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.
At the risk of being banned this instance is starting to get annoying with the amount of political keyboard warrioring posts. I thought this was supposed to be a pro piracy anarchist community.
For self proclaimed anarchists there sure is a lot of desire to censor and dictate what opinions everyone is allowed to see.
For fucks sake if you are that bothered by a handful of users just block those individuals. Not all of us have a panic attack when we see an idiot spouting nonsense we don't agree with.
Anarchism=No politics
Lmao, maybe join a no politics instance, also maybe read up a bit on what anarchism is about, spoilers its not (when there is no bans or moderation)
Yeah they seem to be confusing anarchism and libertarianism.
is there anything
feddit.orgoffers to pirates that you are unwilling to say “we dislike genocide ffs!”?This 🧵 is about the instance’s exhibited moderation: Zionism.
Looks like the last defed vote was almost a year ago. Sorry to both you.
It is. Anarchism is a political ideology. We are a political instance. All our admins are anarchists and/or socialists. I don't know what to tell ya. You've been here 2 years, you must surely already know this?
We are a leftist instance - and every new member agrees to follow the Golden Rules. Anarchism doesn't mean "no rules" or "no moderation", that's freeze-peach libertarianism you are thinking of. If you would prefer more of a free-for-all experience then other options exist that might be a better fit.
We operate this instance by community consensus and take user feedback seriously. The proposal did not originate from the admin team, we were asked by a user who wanted a defederation vote. And while i'm glad you feel you feel comfortable enough to handle bumping into zionists and fascists [eh, same thing] on the regular, the evidence suggests there is very strong support for this proposal across our users.
Is it the right thing to do? I'm a bit torn on the decision myself tbh. But fact is that it's not up to me, and never was. It's up to the users. Like it or not, that's the experiment in direct democracy we are running here. You are also free to propose policy changes if you want to, but those would need a separate vote.
To explain some more about my personal take on all this, the reason I proposed removing just a few communities was as a compromise position, to give us a less nuclear option than full defederation, because I'd also prefer not to defederate with feddit.org completely. I quite enjoy banning Zionist accounts. But judging by the comments so far (vibe check), it seems the largest group of commenters prefer full defederation, another large group prefers (some) community bans similar to as proposed (judging by the yes votes), and a smaller chunk of users would prefer us to do nothing. I'll make a more careful assessment once the vote is finished to confirm, but would you say that's a fair summary so far?
If you can think of a way to square that circle and keep everyone happy I would welcome the advice tbh (minus the snark, preferably). I'm also open to the idea of pruning the list of banned communities a bit based on the feedback received so far. But it won't be my decision to make at the end of the day -- the whole admin team will have their input.