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.
I am not a member of your server, but I think it's amongst the top 4 best servers on the threadiverse. I have a great deal of respect for your server and the communities that have come to be on it. I would advise that when dealing with a -----bar on the fediverse, be that a nazi-bar, a zionist-bar, or any other kind of authoritarian-bar, the smaller concern isn't if there's things on it your users will miss (with the threadiverse, those things are communities) and the bigger concern is how the problem figures that have coagulated in that bar act and behave when they engage with the things originating on your server. I commend the desire to do this gracefully, but if you're going to limit yourselves to blocking communities (which will ultimately limit your own users more than feddit.org's users, though I'm not sure your users will be bothered or that their users will notice), I think you ABSOLUTELY MUST plan a period of time to revisit this. I'd probably say 1 month. If next month you feel that what you're seeing on your server is improved in the way you want it to, then leave it be, and if not then de-federate.
Otherwise, I would recommend immediate defederation if this is a recurring problem. These fediverse servers all act as garden parties. Blocking communities at other garden parties is less effective at combating bad behavior than not letting people through the gate in your garden. If this path is followed, I'd recommend maintaining channels of communication between the admins of both instances for 6 months to see if and how things change.
Again. I am not a member here. More of an outside observer with a ton of respect with a little bit of input after years of being in online spaces and having very little tolerance for bad faith behavior. You can take or reject these observations depending on how you align with them. Hell, I may even be full of shit. But one of us leftists' greatest weaknesses and greatest strength is our tolerance. The strength is in that it helps us build coalitions and confront our own biases. The weakness is that bad faith actors exploit this to string us along and keep making our spaces worse on purpose, so I tend to support a relatively strict federation/defederation policy and to let users find the admin teams that align best to their own desired defederation policy.
I agree, what people who talk about the negative effects of defederation always miss is that federation with a server and userbase who is actively against us and what we fight for hurts us more than losing them would. This is why I think defederation of feddit.org and possibly a censure against them would be the best course of action here.
I do not think they will make any attempt to change their policy or their environment in a way that is mutually beneficial. In fact from my many many exchanges with @Emopunker@feddit.org it is very clear that they believe their opinion is the morally objective one, and they will fight to defend their position, including by making bad faith arguments against other users or siding with known trolls. They were willing to defederate from servers over those servers' censures towards Feddit, which I should add, are 100% justified at this point.
So true, tolerance is both the greatest strength and weakness of leftists. And when the intolerant are tolerated it is a great weakness that does more harm than good.
as i was reviewing the evidence i was struck by how differently feddit.org's admins act defending their positions than what works to combat hate. it's far more effective instead of just denying what others are saying about you is true, and to instead state what your position is.
Thanks for the sage advice! I'll definitely take it into account.