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A story as old as federated social media, in 3 parts
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
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Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
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Mainly BPR imo. I can sympathise with the mod not wanting the thread to be hijacked by crazed Democrats telling everyone to vote, vote, vote, as though that will address any of the concerns raised by Greta. The clear message from Greta is that voting is not sufficent to move the dial on US policy in these areas. She didn't recommend to vote or not to vote, she just pointed out (correctly IMO) that only voting won't move the dial on many problematic US policies that both major parties are aligned on. That requires large-scale direct action.
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding by a lot of liberals who think anarchism means 'no rules' and 'free speech' no matter what. That's more like libertarianism than anarchism though. Anarchism is more about directly opposing or subverting the existing external power structures (aka authority) of state and capitalism instead of working within them to effect meaningful change (e.g. by voting in a 2-party system where both parties share the majority of policies).
So advocating for not voting but instead engaging in direct action against problematic US policies is entirely consistent with an Anarchist view. But so is advocating for voting and engaging in direct action. So if any libs were advocating for both things and had their comments removed then I think there's maybe a bit of PTB involved in those cases. But if all they are saying is vote, vote, vote, then it's perfectly reasonable to remove those comments imo.
Here's what I actually said. It's three messages:
The part of your statement where you say:
I can agree with, except for the part where you said "maybe a bit of."
Ok, fair enough from your perspective. From my perspective, it is still entirely consistent with anarchism to outright reject calls to participate in a 2-party democracy by voting though. While personally, I see no harm in doing both things (voting + direct action) and wouldn't remove comments advocating for such, another anarchist might see one thing as taking away from the impetus for the other, which is why I qualified my remark.
But this comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of anarchism vs libertarianism/free speech and really isn't a valid criticism.
I think if your "ism" involves telling me I'm not allowed to point out an urgent threat to both of our well-being and advocate for a partial solution, mechanically enforcing silence on me if I persist in talking about the threat, then your "ism" is a bunch of garbage.
There may be a way of applying anarchism which isn't subject to that laughably obvious danger, in which case I have no problem with that alternative way. Like I said, I don't think this person is an anarchist. Most of their posts seem to be about the election, with only a small minority being anarchist stuff.
Speaking as a moderator, moderating communities isn't exclusively about ideology. I believe, ideologically, in freedom of speech - but I'm not going to let shitheads shit up my communities just because they have the legal or moral right to spout off. I have the right to keep a clean house - to not provide a platform to whoever wants it. Hell, this extends to the simply irrelevant - if someone, genuinely and innocently but insistently - started posting fantasy artifacts in !historyartifacts@lemmy.world, I would remove their posts in a heartbeat.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean giving everyone your platform to speak out - anarchism doesn't mean communities cannot be curated. Though, I believe, in terms of praxis it would mandate a more democratic means of curating communities, but as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Lemmy's not really got the tools for that.
Yes. Lemmy seems like it's got this tempting authoritarianism-trigger built right in and readily accessible, which doesn't seem like great design. I get the necessity of moderation so that things don't become a cess, but in practice it seems like it tempts people into policing allowed points of view in a sizable minority of communities.
Nobody is "mechanically enforcing silence" on you. There's plenty of other mainstream communities and instances to share your opinion. But you don't have the right to present your opinions in an anarchist community any more than you have a "right" to come into my home and berate me about voting. That's just a libertarian free-speech(ism) mentality.
I think this is a difference of opinion between two different views which both have some level of validity. I may expand my response into a whole essay not directly connected to this issue, but to cut it short, my personal view is that a forum about anarchism is not equivalent to the moderator's "home." I don't think the comments sections and content from other users "belong" to the moderators, to curate viewpoints within as they choose.
I think being able to take it somewhere else and continue the discussion is a nice type of harm reduction when that does happen. But a quick look at Reddit, lemmy.ml, and so on will clearly tell you that having the idea that particular comments sections "belong" to the mods in question, like their home, such that they delete comments they officially don't agree with as part of their duties, leads to a toxic result.
I like that we can continue the conversation elsewhere. That's the reason you and I can have this conversation, and it's great. What I'm saying is that making little safe spaces where you're not allowed to disagree with certain viewpoints is not the type of network I want to be a part of, regardless of what the viewpoints are, or whether I agree with them. I think that's probably the majority view among Lemmy users.
In an anarchist community, it's anarchists who should decide what sort of content and posts they want in their community, not a bunch of electioneering liberals who want to swamp the entirety of lemmy with their US-centric liberal viewpoints.
The alternative is that smaller communities like the subject of this post routinely get swamped with off-topic comments from larger communities and rapidly devolve into a shouting match between community members and a bunch of folks with no understanding of the community who just happened to chance upon the thread.
imo Lemmy communities shouldn't be treated as just another communication channel that the Democrats get to monopolize every time there is a US election cycle.
