I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.

I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

  • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Tankies gonna tank. Just block their shit instance and move on with your life.

  • Audacious@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Sad to see. Feels like Lemmy has no bright future with people in charge of it thinking russia’s and China’s government is good and ban difference of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs.

  • Darkpepito_tux@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    As a marxist, I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism. And I don’t even understand how people can stay with “Stalin was not so bad”, knowing that he never planned to apply the last state of the Communist theory, and even if it did, massacre are not acceptable (sounds obvious), same applying with China and their open market.
    In my country (France), Stalinism isn’t a thing, all communists are against what happend in USSR, and most are anti-china.

    • finder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I’m myself tired of how tankies deals with criticism.

      It’s because tankies are just contrarians that use communist ideology as a vehicle to be anti-west / anti-United States (anti-liberal democracy). Tankies will defend any cause or ideology that is against ‘the west’ even if that means happily ignoring the blatant homophobic, genocidal and repressive authoritarianism.

  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Thanks for spreading the word. We get these complaints every few weeks. More people need to be educated and move away from these instances to make the Threadiverse a better place.

  • EleventhHour@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    As others have said, the only option available currently is to leave the instance and re-create your beloved communities elsewhere. The Lemmy.ml Admins also happen to be the ones actively developing the Lemmy code base, and they’re not gonna change because they feel entitled to do whatever they want, and technically, they can because they run the instance.

    My best advice is to move on from the instance.

  • taipan@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    .ml = Marxism-Leninism

    This wasn’t obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it’s unmistakable that the “.ml” in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.

    Hope that clears things up.

  • GingaNinga@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’ve had this happen to me, I was chatting in a thread with some guy about IP theft and plagiarism at universities- a legitimate discussion about a current topic- and all my comments were suddenly deleted for “xenophobia”. I let it go but its still really jarring and annoying.

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think all instances need to defederate. This is totally inexcusable. We shouldn’t be attached and well connected to a CCP-controlled (influenced or directly) community. This is propaganda, pure and simple.

    It’s not a problem to have dissenting opinions to widely held beliefs, but it is a problem to have those injected constantly into our streams while all opposition is silently erased and curated to artifically support state-sponsored CCP propaganda.

  • hipsterdoofus@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Unfortunately, lemmy.ml is run by lemmy’s actual developers and will likely remain one of the most popular instances. Best thing to do is block the instance and host new communities on other instances.

    • retrospectology@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      That kind of makes me a bit more skeptical of Lemmy as a whole if I’m being honest. Not necessarily the instance owners, but the system as a whole.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      2 years ago

      I’m staring at the front page of lemmy.ml and I’m trying to find what’s got people so worked up. It seems fairly simple to not go into a prolonged rant about how much you hate China when the content is just silly imgr memes.

      I mean, by all means, block it if you don’t like the content. But why are you obsessed with the modlogs of an instance you blocked?

  • Aux@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Tankies are modding many communities here as well. The solution is to fight them tooth and nail.

  • noisefree@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    They will ban you for comments that are so inert it’s impossible to even know what offended them, it’s ridiculous.

  • cygon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.

    Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

    I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.