Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares.
It’s one of those things where the very tankies you’re talking about made it trivial for anyone not wanting to interact with them, their instance, or anyone in specific can just block whatever. And then there’s the instances that defederate from .ml and/or grad, which is a decent amount of them.
They may be assholes (though they tend not to be in interpersonal ways, only in their political views), but they’re assholes nobody has to interact with for very long.
You’re beating a dead horse with this one
That horse fucking deserves it though. He knows what he did.
Yeah honestly let’s make an example out of that horse
Malicious propaganda isn’t a non-problem. I’d like a social media platform that doesn’t have any governments openly pumping their lies into the conversation.
There is always a bias.
There’s always murder, but we still try to stop it.
Your last sentence is contradictory with the meaning of “beating a dead horse” with the usage of the phrase I’m aware of.
To beat a dead horse isn to waste effort at an impossible or pointless goal.
When I used the phrase, it was with the second meaning in mind, but the first partially applies if op wanted anyone to do anything about the situation because the dev team isn’t exactly open to some kind of takeover. The most that could realistically happen is that everyone leave lemmy entirely. Except for the tankies, obviously, why would they leave?
Since anyone that has spent enough time on lemmy to be called a regular user has run across the whole issue at least once, that means that if OP was wanting to raise awareness, the post was also pointless in that regard because it’s kinda impossible to raise awareness past common knowledge and achieve anything useful.
Now, maybe our usage of the phrase “beating a dead horse” isn’t the same. Language is funny like that. Maybe you just disagree that the post has no point, or that the point it does have might achieve something useful. That’s cool, no worries, disagreements like that are healthy and fun.
I will say that in the first part of your comment, you actually echoed the point that I made; it is trivial to minimize/block instances in one way or another, including defederation. Defederation is an instance decision, not a personal one. But it is also a personal decision which instance/s we use to interact with the fediverse. There are instances that do not federate with lemmy.ml, and there’s a ton that don’t with lemmygrad.
So, based on that, I would even argue that, since we have the freedom to choose our instance (with the consent of the host of the instance of course), trying to get an instance that doesn’t already defederate from lemmy.ml to do so approaches pointless since all of the major instances have been around for a while now, and have already taken part in that debate. Maybe you could change someone’s mind with yet another rehash of the same debate, it does happen. But, again, all the major instances have had this debate multiple times, and the hosts don’t seem open to changing just because someone brings it up again.
New instances? Absolutely have to decide if they want to federate with any of the “iffy” instances. And every user has to decide if they’d rather stick with a given instance that doesn’t match their preferences regarding federation. But, uh, the instance this was posted on isn’t new. The user that posted it isn’t exactly new either. So the fact that they haven’t already made a choice, but instead decided to beat a dead horse (again, using the “pointless” rather than “impossible” usage of the phrase) seems a bit meh.
I have Lemmy.ml blocked and I still see them in other communities all the time.
If that’s the case, then that may be a bug. I advise you to report that.
It’s standard, unfortunately, I’m not the only one
What do you mean by “it’s standard”? As in that is the intended functionality? It shouldn’t be — the whole point of blocking instances is for the user to be able to, well, block an instance, ie content originating from it no longer shows up.
Yeah, the software is set up so that even if you block an instance you still see comments from their accounts on other instances.
I mean, we should probably care at least enough to make sure they’re not smuggling in any backdoors that would allow them take over the entire Lemmyverse.
I know it’s open source so that’s somewhat difficult to accomplish but not impossible (see the recent stealth attack on SSH/OpenSSL). At the very least, it requires people from outside their echo chamber to regularly review commits being made made before admins begin rolling out new updates.
Jesus christ.
I’m not sure if He knows Rust well enough to do that, and having some sort of background in infosec would likely also be helpful.
Oh come on downvoters, that was funny! Haha
Thank you, I tried.
Tough crowd, eh?
Well, things have turned around! Haha
Guess it was just a slow burner then
That’s a valid point, imo.
