Hello! I’m a guy who decided to join lemmy a few months ago, specifically because I was absolutely enraged by how moderation on Reddit worked. I am also taking part rather vigorously in the conversation about how much I dislike .ml moderation practices! I think I might be a little bit of an agitator in all this, because In joined lemmy after about a medium bit of research, and then jumped into it full tilt with the idea of “why not, I spent so much time as a revolutionary, myself!” And then I hit whatever the internet/globalization has done to what I recognize as leftist political spaces.

AMA, I guess!

For some background about myself, I’m an older millennial, who grew up with disparate web forums which were generally hidden behind a random website. My favorite haunt was punkbands.com, and loved LAN parties and early MMORPGs. Anyways, I had to get off the internet for a while to make a living, but eventually got to a spot where I could again visit the world wide web during working hours. One of my coworkers introduced me, through my first “smart phone” (an android, like, whatever was around in 2011 and cheap as fuck but still let me get online) to reddit. I really loved that old(ish) school internet, where people could spam and insult eachother within limits, and the community policed itself through a somewhat democratic process. I was legit excited to join lemmy, given how far I think reddit had fallen and how much disinformation had infected it, and how similar it appeared to the older, more democratic internet of my youth.

However, I found that a large part of lemmy is dominated by people who profess to be leftists, but ambush you with ideological purity tests and subsequent abuse if you don’t pass. I questioned a post on the .ml world news sub that came from a source that is literally a Syrian and Bolivian governmental news outlet, which alleged that the US military was stealing crude oil and raw wheat from Syrian oil derricks/Syrian farmers. I used mediabiasfactcheck.com to support my questioning of this source. I also appealed to logic, questioning why the US would steal things that it exports. A mod there (I believe the username is davos) engaged me in a conversation spanning hours, where we exchanged information about whether mediabiasfactcheck.com was a reasonable source to help assess the validity of media. While the conversation was uncomfortable, we each exchanged information and links supporting our arguments. Because I did not accept his outright rejection of medibiasfactcheck.com as a way to assist with the judement of media, I was banned and all of my comments were deleted.

Since then, I have met another .ml mod (username yogthos), and engaged in a long conversation about this same topic (.ml censorship). It was in a meta sub, hosted on the .ml instance. The conversation I am referring to has since been deleted, and I am not sure if it is possible to find it again, since my own history has disappeared; I will be happy to answer questions of anybody with the tech savvy to retrieve these exchanges. Anyway. In this meta thread, I engaged several users about the issue of unfair .ml moderation, alongside several other lemmy users. During the course of this exchange, a .ml user made an assertion that the OP (who was complaining about the “tankie problem”) was banned from the .ml instance because they had, somewhere undefined, insisted that the Tienanmen Massacre had actually happened. As a note, please understand that this was about a week before the start of June, and nobody so far in this thread had mentioned Tienanmen Square. Anywhere. Anyways, I questioned this particular statement, and yogthos suddenly butted in with a ton of weird sources that supported his claim that Tiennenma Square never happened. They insisted that the whole thing was a Color Revolution that was sponsored by the CIA, and that actually the students of the Tienanmen Square had attacked the Chinese Soldiers. I insisted that this was inconsistent with prevailing evidence, but was told that I simply needed to watch the various videos and read the blogs to understand that it was all untrue. I also engaged with some uders about my own ideology, where I was insulted as a “lib” for stating my intense distaste for authoritarianism. yogthos, the .ml moderator who I spoke with, told me that “libs don’t understand” that authoritarianism is ok if it is in defense of fascism… but did not expound as to how fascism was defined.

As for my evidence, I have shared it in some of the other posts. However, if you’ll look at the moderation history of .ml, under my user name, you will see that I am banned from several subs, and I think from the whole .ml instance. It will be for “Rule 4,” which from what I can tell is spam, or advertising. I have never taken part in anything that resembles spam or advertising. I have, though, had comments that insist that there was some kind of violence surrounding Tienanmen Square, or debate the validity of news from Syrian government media sources, removed from .ml instances. You may also notice that I was banned from subs like palestine and usa, which I have never actually participated in, aside from upvoting or downvoting.

You will also, looking back, hopefully find the initial conversations I reference in this post. If you have specific questions, I will try to figure out how to find them, using the mod log.

This is a long post… and I’m sorry. I guess I just really don’t want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.

I’m sure I have missed a ton here, and paradoxically written far too much. I am happy to answer any questions or critique, as long as it is relatively polite and relevant.

Edit: I’m also just kind of a nerd about propaganda and discourse in international relations, especially in online spaces. I’ve studied it. Ive written papers on it. I find these things incredibly meaningful and important, so I’ve gotten involved here.