1. Mod of [email protected] posts a great Greta Thunberg quote, but then tries to use it to justify not voting in the upcoming US election
2. Multiple people point out that’s very clearly not what she meant
3. Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod

Using your mod powers to decide who is allowed and not allowed to speak is not very anarchist of you, @[email protected]

https://lemmy.world/post/21485461

Lord.

Five days ago, drag was banned from [email protected] for using neopronouns. A comment explaining drag's pronouns, and a comment saying "drag" isn't a nickname, were removed with the reason "trolling". Drag understands why someone would think that using different pronouns than most people is trolling - transphobia. However, drag is confused how on earth not liking a nickname is a violation of any rules anywhere.

Context of the removed comments:

Drag would like to pre-empt any further accusations of trolling by asking a question: If drag were a right wing troll, and you chose to freely accept drag's pronouns, wouldn't that completely neuter the trolling attempt? Trolling is about trying to make others upset. You don't have to get upset when someone uses unusual pronouns. If you aren't transphobic, then it's impossible to troll you that way. And drag promises: drag wants you to not be transphobic. Drag is not trying to upset anyone. If you do what drag wants you to do, then you get what you want too. This is a non-issue, there's only a problem if you want there to be.

EDIT: DRAG DID NOT TELL ANYBODY TO USE DRAG'S PREFERRED PRONOUNS.

Earlier today drag was banned from [email protected] for this post: https://lemmy.nz/post/15864724

The reason stated was "Dishonest headline and quoting".

The sidebar of the community states the following on article titles:

Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive.

The article's original title was "Harris vs. Trump spoiler’s supporter says the quiet part out loud" - in drag's opinion, this is clickbait. The quiet part is not stated in the title. The reader has to click on the article in order to learn what it's actually about.

Drag's post title was "Jill Stein ally says the Greens' strategy is about making Harris lose the presidency" - this clearly states which group is involved and what precisely the controversial statement was. But drag was banned for making the title more clear.

The sidebar of the community states the following on article quotes:

Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Drag quoted three passages from the article in the post body: The quote from the Jill Stein ally which the article was about, and two passages about Donald Trump's relation to these events. None of the quotes were edited. As asked by the sidebar drag did not post the entire body, only the parts drag believed was relevant, and drag was banned for following this rule too.

The vast majority of comments on the post, including all the highly upvoted comments, agreed with the points made by the article and expressed zero problem with the presentation. There were two comments which had a problem with drag's presentation of the article:

…um, where is the second half of this article? (2 upvotes)

This comment is a non-issue; posting the entire article in the body is against the community rules. Drag was following the rules by only posting half.

Least dishonest LW politics OP quoting an entire article out of context (1 upvote)

This comment agrees with the moderation decision but does not explain why, and drag can't work out why on drag's own. Drag tried drag's best to represent the article accurately.

So I try to make heads or tails of this situation. I got randomly banned from a community where I posted a youtube video showing something from a Convention. Then I wanted to post a question today but realised that I couldn't since I was banned. That community is sadly the biggest of all Star Citizen communities (the next one would be from lemmy.world)

I took a look at the Mod log and see the following line in it:

So no clean up of violating comments or posts, just a strict out ban.

The community has a pretty standard ruleset:

further, the moderator @[email protected] hasn't posted anything since a year, so what gives here, or was it some other mod that was able to declare the ban?

reason: Rule 3 - No opinion articles

This is the article, as you can see it is very clearly a news article about a current event and not at all an opinion article.

reason: Misinformation. Two parliament victories out of 650 members is NOT a nightmare for the opposition.

It's a clickbaity title at worst, b ut it is not misinformation. A party losing a swing seat is not a good sign, especially considering Starmers growing unpopularity. This ban was purely a mods opinion, there was no 'misinformation'.

reason: Multiple posting rule violations, especially opinion and misinformation articles. Please read the rules in the sidebar in future.

The mod used these two lies to justify a ban from the community. What point is reading the rules in the sidebar meant to serve if they're not legitimately being enforced?

