org deserves a full instance ban instead, or have alternative suggestions, then please leave your comments below. If enough people think that’s the better option, then we’ll do that instead.
Note 3: Although I don’t really expect this to happen, if feddit.org agrees to make policy changes to address these issues then we are willing to reassess the situation.
At the risk of being banned this instance is starting to get annoying with the amount of political keyboard warrioring posts. I thought this was supposed to be a pro piracy anarchist community.
For self proclaimed anarchists there sure is a lot of desire to censor and dictate what opinions everyone is allowed to see.
For fucks sake if you are that bothered by a handful of users just block those individuals. Not all of us have a panic attack when we see an idiot spouting nonsense we don’t agree with.
Looks like the last defed vote was almost a year ago. Sorry to both you.
It is. Anarchism is a political ideology. We are a political instance. All our admins are anarchists and/or socialists. I don’t know what to tell ya. You’ve been here 2 years, you must surely already know this?
We are a leftist instance - and every new member agrees to follow the Golden Rules. Anarchism doesn’t mean “no rules” or “no moderation”, that’s freeze-peach libertarianism you are thinking of. If you would prefer more of a free-for-all experience then other options exist that might be a better fit.
We operate this instance by community consensus and take user feedback seriously. The proposal did not originate from the admin team, we were asked by a user who wanted a defederation vote. And while i’m glad you feel you feel comfortable enough to handle bumping into zionists and fascists [eh, same thing] on the regular, the evidence suggests there is very strong support for this proposal across our users.
Is it the right thing to do? I’m a bit torn on the decision myself tbh. But fact is that it’s not up to me, and never was. It’s up to the users. Like it or not, that’s the experiment in direct democracy we are running here. You are also free to propose policy changes if you want to, but those would need a separate vote.
To explain some more about my personal take on all this, the reason I proposed removing just a few communities was as a compromise position, to give us a less nuclear option than full defederation, because I’d also prefer not to defederate with feddit.org completely. I quite enjoy banning Zionist accounts. But judging by the comments so far (vibe check), it seems the largest group of commenters prefer full defederation, another large group prefers (some) community bans similar to as proposed (judging by the yes votes), and a smaller chunk of users would prefer us to do nothing. I’ll make a more careful assessment once the vote is finished to confirm, but would you say that’s a fair summary so far?
If you can think of a way to square that circle and keep everyone happy I would welcome the advice tbh (minus the snark, preferably). I’m also open to the idea of pruning the list of banned communities a bit based on the feedback received so far. But it won’t be my decision to make at the end of the day – the whole admin team will have their input.
I don’t think I did a very good job explaining my point in my original post.
I know anarchism is by it’s nature political, you literally cannot separate the two. My main issue with with the defederation of communities that have political views the admins don’t agree with.
Now that isn’t to say I’m opposed to defecation all together for example I would be in support of defederating state run instances as that goes against anarchy’s core principals.
But as far as I’m aware feddit is not state run, and is simply choosing to comply with German and EU law.
If feddit has a high percentage of Zionists it isn’t because they are pro genocide. It is a direct result of other instances and the greater lemmy community banning and defederating places with users that hold these views causing their circle to shrink which consolodates those users into a few remaining instances.
If an individual hates Zionists, driving them all into echo chambers where they are exposed to fewer and fewer dissenting opinions is only going to radicalize them further. It isn’t going to get rid of them.
And on the flip side I don’t want our political communities to become a complete circlejerk where users pat each other on the back for having the “correct” opinion and passing around imaginary internet points.
Ideally I would like to see this place remain a bastion of free speech so I can continue to see people of varying backgrounds, cultures, and political ideologies having interesting discussions.
If that isn’t what dbzer0 is\wants to be then I’m probably in the wrong place. I figured I would voice my opinion and accept the down votes rather than silently watch and eventually quietly leave.
Being a Zionist, or any kind of ethno-supremacist for that matter, should be a lonely and alienating experience. Believing in the supremacy of any race and upholding apartheid systems should result in being ostracized and treated as a pariah. If someone doesn’t want to be ostracized, they shouldn’t hold beliefs that deny the humanity of other people; that’s the paradox of tolerance, if you tolerate such intolerance then tolerance itself is jeopardized.
