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.

Yes you are right it repeats the “reasonable grounds” thing over and over and then undoes it by saying “lol we don’t actually have an investigative mandate and this report cannot draw conclusions. Our witnesses and evidence and not mentioned trust me bro but also you can’t trust me.

Doesn’t say they can’t draw conclusions, only that the conclusions they draw do not have the same legal weight as other possible legal instruments. You’re also conflating their mandate and the evidence they collected; they don’t have a mandate sufficient to complete the investigation, but that has nothing to do with the evidence they did collect. Which says, in no uncertain terms, that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that sexual violence occurred. Let me be clear, again: NONE OF THAT MEANS THE UN HAS FOUND ZERO EVIDENCE OF RAPE ON OCTOBER 7TH.

Very contradictory. You’d almost think that she is writing propaganda for israel here. And was specifically invited by israel to write propaganda.

I’m sure Israel does want these crimes to be exposed. I’m also sure that the present government of Israel is a bad actor and is doing everything it can to subvert any critique against itself, while maximizing messaging critical of Hamas (and also minimizing any reports of its crimes).

Tell me again, why is israel blocking the actual UN investigation team that wants to investigate?

Because the government of Israel sucks, and any intensive investigation would certainly recover even more evidence of the various war crimes it has committed, which obviously amount to a lot more death and destruction than anything that happened on October 7th.

Consider reading the Finkelstein post again if you’re having trouble with the deceiving legalise from Pattens report.

Thanks, I have an advanced degree in international affairs, so I was trained by actual subject matter experts on how this stuff works. Dr. Finkelstein is not an expert in international law, which is why some of his critiques fall short, in my view, and explains why you don’t seem to understand that just because a team does not enjoy a robust enough mandate that doesn’t mean they don’t collect evidence. It just means they don’t have the proper mandate to collect all the evidence, and certainly not sufficient authority to make conclusions beyond certain evidentiary standards.

I’d also remind you that the UN is an intergovernmental organization, and with a few very notable exceptions, no UN entity can operate outside the restrictions that a host country places on it.

Because a wider, better resourced, and long term investigation would be better equipped to collect and analyze evidence? Because a better structured and mandated team would likely have more access, credibility, and ability to undertake that assignment? Because, as the report discusses, it often takes years or decades for crimes committed during armed conflict to come to their conclusion, for myriad of reasons?

Among other statements, here’s what the actual UN report actually said about just this: “As in other conflict-affected contexts, there remains a significant likelihood that the findings of the mission team, in terms of verified violations, only partially reflect the crimes actually committed. A more comprehensive assessment of the occurrence of conflict-related sexual violence in the context of the 7 October attacks would require a fully-fledged investigation by competent bodies with adequate time and capacity.” (Page 15, section C, subsection 56).

Over and over again this report says that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred” on that day, in various settings. I’m not sure why you think that this amounts to “rape definitely did not happen.”

And, since your counterargument rests on the idea that Pramilla Patten is just “a woman,” I think you should think about who and what she is: a legal expert, practicing lawyer, and judge who has been investigating gender-based violence for more than 20 years, and specifically sexual violence in conflict settings since 2017.

What? How does that say anything about what did or did not happen? This is about the mandate of the team, and, as I have been saying, means that there is more investigation needed. Please, highlight for me where the UN says that there is no evidence of rape. I think in this case it might be you who struggles with some of the nuances of legalese.

Over and over again, it says that there “are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred at several locations across the Gaza periphery, including in the form of rape and gang rape, during the 7 October 2023 attacks. Credible circumstantial information, which may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including genital mutilation, sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, was also gathered.”

None of this amounts to “there is no evidence of rape.” What this means is that there needs to be more, sustained and explicitly mandated investigation before legal action should take place. This concept, I think, is called due process.

Between this and the S-400 that was destroyed by ATACMS after sending off like 6 missiles, I don’t think Russian air defense is that good.

Then again I’m not a military analyst, so what the fuck do I know?

But I do remember another drone POV where something comes from a treeline and shoots it down. I think that one was a Russian drone being shot down by a Ukrainian system, though.

Not my claim.

And my understanding of the person you responded to is that China has a space station, and they are capable of travel to both the Moon and Mars.

You seemed surprised at that, so I went ahead and gave you a Wikipedia that’s all about China’s space program.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_space_program

I don’t think anybody ever really withheld information about how defense contracting works. It’s not a NYT thing.

It’s a big part of the way the current US Presidential administration has been talking about the Ukraine arms funding: that it will mostly be spent here, manufacturing things for war.

Edit: changed one word.

And they’re all a woman.

It seems like it takes a hit of some kind to the turret just before it starts to move off, and then the amount of artillery landing right around it. Absolutely insane.

You injected discussions about Tiananmen Square into this debate. It came out of nowhere.

And I simply don’t accept the official Chinese picture of what happened. There is plenty of evidence of what happened.

What I do accept is the nuance. But you’d have to read the rest of my responses to understand that.

If the disagreement is about framing then I don’t think there’s a disagreement. But if you’re insisting that tue Chinese government did no wrong, then we do have one. And that’s not about framing, that’s about covering for government murders.

My understanding is based on the links you’ve sent and my cursory looking through them combined with a few other academic sources and a Taiwanese NGO that as created to address this very topic. To me, it appears there was internal dissent within the CCP, focused on general standard of life things (inflation, cost of goods, etc.), which was opposed to some of the more entrenched power structures of the CCP/PRC government. Of this organic movement, some parties were likely co-opted or encouraged over time by foreign actors to step up their dissent into civil disobedience.