Modlog

Original thread

Last time I checked the thread had 2 upvotes and 6 downvotes. Shows you how insane this entire network is.

Edit: Apologies for the wrong thread link, containing the album of the original thread in the other community. Originally I had this thread here organized differently and the original album was linked in the body for context, but it got eaten by spam protection. Same happened to this one, but I only noticed the mistake after since I'm still tired, and then it got manually approved.

I can't figure out how to view my own reply comment anymore, but a /Ukraine user commented this insanity and I called them out — that cornering a sociopathic nuclear armed dictator is recklessly stupid, and exactly what will trigger a nuclear war — and got massively downvoted for "enabling Russia". 90% of the user base agreed with "conquering" Russia, and thought previous mini incursions across the border are equivalent; proving that nukes are a forever bluff.

The best part? After inspecting several of the mods and users comment histories I realized all seem to have nothing to do with Ukraine whatsoever, and appear to be young pro-war machine North American jarheads (or keyboard warrior wannabes), who sub to or mod numerous other military related communities.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/45204357

Yesterday, I created my account on Lemmy.ml because I want to become mod on [email protected]. And I posted this comic on [email protected] It's SDV game cutscene where Shane a NPC go watch Sports game with you kiss you accidentily but It was part of that event also player kiss Shane(NPC) back. Here's video for more context. And someone claimed it have SA(Sexual Assualt) From Hexbear Ofcourse. So, I should delete it. I said it was a part of game cutscene. And If main player doesn't love the Shane(NPC) then they don't need to complete this event. And Just as a sarcasm I added Yeah we shoule delete this entire community because this game is Woke like Woke Detector Steam Group said. That user think I am some anti-woke dickhead something like that IDK. And tell me to Kill My Self. What I do now? I wanted on become mod on .ml because community was already well established. I message dessaline but I am sure he will not unbanned me. :(

Did I really did something wrong? I don't know If I really did something wrong.

Link for that comic if embed doesn't work.

Create one lemm.ee [email protected]

Disclaimer: The issue here is not completely related to the bot presence, but more about the justification used. People would probably be less annoyed if the mods stated "this is our decision, and it is final", rather than to try to use admins as an excuse.

As usual, for people looking for other world news communities

• [email protected]
• [email protected] (warning: single instance admin)

https://lemmy.world/comment/12825224

https://lemmy.world/comment/12834553

For other threads about the MBFC bot:

• https://lemmy.world/post/19665956
• https://lemmy.world/post/18073105

Hello I'm not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I'm posting on behalf of people who are, since they don't seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I'm not sure they'll respond. So I'm making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.

Recently I was made aware of a community that appeared randomly on Lemmy.world. It seems to be a troll community given the type of content, but the reason I'm posting about it here specifically is that this mod seems to be banning anyone who points this out or goes against his narrative. Furthermore he is only using the autoremove on ban function, not removing any content the users have posted, which I believe is deliberate in attempt to prevent the content from showing up under the modlog and revealing the hypocrisy.

Some samples of comments:

All of these were retrieved from the API, even though they aren't included in the modlogs, I could've included more but it's kind of a time consuming process to look for them and retrieve them. Viewing removed comments is easier on Lemmy than it is on Reddit but it still isn't easy.

What do you guys think, does this seem like power-tripping? Also does this person's content seem like blatant troll content?

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

People who's comments I mentioned, I CCed them so they know I did this on their behalf

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20891389

Maybes I missed the rule that says "Redditors that try to be helpful will be banned".

Tl;dr:

• these are old events, 9 months ago.
• we have since then mostly moved on, but I still thought it could be interesting to document those in this community
• the power trip was a single mod not wanting to discuss how a community should be run and banning people wanting to discuss it
• the new communities we created following this power trip ([email protected] and [email protected]) are now more active than the initial one

Hello everyone,

I added the summary of the event in the tl;dr above. If you are here, you probably want to know the details of what happened.

