The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.
Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.
The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.
I decided to block the lemmy.ml instance entirely to avoid any further interaction.
I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here
- https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
- https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
- https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
- https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
- https://lemmy.world/post/43978041
Log screenshots
The comments in this post are turning nasty and I’ve already banned two users for their behavior. Locked.
The path to enlightenment.
Reminds me of some zio article I read lately that says in reality democrasy does not work in the middleast and that Israel is the only democrasy in the middleeast…etc ,… without mentioning that in reality the US steps in to slaughter every middleastern country the moment they try democrasy, and forces them to install a puppet dictatorship government that works for the intrests of israel and US.
Democracy works when it serves USA’s interest.
Which democratic countries did the US install dictatorship to apart from Iran which was more the UK(BP) thing?
If you root for murderous authoritarian dictatorships just cause they are anti-west, you are not a leftist, you are not a tankie, you are a fascist and should be treated as such.
Fascism is a more specific than that and education around this topic is sorely lacking, we shouldn’t muddy the waters further.
i will not make a difference between actual fascists who embrace authoritarian regimes or people who claim to be leftists and do the absolute same. it is important to call them fascists, nazis even, since their way of thinking is the absolute same and they have the audacity to think of them as leftists.
Or you can learn what words mean and describe them with suitable ones.
You should, and it’s not. https://ia802906.us.archive.org/31/items/umberto-eco-ur-fascism/umberto-eco-ur-fascism.pdf
Fascist doesn’t simply mean “bad person”, and you can absolutely be a horrible person without being a fascist.
It only helps the enemy if we enable the notion that leftists call everything they oppose fascism.
I dont believe that rightwingers (the enemy) are in any position to lecture anyone about the usage of any word tbh. I will not recognize anything these people say as anything other than garbage.
Tankies claim to be antifascist and anticapitalist but root for unfree, hypercapitalist, ultranationalist, imperialist countries like russia, who are actually behaving like Nazi Germany right now. They even have their own Nazi Symbol “Z” and matching armbinds. If Tankies are not fashists by the book, then the more fitting desctiption would be Nazi Enablers, or simply Larpers.
Just defederate yourself from those instances (block them.) Idk why you think spending all this time and effort on an instance you really don’t like is going to do anything positive for you.
why you think spending all this time and effort on an instance you really don’t like is going to do anything positive for you. I am not looking for something positive or negative. I am analyzing how they mix truth with false information to influence people.
What specifically triggers me is that they selectively criticize some things such as Israel’s occupation of Palestine, but stay silent about Russia’s invasion. It is good to inform others and provide references for the new lemmy users who do not know much about instances.
- https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-covert-russian-government-sponsored-foreign-malign-influence
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/meta-takes-down-chinese-spamouflage-disinformation-mega-campaign/
- https://www.cyfluence-research.org/post/cyber-based-influence-campaigns-13th-19th-july-2026-report
- https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmfaff/703/report.html
- https://thehackernews.com/2024/09/us-seizes-32-pro-russian-propaganda.html -doppelganger, tenet Media, Spamouflage
I’ve been hoping that .world would defederate from .ml for a long time. I’ve become a lurker precisely because of this.
We already defederate from alt-right and freeze-peach servers. If a server is overwhelmingly populated by fascist collaborators (call them tankies, if you will, but that’s what they do), why feature their memes and users on the front page?
It’s like we still haven’t learned from the “GamerGate” days - people claim that judging their movement/forum is unjustified because there’s no vetting or membership card. But if you join a movement primarily known to be a reactionary harassment group, be ready for people to assume the worst.
And no, my personal block list isn’t good enough. This is a systemic issue. Hiding the primary propaganda just to then perversely receive it through the changing opinions of people around me isn’t good enough.
Since there’s no way to stop someone from just opening another account elsewhere, blocking the entire thing would just scatter them like smashing one roach will scatter the others.
When the roaches are farther apart they don’t breed as much
this is like the 100th fork in this kitchen
You must be new around here. This is old news and a reason a lot of places block ml
It’s important to document their behavior anyway, because not al places block ml.
I knew that lemmy.ml is tankies, but removing comments/posts that don’t serve their agenda is new to me.
They’ve always done this. “Rule 1” Is pretty much a .ml meme catch all for “you aren’t allowed to use facts here. Agree or be removed”
What part of “tankies” do you not understand?
they have been doing that, maybe you dont visit thier posts often. hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml are all super tankies. others ones you may want to avoid is dbzero, or equivalent, startrek website comm, and some of blahj ones.
A lot of instances are curated, they’re the supreme mods after all. Some delay your posts until they can curate them, and some just remove them. It’s the way it be.
This isn’t said and understood enough. Instances on the Fediverse aren’t free-for-all, apolitical places without ideology. Some try to be (with varying success) but being active in the Fediverse and especially running an instance is in itself a fairly ideological and political act. So chances are instances reflect their owners’ ideology. And that is great because one has places to be if an instance doesn’t suit them, unlike corpo platdorms where one ideology drives most of them.
