I was wondering if there were systems in place for users to report mods who are just ignoring the code of conduct and just abusing their power of moderator as a whole?
I’ve seen that we could get in touch via Mastodon, but I don’t have an account for that unfortunately and I was curious to know if there were other ways
The point isn’t that they received some wild type of “punishment” they can’t come back from. The point is that having what you’re allowed to say policed in this fashion is offensive to the vast majority of people, whatever mechanism “gentle” or not is being used to enforce the policing.
Moderation started out as a way to remove racism, spam and similar blatant abuse. Somehow, it’s grown to the point that people feel they have to hover over the shoulders of the commenters dictating what are the allowed and disallowed types of statements. Most people feel that if they think China has an oppressive government, they should be allowed to say it. And that if they think the US has an oppressive government, they should be allowed to say it. Lemmy.ml is a silly place because one of those statements is “allowed” and the other is not, which is absurd behavior that belongs better on a Fox News comment section or a US State Department web site than it does on the flagship instance of a supposedly FOSS-and-freedom friendly software project.
Both of those statements are allowed in .ml, you just can’t repeat us state department propaganda without extreme amounts of proof to back it up. There is a difference between: “I think China is authoritarian” and “oog boog look remember that genocide that the UN investigated and found wasn’t a genocide where all the ‘victims’ that were touted are now millionaires in other countries after selling a story the UN specifically found didn’t happen… It happened!!!1!1!!1”
I have gotten banned from .ml twice for merely stating that Russia shot down a civilian airliner in Ukraine.
What century are you from? The last time Russia had anti air assets in Ukraine it was still called the Ukraine and it was half it’s current size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
And here we reach the crux of the matter.
If I think there’s been a genocide in Xinjiang, I should be able to say so. Someone else might think that’s objectively not true, and we can talk about it. That’s actually a really healthy thing, it is an exchange of ideas. Almost no one has a monopoly on understanding the world completely, and so it’s necessary to be able to talk it back and forth. Deciding that we’re going to delete one side of that conversation is good for no one.
I think the model that’s crept into the modern internet where discordant ideas are “enemy” ideas that everyone needs to be protected against, and there’s no point in talking with anyone you disagree with because all the two of you will do is attack each other, is poison.
I’m happy to hear what you have to say, maybe I am wrong about this instance. When did the UN say there wasn’t a genocide and all the victims are millionaires? If you link me to the report, I would like to read it.
Edit: Instead of pointing me to information so I can read for myself and upend my whole worldview, he chose to go back through my history downvoting a bunch of stuff including when I was talking about how to set up RSS feeds. Lol.
Uncritically spreading xenophobic propaganda will of course get you a tut-tut of some kind. As it should.
Can you link me to the UN report where they found there was no genocide, and the so-called victims were millionaires?
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf
They don’t even mention the word genocide because that is an accusation exclusive to US propaganda think tanks and those who cite them, i.e. their funders (the US State Department and other imperialist countries’ similar state organs) and friendly media. It is baseless bullshit that can only be entertained by the ignorant.
If you keep searching, you will find another “UN” “report” that attacks China, but this is not the OHCR, it is the usual propaganda thing where countries invite propagandists to a meeting and have them read out accusations. It is not any kind of investigation.
How does this report find there was no genocide, if they didn’t mention the word genocide?
I also searched for “million” to try to find the story about all the victims being millionaires now, and I didn’t find that either. Can you or the other person who talked about that tell me more about where I can find it?
I did skim some of the report.
Leaving aside the question of whether to draw the conclusion that there is a genocide, do you think that information like the stuff I just quoted from the report you just sent me is accurate?
Because it is an investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang for the exact period in question in response to the people making these allegations.
The escalation of claims went: human rights abuses -> cultural genocide -> genocide. Both escalations were unjustified and they literally had nothing for the escalation to genocide. It was a claim by a shady organization funded by a CIA cutout.
I haven’t followed the incomes of the grifters pushing this narrative in the West but if you research World Uyghur Congress you will probably find information about this. I do know that they received a lot of funding and have very little to show for it. That money went somewhere.
