I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.

I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    704·
    22 days ago

    Not only do they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology, they often do it in such a way that it is untraceable by other mods. I’m not sure how they accomplish that, nor is the admin who messaged me letting me know that it was happening and he couldn’t figure out how. Anyways, my solution has been to completely block that instance, and delete my account there. If they want to exist in a little untruthful echo chamber, then so be it, but I don’t need to be a part of it. I recommend you do the same thing.

    • DefederateLemmyMlOPEnglish
      46·
      22 days ago

      I’m not sure how they accomplish that

      If they have database access, which they would have being the admins, they can do anything.

      • Unruffled@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        10·
        22 days ago

        Their mod actions usually do federate out, but their outgoing federation is a bit borked right now with some instances, perhaps due to the recent upgrade to Lemmy 0.19.4-rc.6. I believe they are at least aware of it now, though they have been basically non-responsive to the issue so far.

    • DefederateLemmyMlOPEnglish
      13·
      22 days ago

      So it seems they do indeed clean up the modlog… my bans are still in there, but all mod actions where they removed China critical comments are no longer there.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      176·
      22 days ago

      It is extremely obvious that the .ml admins run a malicious version of the Lemmy code which gives them additional levers of control. This alone makes them a serious threat to the entire fediverse.

      • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
        123·
        22 days ago

        It is not obvious, most likely not necessary and in any case completely unproven. Why are you so busy making stuff up in this thread?

    • lltnskyc@monero.townEnglish
      831·
      22 days ago

      they delete truthful responses that contradict their ideology

      That is EXACTLY what is done on lemmy.world.

        • lltnskyc@monero.townEnglish
          223·
          22 days ago

          Nice, didn’t know there was a possibility to see deleted comments, thanks :) (not every deleted comment is there though, but enough to show the total hypocrisy of lemmy.world)

          • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
            13·
            22 days ago

            https://beehaw.org/modlog?page=1&userId=4130334

            https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&userId=1782109

            It gets difficult to find them sometimes, depending on who removed it and from where. If a moderator, from the community, removed it then the removal reason could have originated from where the community is located at, whereas if an administrator of an instance removed it then it would be elsewhere.

            For all that the lemmy.ml admins enjoy going on sprees of mass-removals, it sure would be nice if they would add to the code a way to see the reasons for removal linked to directly from the comment itself.

            • lltnskyc@monero.townEnglish
              512·
              22 days ago

              Oh yeah, that’s the other one, thx!
              I did not even get a notification for that comment why it was deleted, but now I see, and sure enough - it’s misinformation (despite providing 5 or 6 links to sources in a comment below, including reputable western (!!) media and tens/hundreds of footages…). 🤷‍♂️