First off before we get into this I want to make clear that I’m not just throwing shade at the specific instance involved, and I’d also like to avoid focusing on the specific content of thread. I think this is a larger issue that warrants an open discussion, this could have happened with any other instance on a wide variety of thread topics.
Context:
- Swordgeek@lemmy.ca created this thread asking for people to resist Tucker Carlson being allowed into Canada - https://lemmy.ca/post/12683277
- A user on a very large instance reported the thread with the reason “Inciting Illegal Behavior”
- This report was seen and cleared by lemmy.ca admins, as it didn’t violate any rules and definitely wasn’t inciting any illegal behavior
- The external admins removed the post based on the report
- Sworkgeek was DM’ed by automod to let him know, otherwise he would have no idea the largest lemmy user base can’t see his thread
- Swordgeek asked about cross-instance removals here - https://lemmy.ca/post/12724897
- Swordgeek asked about appeals for the removal here - https://lemmy.ca/post/12789496
There’s more discussion around this in the threads linked above, they’re worth a quick read.
TLDR: swordgeek made a post asking for political action and someone reported it with a fake reason, and an admin on a large instance removed the post. This removal would only impact their users, giving a largwe lemmy user base a selectively censored view of the lemmy.ca community.
It concerns me greatly that a lemmy instance can act as a censor and push the biases of their admins, on users who are completely unaware it’s happening. It also concerns me that a user could manipulate other users, if admins aren’t looking closely at the reports they get and just blindly remove things.
IMHO instance admins should not be moderating communities, that is the job of the community mods. Admins should only be involved in urgent + serious reports that are for things like CSAM, dox’ing, death threats, etc. All other reports should be left up to the moderators of the community to deal with.
If an instance wants to block a specific community or defederate then by all means, but instances selectively censoring content in a non-visible way? No thanks.
Can we have some sort of group policy that major instance admins should restrict their moderation activities, to significant rule violations?
a lemmy instance can act as a censor and push the biases of their admins,
This is a strength of the federated model. In an ideal world instances are small and a user’s values align with those of their instance’s admins.
The problem here is that a single instance has grown so large that a decision like this has had such an impact.
That single instance is so large because it meets the needs of many. If people care about this type of censorship, they will leave and it will shrink.
Admins have the final say on what’s on their instance…
If this happens often, they’d probably just defederate.
But they’re not going to jump to defederate immediately. That would make zero sense.
I don’t like posts being removed like this.
But, it’s their servers / instances and it’s their rules, precesses and ways of working. They owe you nothing.
If you don’t like what they are doing, move to another instance. That’s the beauty of a federated system.
I don’t need to move to another instance, I help run lemmy.ca. I don’t like that external users may be seeing a censored version of our / other peoples communities, and I think the community as a whole should be aware of this so they can discuss if they are ok with it.
That’s just how federation works though. Other admins don’t have to put up with content on their servers just because it was federated to them. I own my server, I can remove whatever content I want from there - whether people like it or not.
Frankly, I don’t care at all if people don’t like that or that I’m not showing a true version of a community. It’s my server, my door the feds kick down if something slips through. Other people want a “truer” experience? Great, they are welcome to host their own servers and do what the please, and accept more risk themselves.
Valid. I’ll just have to accept that.
Have you spoken to the admins at lemmy.world to get an understanding of what’s going on?
I’m looking for more of a conversation with the community here on what we want to see from the Fediverse.
I don’t think this is a lemmy.world specific issue at all, and I don’t think they meant any harm by removing the thread. They were just being good admins and trying to stay on top of reports.
That’s not what all your posts suggest.
You said above you don’t like that users of lemmy.world are having their posts removed and that a censored view is being shown.
Your original posts mentions the instance by name and you say over and over in multiple comments that you don’t like what the admins are doing.
So if you don’t think they meant any harm, why have you just shit all over them since you posted this.
You come across as a self entitled douche who wants to tell people what to do with their instances because you’re unhappy about a single post being removed. In comment after comment.
How about you ask the admins what happened here and determine if there’s an actual problem rather than shitting on them in public? That would be the right and respectful thing to do.
I’m sorry that’s how you interpreted my post, as I did not want to imply this was an issue specific to lemmy.world or mean it as an attack upon them.
I’ve edited my post to not name the instance and try to make it more clear about my concerns for the fediverse as a whole, rather than their admin activities.
keep in mind when you start using words like ‘illegal’, small instance admins are going to be involved as that has tangential affects on the whole system.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here? If a post violates local laws of an instance then sure the admins are justified in removing it, but that wasn’t the case here. Am I misunderstanding you?
this appears like a rail against local admins moderating, and an example of a clear classification failure.
i was just pointing out that at some levels the instance admin will always be involved.
Generally with these kinds of feelings, how would we see things if the roles were reversed? If lemmy.world had communities saying absolutely vile things about Canada or whatever. Or things that would be maybe illegal in Canada.
Would you want lemmy.ca users to be subject to that, because it’s on another instance? Or would you rather try to cultivate a positive experience for everyone?
Now obviously these aren’t super comparable, I can’t quite come up with a 1:1 example. But part of choosing an instance is to align with your values and the content you want to see. There’s ultra conservative instances censoring what they see as “liberal crap”, and there’s ultra liberal instances that also censor what they see as “conservative extremism”. I’m sure there are or will be religious instances that censor everything that doesn’t strictly align with the gospel.
The problem with rules is even some of the rules we think as pretty obvious universal like respecting eachother falls apart when the group of people enforcing the rules decides the other group is [insert *phobia] and they don’t deserve respect because they’re [insert unfounded accusations].
Now we’re still mostly dealing with fairly free countries. But then you’ll also have instances from other more authoritative countries that will also gladly censor a good chunk of lemmy.ca, if not defederate entirely. It just happens that we tend to try to see lemmy.world as relatively neutral instance.
For me that’s a feature of the fediverse: it can all mostly coexist and as users and admins we get to choose which particular view on the data we want. If an instance wants to aggressively moderate conflict, good for them. I run my own instance specifically so that I’m not affected by all that crap, and why smaller instances should be encouraged.
It should be well known and agreed to that if you want the full view of a community, the best way is to get it from the original instance. Don’t want lemmy.world to skew your view of lemmy.ca? Make a lemmy.ca account.
IMO it would be entirely reasonable for an instance to for example aggressively censor transphobia. You bet there will be a matching instance that censors all LGBTQ+ topics as disturbing deviant conduct dangerous to people.
