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/[email protected] 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.
If you wanna educate people on the events in Beijing around the tiananmen square protests, the Wikipedia page has a decent overview of the scientific consensus, what is established to have happened, and what is not. What you shouldn’t do is give some random Imgur post with unsourced claims and gore images to shock people into embracing the narrative you want to push
I was actually banned for linking to the wiki about the Uyghur genocide and the death toll estimates from the Great Leap forward. It’s not about the gore, it’s about them trying to distance public understanding of the true horror and extreme violence that took place at Tiananmen etc.
The CCP’s objective for at least the last decade or two has been trying to make the government in China apoear “normal”. Before this latest era people understood clearly that China was extremely authoritarian, but that understanding is being eroded as the CCP puts up a civilized facade, when that’s not the reality – they’re still brutalizing people it’s just so horrifyingly systematic and industrialized that you can’t even see it on the surface anymore due to how they doggedly chase information and dissidents.
They achieve this by downplaying events like Tiananmen, invasion of Tibet, Uyghur genocide, brutalization of HK etc. They exercise the most extreme measures to silence dissidents even when they are in other countries, and they repeat over and over again how the west is “just as bad!” until it becomes background noise. Having tankies modding communities helps supercharge this effort by allowing them to remove anyone who confronts that narrative, leaving only what they want people to see.