But there supposedly are people doing just that. Been too long since I ran across it here, but when the last big version change happened, some of the instance running folks looked over the code, and found nothing hinky. I know my asshole cousin has his own instance, and he said he scanned through it a little out of curiosity and “it ain’t the prettiest” was the worst he had to say about it. Which, second hand info like that is like toilet paper, but it serves okay for a casual conversation like this.
I would hope so, since it’s THEIR hardware it’s running on (or in case it’s rented, responsible for).
But as long as they don’t put anything iffy into the code and leave their political opinions separate from that, they can certainly run their own instance however they please. That’s the whole point of Lemmy after all.
Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares
The 730 people who upvoted this post do care.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
Maybe it’s too soon to make such a judgement call, we’ll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them.
Agreed. Maybe I should try creating and managing a community some day. (hopefully this didn’t come off as sarcastic)
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
This is a wildly misleading and unfair comparison. Let’s take the Trump verdict as an example. The most upvoted post about this had ~2700 upvotes. But that’s only 6% of the MAU! Is that “nobody”? Obviously not. 2k upvotes is a huge deal on a rather small community like Lemmy. How often do you see posts with more than 3k upvotes?
~500 upvotes is already a moderately large number of upvotes. You need to compare this number with how many upvotes a post typically gets.
I didn’t necessarily think you were being sarcastic, but I appreciate the clarification.
You’re correct, that was a rather shallow comparison for me to make.
I don’t think raw upvotes give the full story either. I’d be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
I’d be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
That would be interesting indeed! I heard that if one hosts their own Lemmy instance, they can see who voted on every post. Don’t have that for now though.
Fwiw (our disagreement aside), moderating a community anywhere online can be a very rewarding, and very thankless job. And it really can be a thing that feels like a job if the community is active enough.
But I would still recommend at least trying it for a few months to see if whatever subject matter you make it around draws users. That’s when you get a real feel for moderation, and have the best chance at helping the overall fediverse work well.
I also think that moderating a big community would change your mind at least partially regarding vote numbers as a measure of anything significant. There’s behind the curtain stuff that usually gives a better indication of how a given post/subject is being received by the individual community. It depends on the tools available, and lemmy is a wee bit scant on tools to help moderators gain understanding of the population of their C/; but it’s still eye opening.
The biggest thing I think you’d notice in comparing people interacting with a given post is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that. And that’s the ones that bother to vote. A lot of people don’t. They’ll click a link, maybe open that post and read comments, but just not care enough to do anything else at all. Back on reddit, that was a majority of posts, and I know it was the case on other forums back in the day.
So, yeah, disagreement about the numbers in this case aside, if you’re this interested in how a vote using forum works, moderating your own would be a very cool experience on top of diversifying the instance/community balance.
[…] is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that.
Wow, now that I think of it, that is indeed how I vote most of the time.
Thanks, I will seriously consider opening a community.
Votes mean as much as the shit I just took.
No. The shit that you took is more meaningful than fake Internet points.
Usually I’d agree with this, but on this post, the upvote count is a direct representation of how many people care about this issue (out of the number of users who saw this post). That is meaningful.
In my view, upvotes are too easy to manipulate to take them seriously or expect authenticity. And I’m ok with that. I think Reddit and the like showed that karma and the like are not great measures of authentic engagement.
I don’t have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it’s a matter of general principle in my opinion.
It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don’t engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can’t see those numbers, so it’s kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.
But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they’re a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they’re the only metric available.
Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there’s significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.
I kind of see your point. The information we have is not sufficient, and we cannot really know how much of the Lemmy userbase cares about this issue.
True, it was a very healthy bm ;)
FYI, the second main dev, Nutomic, although he doesn’t write as much, is in the same ideology, his avatar is Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.
During their AMA, 10 months ago, I directly asked them:
Since you’re very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?Thanks for your work, it’s projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive. https://lemmy.ml/post/2920188/2385128
They intentionally ignored my questions and answered to other later questions with fewer points.
Eventually, 10 months later, my personal observation is that it seems that they keep their ideology tendencies to their home instance, which is fair enough since people are free to leave and block. And they don’t seem to be developing some centralized International political oppression feature into Lemmy, like their role models may have, so far.
Don’t forget that you can block an instance personally now.
