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.
My first idea would be to have users report posts and ping a random sample of like 20 active and currently online users of the community and have them decide (democratically). That way prevents brigading and groups collectively mobbing or harassing other users. It’d be somewhat similar to a jury in court. And we obviously can’t ask everyone because that takes too much time, and sometimes content needs to be moderated asap.
But then if you report something nobody should see, say CP for example, you’re suddenly subjecting 20 random people into seeing it.
Right but you could have filters to opt out of mod requests or certain types of mod requests. It could even be opt-in, with some trust level requirement before you’re included.
Also “CSAM” is a better term, because putting “porn” in the name focuses on the intended use by abusers, whereas the term “CSAM” focuses on the victims.
I see. I had noticed people using that term instead, but I never knew why. Thanks for the info.
Why is that at all important?
Because calling it ‘porn’ makes it sound appealling to people who associate porn with sexy things. It makes it sound like something they might want to seek out. It also demeans the victim by rhetorically placing them as the subject of pornography which can contribute to the damage.
Calling it “child sexual abuse material” centres the victim and puts distance between this material and pornography that was made consensually and ethically.
In a similar vein, “revenge porn” should be called sexual abuse material as well. And in fact a lot of technically legal “porn” would fall into the category of sexual abuse material if the full circumstances of its production was made known, but in the case of children the distinction is unambiguous.
This comment is kind of fascinating because it’s essentially reinventing Slashdot’s metamoderation system 25 years later.
It was good then. No reason it wouldn’t work again today.
Basic sortition method, I think that has a lot of merit.