This was originally posted to lemmy.pineapplemachine.com: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/5781
It has also been posted to lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/591991
Lemmy is federated and decentralized and that means that we can all coexist regardless of our differing political opinions. I think it’s important to preface this by saying that I am not offended by or concerned with anyone’s politics, and I’m certainly not here to argue with anyone about them.
My concern is that users are being banned and content is being removed on lemmy.ml citing a rule that is not publicly stated anywhere that I have seen.
Moderators of lemmy.ml are removing posts and comments which are critical of the Chinese government and are banning their authors.
This came to my attention because of how lemmy user bans are federated just like everything else, and I was confused about why my instance had logged a lemmy.ml user ban citing “orientalism” as the reason for the ban.
Screenshot of my own instance’s modlog, as viewed by an admin
I noticed that the banned user had recently commented on a post in !worldnews@lemmy.ml that had been removed with the reason “Orientalist article”.
Screenshot of banned user’s history on lemmy.ml
Here’s the article that was removed, titled “China may face succession crisis”. It was published by axios.com, which mediabiasfactcheck describes as having “a slight to moderate liberal bias” and gives its second-highest ranking for factual reporting. The article writes unfavorably of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
https://www.axios.com/2023/06/06/china-may-face-succession-crisis
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/axios/
I had not remembered seeing anything in lemmy.ml’s rules that would suggest that “orientalism”—meaning, as I understand it, the depiction or discussion of Asian cultures by people in Western ones—was against the rules. So I checked, and I found that there was not. Not on the instance’s front page, and not in !worldnews@lemmy.ml.
Screenshot of instance rules for lemmy.ml
Screenshot of community rules for !worldnews@lemmy.ml
There is a stated rule against xenophobia, but I think that xenophobia is not widely understood to include Westerners writing critically of the actions of an Asian government.
This is where I went from confused to concerned.
Lemmy instances have public moderation logs, which I think is a very positive thing about the platform. So I looked more closely at lemmy.ml’s moderation log.
Please note that moderation logs are also federated. It’s hard to be 100% sure which instance a mod action is actually associated with, looking at these logs. The previously mentioned user ban and post removal were, I think, definitely actions taken by lemmy.ml moderators. My own instance’s mod log identifies the banning moderator as a lemmy.ml admin, and the removed post was submitted to a lemmy.ml community. I’ve done my best to verify that all of the following removals were really done by lemmy.ml moderators, but I can’t be absolutely certain. Please forgive me if any of them were actually made on other instances that do have an explicitly stated rule against orientalism.
Removed Comment Ah yes. Being against China’s racist genocide is racist. China, the imperialist ethno-state, is clearly innocent. by @CrimsonOnoscopy@beehaw.org reason: Orientalism
Removed Comment Lol. Thinking some countries have better governments than others is supremacist? Whatever, dude. By the way. If there are any countries with decent governments, I don’t know of them. But like. If there were decent countries, they wouldn’t behave like China. by @balerion@beehaw.org reason: Orientalism
These following moderator actions did not specifically cite orientalism, but did not seem to be breaking any of the instance’s or community’s explicitly stated rules.
Banned @0x815@feddit.de reason: Only makes anti russia and anti china, crosspostst from reddit. 2nd temp ban expires: 9d ago
Removed Comment Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are all Colonies of China, which it treats as Colonial Territories, by - Forcibly destroying the local culture. Forcefully extracting to harm of the locals. Genocide, abuse, kidnapping, rape. But there is no point in engaging to you. You are a liar. You know you are. When you deny genocides, you put yourself on the same side as the fascists and reactionaries of the past. by @CrimsonOnoscopy@beehaw.org reason: Rule 1 and 2
I have no affection for the Chinese government and I do not call myself a communist. I would not enforce a rule against orientalism on my own instance. But I think that lemmy.ml’s moderators are entitled to enforce whatever rules they please. It’s only that, as the largest single lemmy instance so far, I believe that they have an obligation to disclose these rules, and an obligation to not ban users or remove content for failing to follow unobvious and unstated rules.
I’d like to raise some awareness about this, and I’d like to openly ask the moderators of lemmy.ml to state the rules that they intend to enforce clearly and explicitly.
I will be very clear and state it again: I am not asking for anyone to change their opinions or to not enforce a rule that they believe in. That is the great thing about lemmy, that we can coexist in this federated community even when we don’t share the same opinions. What I am asking is for lemmy.ml’s rules to be clearly stated, because I think it does not reflect well on the broader community if the predominant instance moderates its users and content according to rules that are not being explicitly disclosed.
A map like that isn’t really reflective of any substance. Do you know what most maps of the US look like when defining political opinions by states? It’s a sea of red. But it clearly doesn’t tell a valid picture of popular support. And I’m not even arguing that makes any particular opinion more valid or not, all I’m saying is that its very easily misleading depending on what narrative you want to sell.
https://lemmy.kya.moe/imgproxy?src=arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com%2fpublic/E7LSY66ODVCFHEVJ7TTGJKPHSU.jpg
Clearly the vast majority of the country supported Trump based on that map…Except that’s not true.
Are you dismissing information about plight of Uyghur Muslims even though Muslim countries of the world found no issue with it? How does majority of the world support Trump with that map, and why are you distorting and misrepresenting information to armtwist the narrativr?
Are you being inflammatory and intentionally framing my post to make it seem like I made statements that I didn’t make? What I refuted is that posting a simple map that appears to tell a definitive story isn’t actually very substantial because there are many ways in which it can be misleading.
Let’s first address the most obvious error in your comment. You said that I claimed “majority of the world support trump with that map”, and my comment clearly says “country”, not world.
My point is that placing colors on a map can mean anything depending on how you frame the context or what you understand about what geographically is being depicted in the map. I used a map of the US as an example of how colors on a map can be misleading. The vast majority of that map is red, which would lead you to believe that in a lens where red/blue represent two different political parties, would have you believe the red party has drastically more support than the blue party.
Now that is one way that a map with simplistic information shown can be misleading, but there are other ways to use them to be misleading. For example, the very map that Dessalines posts, why is it that nearly all the Western countries are unified in a certain perspective of China? Are you going to say because of US influence? It would be fair to refute that a bunch of independent developed Western nations have each come to a similar conclusion about China if you claimed that there was a lack of independence to them coming to that conclusion. At the same time, couldn’t that argument also be made about China and other nations within the sphere of influence of China?
Also you’re using a fallacious defense that Muslim countries are somehow more authoritative in source because the alleged victims of abuse are Muslim, as though no collective of people have ever hurt people that have identified similarly of that collective before. Wasn’t there violence between different denominations of Christians? Isn’t there violence between different beliefs among Muslims? There’s a laundry list of abuses humans have committed against each other and against people that identify similar to each other, and it’s often because there ends up being a deep difference of opinion on specific issues. So generalizing that all Muslim countries will support all Muslims in all cases is bigotry on your part.