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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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.

      • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.mlEnglish
        01·
        2 years ago

        the Chinese government especially isn’t renown to be tender

        You were just explaining about the saturation of bias and then you retreated back to vibes. Those vibes came from somewhere.

        the hard line is if people were killed, families destroyed, and/or people traumatized.

        “Trauma” can be a rather hard thing to define, but I agree in any case that these would all be serious problems. In fact, these things have been serious problems in the terror attacks that incited the program. Some of those attacks had extreme levels of fatality and they overwhelmingly targeted normal citizens (and not, say, police stations or military bases or government buildings). The cost of action is important to consider, but so is the cost of inaction.

        In the program itself, people weren’t killed unless you count return fire during those terror attacks. To call families “destroyed” when these were all temporary interventions that allowed maintained family contact (and usually returning home on weekends) would be a contortion. “Trauma” is something that will always be produced from a large-scale program in one way or another, and could thereby be used to condemn virtually any program if you leave it merely as “was anyone traumatized?” Trauma should be minimized, but variance exists. To use the most benign possible example as a starting point, a kid who loves his father [who is unrelatedly a Jihadist] is probably going to feel pretty shitty if that father is taken away from him for two years, but that does not mean his life will experience a net negative when you factor in his father returning to him after being rehabilitated from militant Salafism.

        Just things to consider.

        I can see what you’re saying with the last part about timing. Given that concern:

        Dessalines, along with around 5 other contributors, maintains a collection of sources on various topics, and Xinjiang is among them. That could be one way of investigating his stance on the topic and information he finds relevant (though idk which parts are his versus the other contributors’)

          • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            I haven’t read that part because the “didn’t communism fail?” bugbear is a cold war relic, but looking at the very first link in that subsection, I believe it’s a matter of poor formatting, since it does address the achievements of the USSR starting with this paragraph (so you can ctrl+f):

            Examples from this post by /u/bayarea415, Stephen Gowans - Do publicly owned, planned economies work, Ian Goodrum - Socialism vs Capitalism and quality of life, and yogthos’s USSR acheivements post about the USSR specifically:

            And gives a bullet-pointed list of linked topics, e.g.:

            USSR had a more nutritious diet than the US, according to the CIA. Calories consumed surpassed the US. source. Ended famines.

            Had the 2nd fastest growing economy of the 20th century after Japan. The USSR started out at the same level of economic development and population as Brazil in 1920, which makes comparisons to the US, an already industrialized country by the 1920s, even more spectacular.

            etc., typically with one or two links per bullet-point.

            I can forgive him that much because there is a huge amount of information one needs to organize in order to even begin to address the endlessly litany of (often totally baseless) accusations that get so casually thrown at communists.

            Edit: Also, this is just the first link. Skipping the second because it is Reddit, the second is the bullet point:

            Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work?, audiobook

            Which is what it says on the tin:

            The Soviet Union was a concrete example of what a publicly owned, planned economy could produce: full employment, guaranteed pensions, paid maternity leave, limits on working hours, free healthcare and education (including higher education), subsidized vacations, inexpensive housing, low-cost childcare, subsidized public transportation, and rough income equality. Most of us want these benefits. However, are they achievable permanently? It is widely believed that while the Soviet Union may have produced these benefits, in the end, Soviet public ownership and planning proved to be unworkable. Otherwise, how to account for the country’s demise? Yet, when the Soviet economy was publicly owned and planned, from 1928 to 1989, it reliably expanded from year to year, except during the war years.

            And it goes on at length, hence being paired with an “audiobook” version. It does bring up capitalism because such comparison is inevitable (and, I believe, quite necessary), but it is more focused on the topic of your interest, as the title indicates.