This. Just imagine if all of Lemmy was like one instance or another. The whole point of the fediverse is that there can be multiple instances, and you can just gravitate towards the ones that align with your own views.
The only thing that bugs me about it is that the largest instances can control what most people see.
True. It’s definitely not a perfect, problem-solved thing. Merely an (significant?) improvement from the corporate status quo.
The great thing about lemmy’s design is that that’s not really true. I’m seeing this criticism of .ml despite being on .ml, because most of the posts that I see on lemmy are not on my home instance. At least half the time, I’m having discussions outside of my “home turf.”
When you have a space that agrees on certain base assumptions, it becomes easier to have more in depth and thoughtful discussions, because you don’t have to focus on just proving or advocating for those basic assumptions over and over again, and watching every word you say to make sure it can’t be twisted or misinterpreted to paint you in a negative light. By contrast, sharing a space with ideological opponents often means people tend to dig in and just make snipes at each other, everybody’s just grandstanding and trying to get owns in, and the level of discussion is brought down to name-calling and accusations.
At the same time, yes, echo chambers are a concern. If you’re never exposed to opposing viewpoints, obviously that’s not great either. We can see that happen on any number of subreddits. And if we were on different subreddits instead of on different instances, I wouldn’t be seeing this criticism, and you wouldn’t be seeing my response to it.
The way the fediverse is designed inherently addresses both of those concerns. You can have a space where the discussions assume a shared ideology allowing for in depth discussions, but then you’re also federated with other spaces with different shared assumptions. The “tankie” creators of lemmy designed it this way on purpose, for that reason. To allow minority views (including but not limited to their own) to have spaces for discussion, without becoming isolated. To allow for higher level discussions with shared assumptions while also allowing for interactions between groups with different assumptions.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies, and that is not in spite of what the .ml’s admins want, they literally designed it that way on purpose.
The only censorship that really matters on the fediverse is defederation.
and those other instances can also moderate and delete comments and posts for all other instances unless archived or crossposted. If a lemmy.world mod deletes a comment in a lemmy.world post, I won’t be able to see it from over here in db0
You might be thinking of lemmygrad?
Im glad youre taking the steps to enjoy lemmy your way. Take care stranger.
It is so blatantly obvious. Worse than the_donald was on reddit. Pure Chinese and Russia propaganda. Overtly negative on anything from the west and won’t allow anything negative about Russia, China, etc.
Make sure you vote blue no matter who, lol.
How’s the effort to start a communist revolution going?
How’s the genocide going?
Nice pivot
Following your lead.
“Overtly negative on anything from the West” lol.
deleted by creator
I’m in China right now, ama.
Here’s a random bike I saw a couple hours ago
💯
It’s basically a rite of passage for a new lemmy user to get banned from half of .ml for a completely mundane comment they made.
Defederate lemmy.ml
I had one .ml mod delete a comment of mine because I listed events that disagreed with them minimizing the horrors of 1986 republicans. They stated your average '86 republican was further left than 2026 average dem. So I blocked that mod and that channel.
So I guess .ml are apologists for the '86 gop now?
Why do you need the admin of your server to manage your block list for you? Perhaps youre unsure of how to take personal responsibility of your own lemmy account. Dont worry stranger, I got your back.
Welcome to a tutorial on how to block .ml on your personal account.
In the top right corner of the top of the page, there are 3 horizontal white bars. Click it.
This will open up a drop down menu. At the bottom of that menu, you will see your username. Click it.
This will open another drop down menu with 3 options. Click “Settings”.
At the top of your screen you will see 2 tabs. Click the one that says “Blocks”.
Here you will see “Block user” “Block community” and “Block instance”. Click the down arrow below “Block instance”.
This will open up a search bar. Type “lemmy.ml” and click it after it shows up. That’s it! You’ve blocked .ml and will never see content from the instance.
But wait, we aren’t done yet in this menu. Click the down arrow under “Block user”. Now type “UltraGiGaGigantic” Make sure you select my .ml account as the other ones I no longer use. Thanks, appreciate it.
The mods do whatever they want, many break their own posted rules with regularity.
In my experience, in Lemmy they are more apt to delete a comment then ban, so that is nice.
There’s no logic to it. I’ve said “The nation ___________ says this, their motto is ___________ … (and then repeat their own slogan from their own officials).”
Delete. 100% true, easily verifiable everywhere, public information pertaining to the discussion, deleted.
So, if you’re censored or banned, that just means that you’re a thinking person with reasonable opinions who bases your conclusions on the factual information available to you.
It’s a good thing. Thank God.
If they agree with you, please get help immediately. Time is short.
I’m just a user here but three days ago I was banned from some community without any explanation. Some moderator accused me of being a rapist because of one comment that they deleted and no one could read. After some comments trying to find out what was happening, I was banned. I didn’t see before, but in that community, in the blahaj something instance, they warn something like ‘no tankies’. I’m in lemmy.ml, and I guess that makes me a tankie.