You will be surprised how much of the open source software out there is written and maintained by lefties and tankies.
Sadly conservatives seem to have either lower education and are not notorious for their sharing and selflessness.
Denying historical events and refusing to come to terms with their causes and repercussions is not a left or right problem.
You can be as communist as you want but pretending that events with photographic evidence didn’t actually happen put you in the same category as moon landing deniers in my book.
And yet so many people believe in religion without a single scientific proof. But yes, I got your point.
For the record there are a lot of shameful events in your history too, but I am sure your own government has done its utmost to hide those facts.
Just that in the US there is a massive anti China and anti Russia propaganda. Do not get me wrong, I don’t disagree with a lot of their policies, but the US isn’t also spotless and a role model in a lot of ways.
The US has so much red on its ledger it will never be balanced. And there are plenty of apologists for atrocities in our history. They’re just as bad as the Chinese or Russian (or pick whatever country you want because they’re all guilty to some extent) when they do it.
Right wing free software users love from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs until you point out what it is.
Then you get whatever this lemmy-wide tantrum is.
I disagree with Dessalines about some stuff but the guy is a don.
I am exactly in the same boat. I might disagree with someone but the amount of work he put into it is admirable
No problem, fuckingkangaroos.
Edit: the first time I tried Sync it replied to the top level post instead of what I actually replied to.
Well this is news to me. The whole thing; created by Marxists, etc, etc.
Wtf?
This gets posted here on a near daily basis, I’m not sure how you missed it.
.world and .ml have been feuding practically since Lemmy went live. The .world folks insist .ml are full of fascist tankies who hate freedom. The .ml folks deride .world as a cesspool of white nationalism and hatred of the third world.
But the “problem” appears to be that one instance can’t shut down the other. So we get these endless struggle sessions with the same angry sets of links and vows to defederate at all costs.
Hot take: .world will put it to a vote and defed from .ml before .ml does. This will split Lemmy into 2 major sections.
No way the LW admins would shut down controversy. It would impact their engagement and they wouldn’t get to see number go up.
Not really a “hot take”
good thing I’m a furry tbh
Why doesn’t your name have an @instance beside it?
Hmmmmm
Am I crazy or do I also not have one?
It’s cuz we’re server buddies!
Ahh that makes sense.
Thank goodness nobody is locked into any one instance. The beauty of the fediverse.
So is it … the “whole thing”? I.e., Lemmy was invented / created / etc. by a bunch of authoritarian weirdos?
I’m guessing that the question itself reveals that I don’t even understand what Lemmy is, but hey. Any help appreciated.
Lemmy was invented / created / etc. by a bunch of authoritarian weirdos?
Lemmy was created explicitly to get away from the Reddit brand of authoritarian weirdos. Then it was made to be fungible and mutable and interconnectable in order to prevent any single mod or admin from exerting Reddit-like control over the communities at-large.
I don’t even understand what Lemmy is
It’s a place to post. You don’t have to get much deeper than that. So much of this drama is one group of people angry at another group of people for posting wrong.
Which is very classic “old Reddit” before the mods decided dissent was bad for monetization.
It’s funny Lemmy was created as a way to get away from “Reddit brand authotarian weirdos” yet Lemmy’s creator is a “Reddit brand authotarian weirdo” and so is most of the main moderation team on ml and elsewhere you’ll think that with there combined experience on Reddit that they’lld learnt by now that censorship is bad. But then again what am I saying with my experience with tankies and socialists I’ve learnt a lot of them aren’t that bright
It’s funny and ironic that the creator of this platform has become the very thing he apparently despises although I’m not surprised to be brutally honest commies do love their censorship
Except the Lemmy design isn’t authoritarian and it isn’t being ruthlessly monetized.
Also, you don’t seem to understand the difference between being censored publicly and being uninvited privately.
YSK: There are countless posts by “concerned” users shrieking about tankies. What is the point of these “informational” posts? Looking to stamp out opinions you don’t like so you can turn the fediverse into astroturfed-to-hell-and-back reddit 2.0?