This is something that goes beyond a simple disagreement of tactics, or even a disagreement of ideals. If you can’t draw the line at making a genocidal and exclusionary ideology unacceptable where do you draw the line? Do you draw a line at all?
You’ll still be federated with other instances that have people who don’t agree with the official party line of dbzer0.
Anarchism=No politics
Lmao, maybe join a no politics instance, also maybe read up a bit on what anarchism is about, spoilers its not (when there is no bans or moderation)
Yeah they seem to be confusing anarchism and libertarianism.
This response seems to ignore the entire second paragraph and the main point of my post. I’m not complaining about the existence of politics. Anarchism is by its nature political.
Anarchists are supposed to be for absolute free speech. While I personally don’t support Israel, silencing everyone that does certainly isn’t free speech.
Which leads my back to my original point, if an instance claims to be anarchist and by extension believes in free speech then it shouldn’t be defederating instances simply because some users on that instance have different politics.
Sure today it’s “genocide good vs genocide bad” and it’s clear which side has the moral high ground. But it won’t always be that clear and censorship is a bad habit for an anarchist community to get in the habit of imo.
No, you’ve got it wrong. You’re thinking of libertarians. Freedom of speech as a law means you won’t be thrown in prison for having shitty opinions. It means you are free to say it legally, not that it is without social consequences. And anarchist societies and communities absolutely have rules and social consequences for those who cannot behave. We do not believe in lack of rules or consequences altogether.
This is what you fail to understand and why people are ignoring your other paragraphs because the foundation of your argument is flawed to begin with.
Given your explanation would it not then be wrong to ban or dederate an entire instances based on the actions of a few users. You say “consequences for those who cannot behave” yet the proposed solution is to ban entire communities full of many people who haven’t done anything wrong.
This just reinforces what I said in my original post, the offenders should be banned on an individual basis. Sure this means some will slip through but a blanket ban would take away the voice of thousands of people who did nothing wrong. That isn’t anarchism.
The “few users” here are a feddit admin who has been posting to a troll community inciting harassment towards us until a few days ago. It is a very different situation when the management of a server is the one engaged in the bad behavior. This is what lead to the vote being called in the first place.
Many Feddit users have already been banned under golden rule #8 (and just general trolling and harassment) including the original admin who started all this. It’s just that their status as an admin as well as past behaviors by other admins meant the situation was escalated.
It seems you are really struggling to understand the difference between anarchism and libertarianism. As well as the purpose and scope of defederation in the fediverse. So to get the bad faith argument about banning innocent people out of the way. Defederation targets the server, the server which is not compliant with our community’s values. It does not ban the members on the server. They are free to migrate elsewhere if they wish to stay in contact with us. This thread has had more than enough visibility on their instance for them to have warning and knowledge of that (enough for a lot to harass dbzer0 users over it).
Defederation might seem like a conflict of interest to you because from your point of view anarchists care deeply about absolute free speech and the ability to do whatever the fuck you want, but as @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com explained in their comment, that isn’t anarchism, nor what anarchists believe in. What we believe in is decentralized governance. Which is why this vote happened instead of just defederating outright. The community recognizes that emopunker as an admin is capable of doing much harm even when fully banned from our instance, they recognize that feddit.org could make changes to remediate the problems they caused here but also that this isn’t likely to happen considering they’ve doubled down in the past.
Thanks for taking the time to go into so much detail in your response. While I’m still against defederation I can recognize that you have made a solid argument.
If censoring entire communities you don’t agree with is anarchism then I would agree with you that I don’t fully understand what it means and perhaps the best course of action would be for me to find an instance that better aligns with my own ideologies.
Thanks again for taking the time, you have given me a few things to think on.
is there anything
feddit.orgoffers to pirates that you are unwilling to say “we dislike genocide ffs!”?This 🧵 is about the instance’s exhibited moderation: Zionism.