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.
Which principle? Seems you are more angry at the Tyranny of the majority than anything else. As a reminder, we've never had a policy of federating with every instance in the fediverse.
Seeking broad consensus from our users is power tripping? That's a pretty shitty take tbh.
If you are willing to write up a proposal to withdraw some/all of our defeds then I'm willing to put it up for a vote, but I don't think it'll get much support tbh. See https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/instances for all our blocked instances and you can see for yourself what you are missing out on... stuff like threads, exploding-heads.com, kiwifarms.cc, posting.lolicon.rocks, and skinheads.io. We don't defederate for no reason, or do so often.
I think you are just upset because you like feddit.org, and are lashing out with personal attacks because you want someone to blame for the outcome of the vote. You are right that it is largely a symbolic act - one of solidarity with the Palestinians. Will it annoy some of our German users? Yes, it already has. But if I have to choose between an act of solidarity with our German users over how conveniently they can access a website, vs an act of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, then I'll pick the Palestinians every time. Because they are being killed right now with German weapons, by a German-trained IDF.
You don't seem to realize how out of step the majority of Germans are with the rest of the world on this issue, particularly in leftist communities.
Full list of all our defeds and the reasoning/evidence behind them: https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.dbzer0.com
But you're harshing this community with it. Don't you see the eloquently composed backlash? Don't you see the two-bit for votes ('fck off nzis')?
I really don't understand what's going on. I thought anarchism was a little tougher than all this. This feels like you'd rather a vocal part of the community suffer fallout so that feddit gets a message. This shit stinks.
I've been totally unimpressed with the level of thought behind the "for" votes as well.
In most cases there is zero discussion about actual impacts, whether intended or not. Many folks don't seem to be taking it as a governance decision and instead seem to just be voting "fuck Zionism". While I agree, it isn't the question being asked at all...
Aggravating and I don't like where this seems headed.
While I don't entirely agree with your opinions on this, I think that this particular governance post has a drastically different and far more emotionally charged tone compared to even the last one, where the decision was made to explicitly make this horrid ideology against the rules. It's concerning, and I hope it is not a sign of things to come.
The many examples also don't show full context (especially what our users were responding to with such vitriol), and all of them feature harsh language from our users being removed. There's not a single one I saw there where someone was talking calmly and it was removed. (Edit: With the exception of cryptagion's one)
I grew up in the cesspool of 4chan. Conversation does not require calm and kind language to occur. I'm also not trying to police tone on topics like this... but it significantly undermines things if this is our best evidence.
I've been thinking long and hard on my feelings and response to this, and I'll be making my own top level comment in a day or two.
Got no issue throwing out the trash. Have no in-depth experience with feddit.org to go off of. But I have concerns with how this was brought to the community and what feels like a small but significant shift in administration approach lately, or at least the communication of it (not flatworm being the messenger, to be clear).