If Lemmy turns into a toxic cesspit, like Voat did, anyone remotely normal will leave to avoid the toxicity.
voat tolerates Nazis. that’s not what’s happening here. it’s actually the opposite: fascist propaganda is being spotted and removed, and the people spreading it whine
So ‘Tankies’ are the ones fighting Nazis? There doesn’t seam much between the two to be honest.
Okay but this isn’t “oh no, there are tankies around”, it’s the admin of one of the largest Lemmy instances systematically suppressing information about massacres and genocide.
There’s quite a big gap between banning “opinions you don’t like” and defederating from a systemically auth-left instance, in the same way that defederating from an auth-right instance would be a no-brainer.
There is a big gap between auth-left and auth-right thought. Auth-right thought imposes violence as an inherent part of the ideology because it promotes the idea of racial supremacy, they have to actively commit violence to achieve their goals. Auth-left uses violence on perceived threats to their order, not based on features people are born with. I do not agree with China’s actions on Tiananmen Square or their treatment of Uyghurs, but these two things are definitely used by the US as a fulcrum to attack China.
Do you not find it odd how much importance is placed on Tiananmen Square after all these decades? Do you not find it odd how hard the US hammers the point of the Uyghur genocide while at the same time fully funding and supporting the genocide of Palestinians? The tactic is to flood communication channels with propaganda to achieve domination over the narrative and this is the sort of thing we’re seeing here with countless posts about tankies. Why are we supposed to take American narratives as gospel to shut down opposing narratives?
Bold to go with the pro-auth-left take
I’m just going to ignore the long responses to stuff I didn’t claim in the first place
Thanks for admitting you have no response and instead rely on a thought-terminating cliché.
Even if we all disagree with him politically, what, is anybody going to form the lemmy repo on GH and make a better version?
I think the lemmy software itself isn’t so much the problem (in that it isn’t politically moderated), but the way he moderated his own instances make a fairly compelling reason for defederation
You mean a fork? Why not? A copyright assignment and relicensing dispute is what caused a LibreOffice to fork from OpenOffice. Forks is a great feature of FOSS and there are normal.
Best recent example I bumped into was OrcaSlicer it’s a fork of a fork of a fork, merging in some of a fourth fork.
There is [Sublinks] (https://sublinks.org/) but I have no idea when it will be released.
I think the best we can do now is to move communities away from ml.
Really loving the “What does it matter if they support genocide???” commenters in here. Really showing where their priorities are.
I see your posts on various communities all the time. Glad to see you here.
To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies… but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word ‘tankies’ used at all. I’ve asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I’ve asked have ever heard the word before.
So… like I said, I find it weird. It’s like some kind of lemmy boogieman.
they seep in occasionally but mostly keep to their own instances now afaik
that’s because they’re deleting posts. you don’t see it until you are subjected to it
yeah, I’m pretty radically left as it is but I’ve seen a few tankie posts and boy are those threads to stay away from.
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Here’s an idea, block .ml and SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY.
It feels like 30% of all Lemmy use is capitalists whining that they don’t have a central anti leftist authority to block everyone they don’t like, by linking the same two fucking posts from over at least 1 year ago or posts where they “argue” by shouting “fuck you Tankie” and it didn’t go their way.
If you don’t like how its run, leave. THATS THE WHOLE POINT. If you want a central authority thats gonna be strongly pro-capital, go back to Reddit. Either way:
SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.
your tantrum is much more cringe than any complain post I’ve ever seen lmao
See above advice ^
Shut the fuck up
Most activity is on .ml
And will continue to be until people shut the fuck up and populate other instances instead of trying to bully the people who built the damned thing off their own instance.
(This isn’t directed at you) - If lemmy.ml hosts most activity, and continues to host most activity, despite your claims that nobody can have a differing opinion from 2 or 3 people without being banned, and is continuing to grow and host more of the activity…The problem isn’t the people who built the software or admin the server, maybe the problem is you.
In my defense, I use .ml because it tends to have the best stability/uptime. I think I was using .world before, and it was down for like 3 days straight at one point so I stopped using it and started using .ml more.