Starting point

As you may remember, there used to be a movie focused instance called lemmy.film. Following its shutdown, a few users were looking for a new movies and TV shows community that would not be on Lemmy.world (if you want to know why some people are against overcentralization on Lemmy.world, you can have a look here: https://lemm.ee/post/30444527 and https://feddit.uk/post/18336398 )

While I was contacting the lemm.ee admins to become mod of the at the time abandoned [email protected], another mod (I'll just call them "The mod" in this thread) created [email protected]. We contacted the other people who were on the old lemmy.film communities and started posting.

I posted a lot over there, if you sort by Old, you'll see a lot of my posts from back then: https://lemm.ee/c/moviesandtv?dataType=Post&sort=Old

• https://files.catbox.moe/vrnv1t.png

I was also trying to set up discussion threads as they were things who were missing on Lemmy at the time, and a lot of people were complaining about that

• https://files.catbox.moe/75zkck.png

I also started asking for a weekly thread "What have you been watching": https://lemm.ee/post/13386100 which was denied. It wasn't a big deal for me, I was mostly focused on growing the community, I assumed that we could revisit that topic later. That was on 31 October 2023.

Success for the community

12 November, we celebrate our 300 subs: https://lemm.ee/post/14621123

17 November, I start a weekly thread: https://lemm.ee/post/15176837. 7 comments, reasonable success for a first.

26 November, I am appointed as mod: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863, and start pinning the weekly threads.

4 December, I am removed as mod. I ask the mod to make me mod again (purely because it's easier to pin threads), they never answer.

10 December, I open another thread on how to handle movie discussions: https://lemm.ee/post/17546624

I let it go for 6 weeks, I keep posting, after all, this is more or less okay. By then, the community has around 1100 subscribers.

The power trip

30 January, I open a thread to discuss with people in the community how they wanted to handle movie reviews:

• https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/dc0a56ca-bcca-466b-b351-8815c8ab34c9.png
• https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863

The post get removed

I open another thread "Are we not allowed to discuss the way this community is managed?"

• https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/c1c8fa89-8cad-4914-aec0-c2c30ab70405.jpeg

I get banned

I use an alt to comment

Hello, As you banned my other account, I am now commenting with this one. I'm not going to comment on this that much, the modlog is public, people interested can have a look at make their own opinions. For history, the two removed posts: (screenshots) I guess we can just conclude that we disagree on how to manage this kind of communities, which is mostly fine, that's what Lemmy is about after all: freedom. I'll probably contact the people interested in review threads (and there seems to be a few, based on the removed threads and the 200 upvotes on the other post) and see it we can offer an alternative for people looking for a more structured community. Good luck

Comments gets removed: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863

The mod then posts how they want to address the community issues: https://lemm.ee/post/22459747

My alt gets banned.

Please not that those are permabans. Up to this day, I am still banned on those two accounts from that community.

The aftermath

Let's be honest here, I was a bit annoyed. I had been actively posting to a community, helping building it from scratch from months, to get banned just for asking how we could manage this community better.

I reached out to sunaurus, the lemm.ee main admin, who told me that he couldn't do anything, as his admin policy was to not interfere with mod decisions. It's a fair policy that I could understand (even though I was still annoyed). They made me mod of [email protected], and I thought I would take it from there.

I built [email protected] with the same energy I had put in the previous community. I found other people who had seen the drama happening on the other side and wanted to join forces in building another community. I appointed all of them as mods, because why not.

Over time, our community became more and more popular, and now has 2.97k monthly active users, while [email protected] has 1.52k

The mod had promised to add other mods to the community. They did for 4 months (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863) but then removed them in June 2024.

In the meantime, they also banned another user in April 2024 for similar reasons to the ones used for me: https://lemm.ee/post/30754133

They also removed the AMA we organized in May 2024 on [email protected] (https://lemm.ee/post/31335226) because "Unvarified AMA not organized by this community - seems like spam" (https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863)

More recently, we started a [email protected] community, which now has 2.35k monthly active users.

That's it.

Making up arguments to justify their BS.

Edit: @[email protected] Contacted the moderator who did it on my behalf who admitted that this was a mistake, he sends his apologies. This incident though does highlight though the need for ban notifications as well as the need for a modmail system to contact community and site moderators.

