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.
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.