My removed comment, in its entirety, was:
I don’t support Hamas. They killed all those people; fuck them. I also don’t support the current Israeli government, because they occupy, kill, torture, rape, and systematically dehumanize 5 million people, most of whom didn’t do anything wrong and just want to live. So, fuck the Israeli government too. I was just making a point about how forbidding the flags doesn’t have much to do with solving anything about that situation.
The reason given for removal was rule 1:
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Link to the thread. They also removed my interlocutor’s comment, which while unproductive was genuinely harmless, more so even than mine.
So we’re not allowed to criticize the Israeli government on lemmy.ml? (Or wherever was the mod that removed this)
For real?
I realize that whining about removed posts is probably not productive. It is life. 🥲 However, this type of stuff happened frequently on Reddit and helped to convince me it was fundamentally a cheeseball platform. Just recently I was actually arguing with some people and pointing out that I’d never had my stuff removed on Lemmy even though I have some viewpoints that are way more unpopular than “Israel shouldn’t kill civilians.”
And now, the Reddit mod philosophy has arrived here.
This is not an appropriate community to post this.
Is there a community for criticisms of moderation? I’d subscribe to that
I disagree. Issues of where to draw the line as to what represents “free speech and debate” and what represents “toxic behavior” and how to deal with the latter without squashing the former are pretty central to the fediverse fulfilling its potential, and concrete examples of how it’s playing out in practice are part of that conversation. In my opinion.
There’s a certain portion of it that honestly is just sour grapes on my part, yeah, which isn’t ideal for this forum. I can admit that. But the issue at the heart of it is also an important issue to discuss if this is to be a worthwhile platform. In my opinion.
Let me ask this, does this (my specific example) seem like something worthwhile to talk about in your opinion? If so where would you think is an appropriate community for it?
I don’t see how it relates at all. The mod made a decision for their server and followed it through. That seems pretty fediverse to me. What would also be purely fediverse is if you created your own server then you could post whatever you wanted.
You just said
Just recently I was actually arguing with some people and pointing out that I’d never had my stuff removed on Lemmy even though I have some viewpoints that are way more unpopular than “Israel shouldn’t kill civilians.”
and are complaining when one of your comments get removed. From your post it doesn’t seem like a trend of the fediverse
I was saying that recently as a big point in the Lemmy-portion-of-the-fediverse’s favor, then after that, these events happened and belied my early statement.
Yeah but this the first time it’s happened to you right?
Ehhh, accusing the Israeli government of having a policy of rape is pretty out there and kind of indistinguishable from general anti semitism. Fwiw, I’d have removed it too.
Why on earth are specific factual claims about the Israeli government “kind of indistinguishable” etc etc? That’s absolutely wrong. I’d say 100% the same thing, whatever religion or whatever ethnicity the people in charge of Israel were.
IDF soldier imprisoned for rape after several earlier sexual offences
Palestinian journalist says prisoners are being raped in Israeli jails after he was released
It’s definitely not un heard of. That said, honestly, digging around for stuff to send you as links to respond to you made me realize that yes, I think you’re right that it’s unfair for me to throw that in there. There are like these few isolated cases, and generally there’s punishment for the IDF soldiers involved or otherwise some attempt by the Israeli government to address the situation; it’s a whole different story from the way Hamas has been using rape as an explicit weapon of war. So yeah, I think on that part you’re right.
This is the great stuff that happens when you let people talk about things, instead of keeping them inside narrowly defined lanes of allowed viewpoints. Sometimes they learn things. I honestly don’t get what the point of a communication network is, if you’re going to say that you can only type generally widely-acceptable stuff and just share memes and all agree that sunny days are nice.
I agree, the Israeli government only commits some of the atrocities on that list. It’s anti-semitic to say rape when only sexual assault and murder are well-documented. /s
welcome to t the club
In all honesty, it pisses me off a lot more than it reasonably should. I kind of want the mod involved to show up here and try to defend why my type of comment shouldn’t be allowed; I’d be very surprised if that happens though.
People are completely brain rotten on Isreal Palestine. Everyone is dug in and mods will remove anything even slightly trying to strike middle ground.
It’s .ml, they probably deleted it for saying you don’t support Hamas.
Maybe they were worried about things escalating? Your comment also didn’t support Hamas so maybe they didn’t think it had value outside of potentially starting a heated debate in the comment section that was unrelated to the article.
And now, the Reddit mod philosophy has arrived here.
With how many communities and instances there are and how wildly they can differ from each other I don’t think that’s true.
Yeah, that occurred to me. I can see anything related to the war as just snowballing into a big shit show and them wanting to nip it in the bud before that happens. In which case, just make that the policy, and don’t feed into the extremely bad-faith “criticize Israel” = “bigotry” equivalence by trying to assign some other reason to my specific comment.
The proverbial they are trying to keep the equivalence of Israel = All Jews. They want more people to criticize Israel to further the racist narrative.
You could be Jewish, you could be Israeli. And you could say you don’t approve of the apartheid or genocide by Israel, and you’d be labeled a racist. Now leave out those last two words, and you’re fine.
It would be similar if an American said they didn’t approve of the genocide against the American first Nations by the US Government. Except you don’t get called racist for it.
Read the comment again, closely. Arguing the Israeli government has a policy of rape is pretty gross.
Yes, and in talking with someone else here, I realized that what you’re saying is pretty accurate and modified my viewpoint. Probably in the future I wouldn’t say something like that.
That’s the great stuff that happens when you let people say things, even if sometimes they are wrong. It would never have happened if I hadn’t come here to whine about my removed comment which actually led to a conversation about it.
(Edit: Only as far as the rape. If you take that one word out, I still think the comment is accurate and very clearly not based on any racial or religious bias or anything. Again, if you disagree, that’s fine, and talking to me about it is a much better way to deal with that that silencing my comment anonymously.)
Look at what mods do all day. They dont have anything better to do.
In the end they will remove whatever hurts their fucking feelings.
But i wouldnt have thought they do their useless job here too.