I have left the post up with the original contents bellow as I feel it would be wrong to delete the post and rob people of the valuable information it contains, both in the post itself and in the comment section.

I messaged a mod from the community, not sure if that was the one who did it but this was weird. Not sure if it's power-tripping probably a mistake but it's certainly weird and seems like a knee jerk reaction since I didn't have activity in those last 10 days (I checked for votes too). Also no other bans in the modlog for "sock puppet account" so I don't even know why I would be singled out.

Why would someone think I was a sock puppet account? Because I have multiple accounts on different instances? Really weird...

Account is @[email protected], I didn't post from that account since I try to keep each account on each separate instance (helps prevent accidental vote manipulation).

Also outs your report publicly, nice !

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28755832

Gets caught being racist in the past.

People in turn thought it was the official discord server and that Xananax an official member, and started harassing the actual Godot staff. They are forced to ban people who appear to be harassing them for no reason. Today they posted a statement to clarify

Update: Statement from Xananax

Looks like this is actually a reactionary response to them stopping hate speech in their server.

Context: comment on a post about Hezbollah leader being killed.

This comment is not calling for violence. It is literally mocking those that think violence is a good idea as the dire consequences are the very subject at hand.

Those mods clearly put zero effort into examining the context and simply prosecute on report alone. Either that or they themselves support some violence and abhor its criticism.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3142293

Mod Log.

My post got removed despite it being from a reliable source (Ukrayinska Pravda- Media Bias/ Fact check.)

I am not looking to participate in a community where mods remove posts based on their feelings about the source, there needs to be a proof to the mod claim.

Why did my post got removed in this case?

How is the source unreliable, what is the mod proof for that?

[X-post, and trying out this sub]

It's also funny that rather than removing all of my comments, they just decided to remove those I referenced and one particular reply, meaning whoever they were they cared more about the narrative and making the conversation unintelligible so that in the framing that was left people could just fill in the gaps just based on the downvotes and the accusations.

Like I said to some people and now extend to the mod,

I love how people like you are the flip side equal of Trump people warping reality to shit on it. Same bullshit, both sides aren't equal but people like you certainly resemble them closer.

ITT, people who couldn't comprehend cult psychology (and given the inherent Stanford prison experiment abuse within it, any psychology) or even the inevitable conclusion of what they are claiming and accuse me for being ignorant of what I'm literally alluding to in the first comment.

Even supposing that there was some legitimacy to the removals, it's telling how selective it was and where it wasn't. And literally labeling nuance "trolling" in a circlejerk meme reddit ... probably makes sense. But still, imagine being so fragile the huge number of downvotes could not do it for you.

Some of you really want to divide society as much as MAGA does. My message didn't neatly fit into the circlejerk meme, so I guess I must be "trolling, or worse" - amazing.

I can also confirm, can't delete or edit the comments to provide context, but people can still vote on comments that have been removed. Huh, didn't think I'd find something like this reddit was so clearly better at. So now I guess I know why they decided to selectively remove comments and framed the thread into what has been left.

Hello everyone,

I hope this is the good place to ask this question, if not, mods, feel free to remove it.

So as you may know, some LW mods on [email protected] and [email protected] have been denying that the US government is supporting Israel in their attacks against Palestine.

In summary, their stance is

That is NOT why Biden is sending arms to Israel. Biden is rightly sending arms to Israel for the "Iron Dome" protection from outside aggression.

Israel misappropriates that support for use in the genocide. That is NOT on Biden. That's on Bibi and the IDF.

Biden is not complicit in any genocide. Full stop. Never has been.

For some detailed posts

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27598404
• https://lemmy.world/post/18857058

Disclaimer:

• I live in Europe and am not a US citizen, so I might not know enough about the power split between the US President and other representative structures like the Senate and the House of Representatives.
• Linkerbaan, the other of the posts above, is usually suspected to be a Trump supporter or a Russian troll. That may be true or not, and they tend to be quite aggressive in the way they convey their message, but they still seem to make a few points.