This dissent grew over some years into outright protests, which in turn grew into conflicts between the protest movement and the Chinese police and military, which turned to violence and the deaths of hundreds of protesters and at least several government agents. I didn’t watch any video of “the leader” of this opposition movement who expressly went there for violence, but I don’t doubt there were people who were preparing (and may have welcomed) violence.

However, I am of the opinion that any government has the responsibility to de-escalate and to not attack protesters with tanks and machine guns.

I hitch brings me to authoritarianism: you’re wrong, there’s plenty of space for nuance when discussing it. The term is not used to describe an ideology, it’s used to describe behavior. And there are plenty of places in the world where there are very unpopular views, harmful to society, where people aren’t murdered by the state for expressing them loudly.

And when you have any government that censors its own people by making it next to impossible to access information, shoots at them, infringes on their rights to worship as they see fit or to live and work as and where they prefer, or doesn’t allow dissenting ideology, then it’s authoritarian. Doesn’t matter if it’s left or right, and there’s not any need for nuance.

Finally: isn’t the whole communist experiment an expression of an idealism? Granted I’ve only read a few of the more foundational texts, but isn’t your logic against the entire goal of global emancipation from exploitation?

I’m just advocating for a more gradualist approach, devoid as much as possible of repressive violence. And while imperfect, I would argue that there are many places where this is/has occurred to a certain degree already; I’m specifically thinking about the social democracies in Europe.

As an aside, this is why I want to frequent lemmy.ml, and hate it when I’m simply dismissed as “a lib” when I am really just not quite as revolutionary as I used to be…

Cite the people who already quoted the source (The internet, as cited in Lemmy, 2024).

I am not an expert in what actually happened at Tiananmen, however at least we can both acknowledge that there were protesters, and that there was violence. Why is it so hard to consider that the US did have a hand in stirring the pot politically and supporting different dissenting groups in order to destabilize what it views/viewed as an ideological threat (which the US has plenty history of doing), but also that the Chinese government grossly overreacted and killed a bunch of protesting students? Both of these things can be true at the same time.

I also acknowledged that my use of the word was incendiary.

I’m sorry, I can’t trust the word of that site. I looked into Chris Kanthan and can’t find any evidence that he knows what he’s writing about (his bios use the fact that he’s written books to justify his expertise and continuing to write books, but it seems like he’s actually a computer programmer in San Francisco?), and there’s a clear bias towards the Chinese political elite, which I, personally, disagree with.

People are using logical fallacies. You have already done it to me, in your comment about that was removed in this thread and in others where we have met.

I don’t know what to say about authoritarianism being infantile. It’s crazy to me that somebody would be ok with repression anywhere, regardless of where imaginary lines are drawn on maps.

Every stable country technically holds or tries to hold the monopoly on violence, by some definitions, but why is it bad for me to question this assumption, no matter the perpetrator?

Speaking to your last point: I reject your absolute definition of for whom these different establishments work. I happen to believe that both political and civil rights and social, economic, and cultural rights can be protected, and I believe that repression is the counter to obtaining these. I don’t think either of these countries does enough to guarantee them, since they seem to be too entrenched in discourse of conflict and their own flawed and harmful ideologies.

Things did happen there. It’s very well documented, even in the sources the other person posted. There was conflict and there were deaths, of both protesters and of Chinese military/police personnel.

I’m not regurgitating any propaganda, except perhaps implicitly in my use of the word “massacre” that is quite loaded. Aside from this brief exchange I have not said anything about Tiananmen Square anywhere.

I wish to participate on .ml because I have a deep seated interest in politics, political theory, and policy. I like having my views challenged from the left of me, and accessing alternative media.

What I don’t enjoy is being constantly attacked using various logical and argumentative fallacies, and I don’t appreciate authoritarianism or the silencing of oppositional views.

Edit: and the overarching reason is that I detest echo chambers, and because of how .ml mods and admins act, I’m finding it almost impossible to break out of my own. I’m learning that it’s because .ml seems to be another echo chamber where dissenting opinions are simply silenced rather than addressed, which really sucks.

The OP was supposedly banned for spreading information that supports that an event happened (The Tiananmen Square massacre), which is something that one of the most repressive media regimes that exists in the world (China) is trying to deny.

That sounds like the use of moderation powers in support of another government’s propaganda.

I just wish .ml would be more open about whose government propaganda is allowed, I guess, which echoes OP’s question.

Is it all of .ml where only Chinese propaganda is allowed, but US is not? Russian disinformation is ok, but not English? What are the lines, assuming I am interested in taking part in discourse on .ml?

I don’t know what a “glowie” is.

I don’t much care for Reddit, thanks.

Edit: you almost got my with your misdirection and muddying of the waters. Fair play.

But seriously, do I understand the original post I replied to correctly? They’re saying that the OP was banned for asserting that there was a massacre in Tiananmen Square, and then presents evidence that it didn’t actually happen?

So your assertion is that Tiananmen square didn’t happen, and the OP was banned for saying that it did happen?

Edit: does anybody else find it suspicious that this comment is this account’s only one?

Thanks for clarifying, I’m aware of that and I think I made mention to that date in my initial reply.

What you quoted was just referring to the article the other poster linked, which goes through how the Nuremberg trials were the primary venue of defining the four major crimes against humanity, and how it impacted the creation of the ICC later.

I am obviously having a hard time articulating my point here, though. I’m literally just trying to explain a little bit about how this particular facet of an international legal regime works.

Fun fact about the ICJ, though: the USA withdrew from the court after it was found guilty of mining Nicaragua illegally. I really wish it did more to actually follow the legal norms it tried to push in its ideology.

Edit: mixed up ICJ and ICC at the end.

Correct.

That position and sovereignty are not mutually opposed, depending on the view you take towards international law.