Ahoy mateys!
A few of our users have recently pointed out that a lot of the pro-Zionist accounts on the fediverse nowadays seem to come from the feddit.org instance.
Feddit.org's explanation for this situation seems to fit into a few common variations:
- They accept both pro- and anti-Zionist members, so it's not proof of a bias.
- They [choose to] comply [in advance] with strict German / Swiss / Austrian laws regarding [overly broad] "antisemitic" language, or they might get in trouble.
- Calling for the destruction of Israel must obviously mean you want to kill every last man, woman and child, rather than simply wanting to overthrow Netanyahu's genocidal fascist regime. Because [bad faith] reasons.
- Lots of Euros (and Germans specifically) are pro-Zionist, so they feel like they have to accommodate this view.
But whatever the excuse happens to be, they need to do better imo. Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the Middle East (if you exclude the US military bases there). And yet feddit.org seems to regard the Palestinians fighting against Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of their land as the real terrorists. As such, I am calling for feddit.org to:
- Explicitly prohibit pro-Zionist accounts from joining.
- Take measures to resolve their claimed legal issues, e.g., moving their server location to a less regulated jurisdiction, and ensuring that admin accounts remain anonymous regarding their location.
- Stop referring to folks who call for "Death to Israel" or similar as though they are the terrorists or violent extremists. The Zionist Israeli settlers, the murderous IDF rapists, and the entirety of the Israeli government are clearly the violent ethnostate extremists we should be worried about, not the Palestinians in Gaza who are fighting for their lives every single day against completely disproportionate levels of Zionist violence.
More context
Our instance already voted to ban pro-Zionist accounts (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60585441 for reference) and the rule that was implemented is here: Golden Rule #8.
As further context, you can find relevant comments and discussion in this post by a banned feddit admin in MoG (that fact they chose to post in MoG is in itself quite telling), and this post about their defederation from quokk.au over anti-semitism allegations has recently become active again.
I've also pulled out some choice morsels from the modlog to illustrate the sort of thing we are talking about:
This one says it all... mrdown@lemmy.world being banned for calling out feddit.org users for being Zionist apologists. It's apparently "xenophobic" to state a few hard truths.
If you have had similar experiences on feddit.org, please feel free to share in the comments.
Voting instructions
I am proposing to ban the following communities from feddit.org, which seem to be the most problematic communities in terms of hosting pro-Zionist posts/comments:
- https://feddit.org/c/YUROP
- https://feddit.org/c/europe
- https://feddit.org/c/buyfromeu
- https://feddit.org/c/europa
- https://feddit.org/c/dach
- https://feddit.org/c/deutschland
- https://feddit.org/c/germany
Upvote this post if you want dbzer0 / anarchist nexus to ban these communities.
Downvote this post if you'd prefer not to ban these communities.
Note 1: Votes from external instances do not count, unless one of our admins has vouched for you.
Note 2: If you think feddit.org deserves a full instance ban instead, or have alternative suggestions, then please leave your comments below. If enough people think that's the better option, then we'll do that instead.
Note 3: Although I don't really expect this to happen, if feddit.org agrees to make policy changes to address these issues then we are willing to reassess the situation.
I've got a few thoughts on this.
First, its insane to me that someone could read the rules and decide anti-zionist is anti-semitic. That is either someone who doesn't understand words and has no interest in learning them, or is someone actively zionist (and genocide, thus the issue with zionism).
Second, I've got my complaints about what I'm seeing from the flotilla/friendly instances.
Third, there are quite a few comments there that are completely appropriate (support for Israel is support for genocide, etc), the thread about quokk.au is utterly nonsensical to me, as are the discussions in MoG (which shouldn't really be a surprise).
To sum up my thoughts.... At no point do I regret voting in support of rule 8. I am really disappointed by some of the comments I'm seeing being used as support for de-federating though, some of those are just disgusting.
Overall, I'm in support of dropping the comms due to the blatant zionist posts that go on there.
Edit: formatting fuckup.
Thanks for writing this up so thoroughly, wholly agree.
Agreed. Your take is the most reasonable and one I can get behind. Full defederating is insane.
Some of those modlog screenshots are 100% warranted. Dude is coming in angry and just slinging out hatred.
I get that not all the examples used were being polite, but why should anyone be polite towards people making excuses for Zionism?
It goes leagues beyond "not polite" to tell someone to kill themselves. I don't find it acceptable to tell someone that in any scenario, so I don't find it acceptable to say regardless of the source. Simple as that.
Why are you so focused on that one example? There are plenty of comments removed that don't include such provocative language.
Which I commented on in my post already in point 3, and why I agree with blocking (as well as a revisit to see if further action is needed).
Because its a pretty ridiculous example to use. Probably the worst example in the list, and its in the post multiple times.
That doesn't change my opinion of feddit, though, as I said. The fact that I find feddit as a whole to be an indicator of whether or not someone will have what I consider to be some of the worst views also has no bearing on my being disappointed with that sort of comment being used as an example.
Edit: Its also a violation of rule 2 right here. So using it as an example when its explicitly something against the rules right here makes it especially ridiculous. Making it also very worth pointing out how shitty it is to see.
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com can my emoji get updated to match my dbzero account?