The US President impact on providing weapons to Israel

A few recent articles about the US President responsibility about providing the arms to Israel

Do you think that Kamala Harris is likely to agree with the calls for an arms embargo on Israel?

I do not think she will agree with those calling for an arms embargo on Israel.

For one thing, as vice president and before that as a senator, Kamala Harris has consistently supported providing U.S. military aid to Israel. This position is typical of most Democratic Party members, as well as most Republicans.

Opponents of U.S. military aid to Israel often argue that this help is solely a function of domestic politics and reflects the power of the pro-Israel lobby, particularly AIPAC. I think that this view is myopic and exaggerates the power of the pro-Israel lobby. It ignores the fact that the U.S. has its own economic and strategic reasons for supplying that military aid. It is a U.S. national interest, not simply a favor for Israel, and that’s why there is broad, bipartisan support for continuing this military aid.

https://theconversation.com/us-is-unlikely-to-stop-giving-military-aid-to-israel-because-it-benefits-from-it-237290

The Biden administration has been doing contortions to provide military support to Israel without reference to U.S. or international law. It paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs in May, citing concerns about civilian harm, and even admitted in a report to Congress that month that U.S. weapons had likely been used in ways inconsistent with the law. But the White House said it didn’t have enough evidence to prove that specific violations had occurred, which would have triggered a suspension of further weapons shipments.

The evidence the Biden administration says it doesn’t have is everywhere. Careful investigations by the United Nations and organizations like mine have been documenting and reporting alleged violations since hostilities started in October, including Israeli forces’ unlawful airstrikes, the use of starvation as a method of warfare and torture of Palestinian detainees. The International Court of Justice has called on Israel three times to open Gaza’s crossings for aid shipments.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/10/debate-tip-candidates-theres-correct-answer-weapons-israel

The fear of Trump

The main argument usually used against people who point that the US President has an impact on the weapons supply to Israel is that

• the Democrats are the lesser evil
• Trump must not pass

While it is generally admitted that indeed Trump was a bad president and should indeed not pass, why do people go all the way to deny the impact of the US President on that matter?

Wouldn't it possible to both say that Kamala should pass, but at the same time condemn the actions of the US government on that matter?

Genuinely curious, as in Europe is it quite established that the US government chooses to keep providing weapons to Israel.

• https://www.rfi.fr/fr/moyen-orient/20240814-les-%C3%A9tats-unis-%C3%A9trillent-isra%C3%ABl-tout-en-approuvant-la-vente-de-20-milliards-de-dollars-d-armement
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67192779

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19264848

Moderation conflict involving c/vegan

Intro

We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.

Links

• https://lemmy.world/post/18829828
• https://lemmy.world/post/18817262

Actions in question

Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.

The comments have been restored.

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.

Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.

Removing some moderators of the vegan community

Removed moderators have been reinstated.

This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).

The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.

We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.

Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict

Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility

Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.

These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.

In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.

Community Responses

The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.

Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.

That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.

The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.

That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.

Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.

Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.

Conclusions

Regarding moderator actions

We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.

Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.

While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.

We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.

TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.

Regarding censorship claims

Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.

Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".

We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.

While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".

To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.

See Section 8 Misinformation

Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team

EDIT: Added org operations contact info

Figured that this community would appreciate power tripping lemmy world admins :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26218550

(posting to both communities)

A carnist lemmy world instance admin has stepped in and meatsplained to the mods while restoring comments that violated the community's rules. They deleted comments that they did not agree with, citing 'misinformation', and threatened to demod the mods if those comments were removed again. The comments were deleted and the admin was banned from the community as per violating the rules of the community, that was until they unbanned themselves (admin abuse) and unmodded two of the moderators because of "promoting harmfull actions against pets".

As far as it stands, if the lemmy world community wasn't already not a safe vegan place for you (it really wasn't) it most certainly isn't now as carnists (lemmy world instance admin) currently mod it.

I suggest any vegan who wants a safe and welcoming space to come and interact with vegantheoryclub.org. Sorry for any inconvienance that this may have caused. I am deeply upset at the admins actions today and don't condone them whatsoever.