Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml
This was originally posted to lemmy.pineapplemachine.com: https://lemmy.pineapplemachine.com/post/5781
It has also been posted to lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/591991
Lemmy is federated and decentralized and that means that we can all coexist regardless of our differing political opinions. I think it's important to preface this by saying that I am not offended by or concerned with anyone's politics, and I'm certainly not here to argue with anyone about them.
My concern is that users are being banned and content is being removed on lemmy.ml citing a rule that is not publicly stated anywhere that I have seen.
Moderators of lemmy.ml are removing posts and comments which are critical of the Chinese government and are banning their authors.
This came to my attention because of how lemmy user bans are federated just like everything else, and I was confused about why my instance had logged a lemmy.ml user ban citing "orientalism" as the reason for the ban.
Screenshot of my own instance's modlog, as viewed by an admin
I noticed that the banned user had recently commented on a post in !worldnews@lemmy.ml that had been removed with the reason "Orientalist article".
Screenshot of banned user's history on lemmy.ml
Here's the article that was removed, titled "China may face succession crisis". It was published by axios.com, which mediabiasfactcheck describes as having "a slight to moderate liberal bias" and gives its second-highest ranking for factual reporting. The article writes unfavorably of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
https://www.axios.com/2023/06/06/china-may-face-succession-crisis
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/axios/
I had not remembered seeing anything in lemmy.ml's rules that would suggest that "orientalism"—meaning, as I understand it, the depiction or discussion of Asian cultures by people in Western ones—was against the rules. So I checked, and I found that there was not. Not on the instance's front page, and not in !worldnews@lemmy.ml.
Screenshot of instance rules for lemmy.ml
Screenshot of community rules for !worldnews@lemmy.ml
There is a stated rule against xenophobia, but I think that xenophobia is not widely understood to include Westerners writing critically of the actions of an Asian government.
This is where I went from confused to concerned.
Lemmy instances have public moderation logs, which I think is a very positive thing about the platform. So I looked more closely at lemmy.ml's moderation log.
Please note that moderation logs are also federated. It's hard to be 100% sure which instance a mod action is actually associated with, looking at these logs. The previously mentioned user ban and post removal were, I think, definitely actions taken by lemmy.ml moderators. My own instance's mod log identifies the banning moderator as a lemmy.ml admin, and the removed post was submitted to a lemmy.ml community. I've done my best to verify that all of the following removals were really done by lemmy.ml moderators, but I can't be absolutely certain. Please forgive me if any of them were actually made on other instances that do have an explicitly stated rule against orientalism.
Removed Comment Ah yes. Being against China's racist genocide is racist. China, the imperialist ethno-state, is clearly innocent. by @CrimsonOnoscopy@beehaw.org reason: Orientalism
Removed Comment Lol. Thinking some countries have better governments than others is supremacist? Whatever, dude. By the way. If there are any countries with decent governments, I don't know of them. But like. If there were decent countries, they wouldn't behave like China. by @balerion@beehaw.org reason: Orientalism
These following moderator actions did not specifically cite orientalism, but did not seem to be breaking any of the instance's or community's explicitly stated rules.
Banned @0x815@feddit.de reason: Only makes anti russia and anti china, crosspostst from reddit. 2nd temp ban expires: 9d ago
Removed Comment Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are all Colonies of China, which it treats as Colonial Territories, by - Forcibly destroying the local culture. Forcefully extracting to harm of the locals. Genocide, abuse, kidnapping, rape. But there is no point in engaging to you. You are a liar. You know you are. When you deny genocides, you put yourself on the same side as the fascists and reactionaries of the past. by @CrimsonOnoscopy@beehaw.org reason: Rule 1 and 2
I have no affection for the Chinese government and I do not call myself a communist. I would not enforce a rule against orientalism on my own instance. But I think that lemmy.ml's moderators are entitled to enforce whatever rules they please. It's only that, as the largest single lemmy instance so far, I believe that they have an obligation to disclose these rules, and an obligation to not ban users or remove content for failing to follow unobvious and unstated rules.
I'd like to raise some awareness about this, and I'd like to openly ask the moderators of lemmy.ml to state the rules that they intend to enforce clearly and explicitly.
I will be very clear and state it again: I am not asking for anyone to change their opinions or to not enforce a rule that they believe in. That is the great thing about lemmy, that we can coexist in this federated community even when we don't share the same opinions. What I am asking is for lemmy.ml's rules to be clearly stated, because I think it does not reflect well on the broader community if the predominant instance moderates its users and content according to rules that are not being explicitly disclosed.
Okay. My position is that they should be informed of this up-front, and that it should not come as a surprise after they have already unwittingly broken the instance's rules.
It's literally the first rule in the sidebar. If you want to create a "how to not be racist and xenophobic" post to help racist and xenophobic Redditors here, you can always do that.
