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:

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.

    • Unruffled [they/them]@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      I haven’t tallied up all the comments yet but it’s definitely on the table. Once the votes are closed I’ll analyse the results, and then do a sense check with the other admins.

      I will say that the responses from feddit.org to this post have mostly just confirmed the issue, unfortunately. Those commenters, really haven’t done their instance any favours.

      And a lot of our users seem to prefer a full defed, rather than community bans, so we’ve got to take that into account too.