I wonder what you suppose the job of a community moderator is exactly? I guess it's open to debate, but keeping things on topic and preventing dogpiling is certainly part of the job. The reason leftists don't let Nazis post swastikas everywhere is the same reason anarchists don't want liberals posting about their particular brand of politics all over anarchist communities. If you want to have a liberalism vs anarchism discussion, then maybe pick a community that is more geared towards those sorts of debates, instead of inviting yourself in to an anarchist community just to tell them about how your opinion is better than theirs, and insist that your voice is heard. Your attitude just reeks of entitlement tbh.
The weird thing is... if I squint my eyes up a certain way, I actually competely agree with you here.
I think that the anarchism communities on Lemmy should be free of a person coming in and posting faux-anarchism, whose post history is:
That's the top of Mambabasa's user page, going down as far as I really wanted to go down. Notice a pattern? There's some general anarchism stuff, but the things they really put some energy and consistency of posting into, have often been electoral things in the recent past. They weren't really that active until the election started coming to the fore.
They claim they're not American, but they sure do care about the American election. They claim they're posting about anarchism because they are an anarchist, but they sure do seem to care a whole lot about who gets to win this particular contest for US state power.
I think the anarchist community should be free of that. That's the sense in which I agree with your statement here. I think someone who really wants to talk electoral politics, and comes into the anarchism community with a kind of "Boy that Kamala Harris, she sure is a stinker fellow anarchists, amirite" type of energy, at length and repeatedly, should maybe not be allowed to hijack the discussion away from the real anarchists.
I spent some time talking with this person this week, just discussion back and forth, which is fine, and I just now today really formed a firm opinion that they're probably mainly trying to influence the election in favor of Trump, and not just an anarchist talking about anarchism things. Yes, I think protecting the anarchism forums against that is important.
I mentioned before that I think there are multiple valid opinions about this. My opinion is that they shouldn't be censoring things purely because of a viewpoint. I recognize that there are other opinions on it.
In my opinion, Mambabasa is dogpiling an anti-Democrat (not anti-politician, but very specifically anti-Democrat) viewpoint into a community where it doesn't belong, and the structure of Lemmy allows them to do that, because they are for some reason a mod. I think that's a problem. More so than people coming in and disagreeing with them. I would never go in and say "Democrats Democrats Democrats!" as you seem to be strawmanning that I did. If I see someone in the anarchism forum already talking about Democrats, I might also say my opinion on it. I think that's a useful check, maybe the most realistic one that can exist in a system like Lemmy, against someone doing which it looks pretty clear to me that Mambabasa is doing.
Can you find a comments section in an anarchism post, where the OP didn't first start talking about Democrats, and some Democrats came in and started talking anything about Democrats out of nowhere? That whole thing where people are coming from the wider community and just talking trash to the minority because they're a minority, sounds like a strawman to me. Maybe it happens on !conservative@lemm.ee. I know it often happens in the other direction, where some outsider comes into a minority community and all the existing members of the community dogpile on them about how the existing community viewpoint is the right one. But even then, I don't really think it's a problem. It's just people talking, which is the point.
It does happen, but it's mainly on posts that got popular for some other reason, like a meme post (or a Greta Thunburg quote, in this case) that resonates with a wider audience than just the minority community. With the extra upvotes, it becomes more widely visible to "the great dismissive majority". Some portion of them will feel compelled to comment that "minority viewpoint is stupid", or what have you.
Depending on what kind of community we're talking about, they may also be the target of sustained harassment campaigns. This is more common with LGBTQ+ communities, for example.
I'd be interested to see how this happens in practice. It'll be hard to observe, because good moderation should stop it from happening. I have my view about how it happens and how big a problem it is, but my view might not be an accurate view.
My guess is that when this does happen, it's a problem with the wider culture. If people are empowered to be noisy idiots who are shouting their opinions, then as soon as they get exposed to a minority community, there are going to be a whole bunch of noisy idiots shouting their opinions at the minority. That's not ideal, with escalating not-ideal-ness according to the unpopularity and vulnerability of the minority.
I think a grander and better way to address the problem would be to try to address the culture of noisy idiocy at the root. If the culture in general is that you're not supposed to berate people, and you're supposed to be open to learning instead of viewing the purpose of the network as of dueling broadcasts of opinion, then my guess is that a lot of that "we have to censor hostile points of view lest they overwhelm us" pragmatism will go away, irrespective of how necessary it was in the first place. I don't really like this attitude that we need to censor the hostile viewpoints, because however necessary it might be, it's also going to censor reasonable dissent, and it's going to make weird little echo chambers like exist in some corners of Lemmy. I don't think either berating the minority community or creating the echo chamber to protect them is a good solution.
Addressing the culture overall is not easy, of course.
As far as I know, nobody complained about anything in the community, only the mod who decided to remove half of the comments, ban people making reasonable comments and locked the thread.
This wasn't a case of someone going to an anarchist community and starting arguments about why strong central authority is necessary or whatever, when you make a post, you don't use your mod powers to pick and choose which comments you like, which you don't and then lock the tread with a grand total of 10 comments.
And if anyone was swamping lemmy, it was the mod who posted like 15 anti-Harris memes within one hour and made it half of the local slrpnk feed that day.