With that said, I think blocking entire instances is kind of extreme unless it’s very warranted. With that said, I appreciate the ability to move between instances as necessary, or even host your own. That’s one way Lemmy will always be better than alternatives like Reddit.
I think blocking entire instances is inevitable, but the choices various instance owners make in doing so will help shape where the chips fall in the long run in terms of where people end up settling in - someone with leftist tendencies won’t want to set up shop on an instance that defeds all the leftist instances, for example.
A lot of people call for outright defederation because they came from reddit so they want that more singular level of authority/moderation. Whereas (purely hypothetical, haven’t been on reddit in a long gkme) a pro Palestinian sub could be banned because reddit took a pro - Israel stance, on Lemmy if .world bans my community I can take it to Ml, and they HATE that.
I’m watching with interest what happens here. I left Reddit before for Voat for a while. It turned out that without policing (or maybe it was the type of policing) it turned into a toxic cesspit.
Policing of some kind is clearly import to human groups. In the real world, across the world and history, where is no law and order, you end up with war lords and drug lords, who setup their own rules. Take moderation away and online groups get consumed by trolls.
So I’m watching what happens with federated Lemmy with interest.
I’m not familiar with Voat. I’m not sure how it’d apply to something like Lemmy (probably fall on instance owners I guess) but the problem every “ultimate free speech TM” platform runs into is that laws exist and certain things are just illegal. 🤷
The most notable thing about people who complain this loudly about moderation that doesn’t skew their way, is that they dont want LESS moderation - They want moderation that skews to their viewpoints. They complain about being banned on ml for saying “fuck you tankie” or other dismissive nonsense, but if you visit THEIR spaces and politely disagree and provide sources you’ll get banned quicker than anyone here but none of them cry about free speech when it happens on their turf.
See that’s not my experience of the problem. They aren’t being polite. They are out right hostile. Staying calm, providing trusted source references, and remaining polite, just seams to enrage they further. They seam to want to have a slagging match, which is of no interest to me as I’m not 12.
I’m open to to the fact that (like basically anything) it DOES happen at some point, somewhere. The problem with taking the people complaining that its this big systemic push to purge them seriously is even the examples THEY give usually show themselves just being twats.
Also, as many people love screaming at me about “receipts,” if you’re getting banned left and right just for sharing a source and you’re so enraged that you’re taking up arms, where’s the modlog entries?
Then, if it IS being mad that they’re being moderated for getting shitty and acting like a cunt - could I go into their house and start pissing all over whatever they’re about? Conservative spaces LOVE hyper moderation when it aligns with them, as I mentioned previously go find an instance that aligns with your shtick - that’s the whole Lemmy thing.
I’m not giving you what I regard as my instances because I think that is combative. I don’t want combat, that’s the whole thing. I’m not really pro or anti this defederation, but I can see the problem and I’m interested in how it plays out. In it becomes a place of combat rather than debate, I’m simply leave. If there is no news or anyone to talk to, I will also leave.
If there is coordinated defederation, maybe it’ll give mods of the troll infested instances pause for thought, and make them clean house. Or not, and Lemmy bumbles along without ever hitting mainstream, until something else comes along. Maybe central instances set the tone of the whole thing, and here this is a mortal wound.
It’s an interesting “natural experiment”.
Glad I don’t know wtf this is about.
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The FUD spreaders continuing to spread FUD. You know what’s great for Lemmy, this platform you’re using that was developed by that Dev you’re coming for? Inter instance drama, surely.
Cold War 2 bullshit.
I’m glad to have devs with principals. Go back to reddit lib.
Tianneman Square Massacre. Winnie the Pooh.
Winnie the Pooh
Isn’t this racist?
Also, remind me about Kent State. Or Ferguson. Or the extermination of Native Americans. Or concentration camps in the Philippines.
Imagine trying to insult someone by calling them a liberal lmfao.
Who remembers when China was doing live organ farming on people?
Pepperidge farm fucking remembers.
Just FYI, the organ farming thing comes from Falun Gong, who are a weird cult that have been (perhaps overly) oppressed by the Chinese government. They have quite a strong media presence and some weird beliefs about organs.
who are a weird cult that have been (perhaps overly) oppressed by the Chinese government. They have quite a strong media presence and some weird beliefs about organs.
