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.
You complain about the tankies’ whataboutist replies “critical of the USA and the west” - yet your very first comment up there proves that you, too, were very quick to bring the west into a discussion about Tiananmen.
You think the liberal hive mind here on lemmy.world is (somehow) more “reasonable” than the views held by tankies?
By what metrics are you measuring this (alleged) “reasonable-ness”?
We found the thin skinned tankie.
Oh, look… a liberal that doesn’t know what the term tankie means.
Yawn.
You appear to be lacking critical thickness in the rolled homogeneous armor of your Type 57.
Oh, look… another liberal that doesn’t know what the term tankie means.
Is there any one of you libs that have a smidgen of political competence to demonstrate here?
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Yeah, you just happen to buy into liberal claptrap for reasons that are totally not the same as every other liberal that hates having their ideology named and shamed.
Okay, totally-not-a-liberal.
There are lots of comments on that thread trying to divert the issue by pointing out the violence done by the western countries. I would assume his comment was in response to one of these comments, so he wouldn’t be the one to bring up the West into the discussion.
I didn’t react to any of the “but the West also…” comments. I replied directly to the top level of the post, linking to an article that goes in depth on what actually happened as most people in the West nowadays only know about the iconic tank man image.
Yeah, I know - me (and all the other leftists) were dealing with tankies long before these libs even knew what the term tankie meant.
A liberal showing up and pretending that the west (supposedly) puts “attention on those misdeeds to ensure future generations don’t repeat the mistakes” is an utterly fallacious piece of propaganda that any leftist is going to debunk hard no matter what is being discussed. All they actually achieved is to give the tankies a justification to divert the issue.
I have no idea why libs think they are politically competent enough to argue with tankies - they aren’t even competent enough to deal with their alt-right cousins.