I would need to refresh my memory and look into specific cases because some people have recanted accounts like this or otherwise given very inconsistent stories. I don’t doubt that there were abuses, though. The devil is really in the details. Often it is people from these NED-funded propaganda orgs that are used as sources for these stories and they have a vested interest in how they tell them in order to support their ideological cause and continue receiving funding. For example one of the accounts often touted, and I don’t know whether it is one of those specific examples you mention, is by a business owner whose story constantly changed who fled the country and whose family more or less says is lying. Without her business assets, she received income from these NED funded orgs. It’s a fairly standard playbook at this point.
Incidentally, one of the orgs funded in this way, ETIM, was on the US and others’ terrorism lists until it became convenient to use them to poke China. ETIM are reactionary separatists trying to import Arab salafist positions and wrongly conflate them with Uyghur (Turkic) customs. They are also behind some of the knife attacks and they are related to the al Qaeda-adjascent groups in Syria vowing to bring separatist violence to China right now.
I was responding, originally, to this statement:
I asked because I didn’t know of anything that backs up either of those claims. I still haven’t seen anything that does.
In non-authoritarian contexts, it’s actually pretty normal to ask “Why are you saying this, what is the evidence,” instead of just accepting a browbeating message as, in itself, proof of what’s being claimed. And usually, if someone’s asked for proof and then their proof doesn’t match the thing claimed when you examine it, or they’re hostile to the idea of needing to provide proof in the first place because that’s “sealioning” or whatever, that’s a huge red flag. Likewise it is a red flag if someone makes a claim, and then when asked for evidence they pivot instead into a whole bunch of new claims.
It doesn’t look like you or the other speaker are interested in backing up this stuff. I don’t want to play the Gish Gallop game of indefinitely checking out all these new claims. I really did read the report. I don’t know all that much about Xinjiang, so it was informative for me to see it, so thank you. I didn’t see a strong indication, one way or another, that what’s happening either is or isn’t a genocide. It’s definitely not on the same scale as Gaza or Nazi Germany, but it still does sound to me like they’re aiming to eradicate the culture of these people and replace it Chinese culture, alongside a lot of other human rights abuses. The forced sterilization and wide-scale destruction of mosques, in particular, sounds exactly like eradication.
Okay, so you’re not sure whether the report you sent me was accurate. You’re just interested in using it to back up something that it doesn’t actually back up, but at the same time throwing shade at any part of it that says something you don’t want to hear.
That fact that it doesn’t use the word “genocide” is not, to me, a specific finding that there is not a genocide. They seem like they’re just focused on what the facts of the matter are, instead of the question of whether it fits into some specific value judgement or not.
I’m done here. I was just curious, that’s all. Have a good day.
https://feddit.nl/post/16246531
Yes that is specifically what I’m talking about, there wasn’t criticism of China, there was “oog think China bad because ( insert thing the UN found no evidence of that literally only the US ever said there was evidence of and they didn’t present that evidence ).”
And how is this related to mechanical keyboards, Linux and open source communities?
Banning someone from an instance also bans them from communities they participate in. Or at least, it used to.
That’s probably the core of the issue. People probably don’t mind being banned from !politics@lemmy.ml or !news@lemmy.ml for such statements, it’s not like it’s a surprise based on the political stance of the instance.
Being banned from Linux and keyboard communities seems unrelated. Which is why people are recreating those communities elsewhere.
If instances are like separate Reddits then it is just like getting a siteban.
Also something being “politics” does not mean it should entitle you to other spaces. This is how reactionaries self-victimize to excuse, say, transphobia.
Indeed, and like Reddit, people are leaving for other sites, or in this case instances
Read the rules, if you disagree with the rules in a community, don’t participate, make your own. It’s hardly power tripping if you actively seek to violate rules clearly laid out.
That’s what most people are doing
As a mod, we don’t really “hover”, we do have a queue of reported posts and reported comments and deal with them as they pop up.
Most likely some other .ml user saw the “tankie” comment, reported it, and the .ml mod did the .ml mod thing.
I fail to see a useful distinction between me posting what I think, and a mod seeing it and deleting it, versus me posting what I think, someone reporting it, and then the mod deleting it. In both cases someone’s standing over me policing what viewpoints I’m allowed to express, which is bad.
I actually do get why someone would want to delete “tankie,” since it could be taken as a gratuitous insult. And I do get mod fatigue and running out of care to give as an underlying issue for a lot of this. I think a big part of the underlying issue is depending on volunteer moderators to keep the whole system together and making basically unlimited demands on them. I was just talking about the general censorship problem on lemmy.ml, not trying to say that every case is always power tripping mods.