This logic doesn’t make sense. The government with a great firewall isn’t controlling media to restrict this one particular groups views? Even though they have no trouble with every other group?
They’re international, their HQ is in Deerpark, NY.
This video (and its second part) give a good overview of Falun Gong and their media presence.
Really? Because I remember reading from the UN that this was taking place in the uyghur camps?
Edit: actually it’s both. So…
I think it’s worth considering that your evidence comes directly from a country that considers China an adversary, and they seem to take the Falun Gong organ harvesting as fact.
True, however that doesn’t necessarily constitute falsehood in what they’re claiming.
The UN also did work on this, as did Canada and some investigative reporters in Europe.
China has lots of adversaries. Mainly anybody in the west, and they dominate any of their other Allies which makes them a de facto leader and would make criticism from anyone else pretty tough.
Edit: oh and in 2015 China announced that they wouldn’t do forced organ transplants on prisoners anymore - so they were most definitely participating in this disgusting practice.
True, however that doesn’t necessarily constitute falsehood in what they’re claiming.
I appreciate that, I just think it was worth pointing out that its worth being sceptical about a source like that, as you would be about one coming from the Chinese government.
100%
I’m critical of every ruling body, regardless of where I reside. There’s something to be said about having power over millions of people and how humans deal with that.
I’m especially critical of governments that are known to run PsyOps, disinformation campaigns, and known histories of abuse (US, China, Russia, Israel, Iran, North Korea, etc). Ultimately, the devil you know is better than the others, but we’re still working with devils
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Don’t forget the Uyghurs! Your name calling has no effect against me and is frankly childish when you could’ve taken the opportunity to properly educate.
Instead you chose to call names. lol. Very telling.
There is no war in ba sing se ig
If by “principals” you mean “banning anybody who falls outside of the groupthink”, then sure, more power to ya.
You say that like world or others instances don’t do that
1, that’s whataboutism, form a better argument. 2, that’s still a weak “principal” to have and defending it as though it’s a good thing is pretty cringe.
.world is a zionist and CIA-affiliated shillstorm. It’s just the US version of .ml
Both are equally bad because the US and China are equally bad. Don’t believe me? Check out the death toll of Native American genocide, transatlantic slavery, Latin american imperialism, CIA coups during the Cold War, police repression today, and current prison populations.
Given that I have no idea why anyone would defend the United States. Unless you’re brainwashed or working for the CIA
i’m open to the possibility that you’re right, but my experience is that criticism of the cia or zionism is tolerated to a much greater degree on .world than criticism of china or soviet russia is tolerated on .ml.
can you point to specific instance-wide bannings for talking shit on us foreign policy or zionism?
It’s tolerated in different ways. Ostracization and orchestrated mass downvotes are used rather than bans. .world utilizes methods of control that are more subtle than .ml. Which is consistent with how the CIA/West exerts control compared to China.
Our propaganda techniques and mechanisms of control are more multifaceted and less brutish and obvious - which isn’t a good thing. It means that we create a veil and drape it over the eyes of our people so that they don’t even realize that they are being controlled. This is the ideological state apparatus of the West that is drastically more effective than anything a socialist state has managed to create. Of course, we both have repressive state apparatuses as well, and our police are arguably more brutal than theirs (especially if you aren’t white and female), but there is less need to use that when you are able to brainwash your public so effectively with subtle acts of ideological correction. And convincing them that hundreds of strangers are mad at them is a good way to minimize dissent from being articulated in the first place, as well as distractions such as typical liberal rage bait and “red team bad” distractions
i think this is pretty hard to draw a direct comparison. first, a few mods/admins deciding to ban is not the same as hundreds of individuals voting. even if half of them are bots (no one games lemmy votes, though, do they?), that’s still a far cry from someone stepping in and actually silencing a user.
second, while i think you’re right about the nature of western societal control, i don’t think there is any conspiracy to enact that on .world. maybe i’m naive though.
I don’t think I will
I mean… What is your point here? This is the internet no?
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