These instance wars are bullshit.
well, lemmy.ml has a significant userbase acting as “tankies”, and in turn other instances are overly suspicious of anyone from ml, but I can’t blame them for that. the “tankies” they speak about just make new accounts when they find out people started blocking them. It’s such a shame that new users mostly end up on ml. the devs are enjoying that they can use it to spread their politics, and make controversy in the fediverse.
They should defederate. They are treating everyone in ML like shit. And why would I change to an instance that treats people like shit, anyway? Isn’t that the problem in the first place? What I do is just strip apart the instance part in usernames and treat everyone as equals, fuck, I must be a commie. BTW, my account is 6 yo, you know, when lemmy.ml was basically the only instance with some certainty around.
You don’t have to change your instance but you willingly live in a shit hole and we will treat you like you live in a shit hole. You are free to move at any time. It would cost you nothing. There is no sacredivity to having an older account, I’ve been through to others because my original two instances have since closed. There is no karma. There is no score. There is only here and now.
Let me tell you. It’s not about my account, it’s exactly this: as soon as they don’t agree with others, users like you start treating others like shit. Why would I want to go to an instance to share my time with people like you? Lol, no, thank you. You are now in my blocked users list.
Wow you really showed them 👏 They’re in your blocked users list 😮
This but unironically. Just block stuff you don’t like and move on. I get a lot more annoyed by these posts bitching about ml than ml, because i have ml blocked already. Because i don’t want to see ml anywhere on my feed. Except now i do and now i have another OP to block.
Yep I don’t immediately assume someone from ml is a tankie, but it’s going to make me more wary that even normal stuff they say is just being a mask on tankie.
Did you randomly join Lemmy.ml without knowing what it was? If so, that sucks. If you’re not too attached to your account, you could just create a new one on Lemmy.today or something and be rid of the ml baggage.
I mean when I joined .world I didn’t know it was going to be a neoliberal smorgasbord. I just stick around due to laziness mostly.
Yup, same here!
That’s what I did at first, I just joined ml without understanding much about instances. To be honest, at first I thought it was a pretty chill instance, people were pretty nice in the local subs. But at some point I started to get banned without explanation from different community, where I was just giving different opinion and disagreeing with some people, nothing extreme and no insults. Then one day, boom, just no account at all. Since then I’ve seen quite a few disturbing things from that instance. Nothing to the level of the insufferable Hexbear, but yeah, I’m guessing there are quite a few users that just went with ml because it’s one of the first instance that shows up when you search for Lemmy.
Yeah, but inertia. And you want me to join an instance with a slight blue tinge? Are you mad? I’ll just stay where I’m at and sort by all communities.
I’m more curious how .ml users feel about that mod’s idea that rape is an acceptable action to do in certain contexts, for example if a woman served in a Western military.
I can understand all their political positions and opinions but that one seems beyond the pale.
Geneva is more of a radlib and Bad Empanada stan than a principled communist. 80% of what they post is decent to good, and a solid 20% is horrendous.
My opinion is that geneva_convenience has been going off the deep end, getting worse and worse lately, and definitely should be removed as a mod, honestly just banned. He’s an edgelord who’s taking things to unreasonable extremes and trying to pick fights with everyone.
i agree, can’t stand them either and it’s only been getting worse
I only really saw it for myself when I said, “I’m completely opposed to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel. I don’t have a problem with Jews existing,” and they responded by accusing me of being a “liberal Zionist” and “supporting genocide” and then blocking me.
I remembered Cowbee saying something about them before, I just looked it up and I gotta give props as always because he was calling them out 9 months ago for not reading theory of doing praxis and just watching Bad Empanada, and for apparently calling Hexbear “transzionist” and accusing them of defending Contrapoints’ stance on Israel, which is just bizarre.
It’s honestly very unfortunate. Geneva has had ample time and advice to move onto a better, more coherent worldview, when they seem to be taking the opposite path.
Geneva convenience says I’m a “zio” because I say HAMAs commits war crimes.
Dude, they take pride in it. You can watch it… more videos than you could ever watch all of
(Yes, Israel commits war crimes and breaks the Geneva convention, too).
is that not what any good forum needs?
There’s a line.
That’s nothing unusual for a user who excused pedophilia and posted a fascist dogwhistle.
Let’s normalize shaming and shunning individuals, like geneva_convenience in this example, over ridiculing an entire community.
Communities are not monolithic.
Any community that accepts fascism among it’s ranks is fascist.
Let’s normalize shaming and shunning individuals, like geneva_convenience in this example, over ridiculing an entire community.
and they will just nake a new account when they realize people are blocking them.
Communities are not monolithic.
Communities have moderation policies, and they have the power to discourage such behavior. if a community does not act against it, they are accepting it.