I don't think that's how social policing really works, though. You don't learn because someone gives you a guidebook, but because you get called out for spitting in public or feel unsafe if you show off Nazi tattoos. And all the schools theoretically say Nazis are bad, but I see tolerance for Nazis rising, and tightly bound to this is a lack of social policing. Look at the people who took so little convincing that the Sonnenrad isn't so bad so long as the Good Guys (TM) are wearing it.
You can help out with this by calling out the orientalism on display in this thread as well.
I do support the need to make Nazis feel unsafe in public, but ostracizing them is never going to teach them anything except how to disguise their acts. This tactic has a purpose to prevent the spread of a minority opinion in public, but that tactic doesn't apply in this scenario, where a bunch of people are coming in who think they're doing nothing wrong because they've normalized ignorant criticisms of PRC and think it might as well be Nazi Germany.
Don't compare them to Nazis, these people sincerely believe that the CPC are "committing genocide" and an "authoritarian dictatorship". The problem isn't that they think racism or xenophobia, as a concept, is acceptable, it's because they don't realize what they're saying is racist or xenophobic, they think it's an objective fact.
Banning them for "orientalism", without clearly linking it to "Rule #", evidently doesn't teach them that their comments were xenophobic or ignorant or racist. It makes them think this place is run by propagandists who won't accept a critique of PRC, and doesn't solve anything.
If the sidebar explains that orientalism is all these things, at least there is an opportunity for them to understand our perspective and learn and change their behaviour, instead of just assuming we're the problem and doing the same thing everywhere else.
No, social policing absolutely does work and it's how every healthy community functions, up to and including ostracization of those who refuse to learn and adapt. Those that fail to intentionally do so will end up doing so anyways, it will just be in the form of reinforcing the existing power imbalances in society, as they are unconsciously normalized.
Nationalistic, xenophobic, raxist, anticommunist frenzy is actually a very Nazi thing to do, though I was using the example of displaying Nazi tattoos, as I think most people would be able to, at least in theory, sympathize with socially policing the display of Nazi symbols.
Strong disagree on banning with an easily looked-up word isn't effective pedagogy, and I'd also like to point out that you're assuming the only teachable person in that situation is the person getting banned, which is not true. Communities adopt a shared expectation. They see the other person get banned and so long as this isn't a dealbreaker for them, will be sticking around to tacitly support it. But either way, it should not be surprising if someone who's used to getting away with xenophobia and racism and maybe, like you say, doesn't yet recognize it as such, doesn't "get it" immediately. Maybe they even demand to speak to the CEO of anti-racism and anti-xenophobia to lodge a concerned complaint. This is a coping process that is fairly common and is on many people's paths to shedding wrong and inherently alienating and toxic views. Speaking of which, I haven't seen anyone here specifically signing up to deprogram these people, but I do see some people just doing it anyways while others critique that it's happening in a wrong way. What is conspicuously missing is an alternative, particularly one the critics are themselves actually doing. In my experience, this means the critics are just a bit more sympathetic to the orientalist claims, but aren't comfortable being direct. Another win for the "we will ban you" strategy.
Finally, I have to reiterate that looking up the word isn't hard. That's not a real barrier here. You can see plenty of people defining and patiently explaining it in this thread and still observe the lazy, unlistening pushback (the laziness is bad faith even if the chauvinism is sincere). Sure, maybe more sidebar explainers would be a handy way to decrease the time mods spend explaining how to not be racist to racist people, but it isn't going to change the learning process or community expectations one iota because that isn't really how people change their minds in the first place. Someone changing their mind usually (not always) looks like them disagreeing with you repeatedly, then not talking about it for a while, then finally showing agreement. It's rarely something that happens by reading some rules or having one discussion, so the user is getting banned in the meantime anyways lol.
Like you said, most people recognize that glorifying Nazism is wrong.
Most of the people coming to lemmy.ml don't recognize that calling PRC an genocidal authoritarian dictatorship is wrong. This is an extremely normalized POV in places like USA and lots of Europe. Even among people who consider nationalism, xenophobia and racism to be wrong. People who have Nazi tattoos know what they are doing, and know why they are being ostracized. So this is why I emphasise that finding ways to systematically hint out that orientalism IS xenophobic and not just "stating the objective facts", is important.
Yes, and that documentation or discussion is one of those times they disagree repeatedly. And if it's in the sidebar, that's an efficient one that can be referenced (like you suggested). If anything, it more easily filters out those unlistening bad faith ones by just saying "Read the link in rule 1" and seeing if they even read it. When these people are arriving in large numbers, that efficiency goes a decent way to prevent burnout.
Oh of course, they're getting banned regardless lmao
Most people will say this at a surface level, which is where I expected folks to have engagement with the sentence in question. But the next one or two clarify this: obviously this is not a deeply-held or coherent position because I've seen an incredible number of sonnenrad tats and symbols on people actively getting glorified in Western media with zero popular pushback. This is particularly relevant to this discussion, as the apologetics involved there also center around orientalist tropes, a nationalistic, xenophobic, racist fervor, and the amplification of these tendencies through coordinated propaganda networks (the same ones, in fact).
Yeah of course. Most xenophobes and racists think their xenophobia and racism is actually very good. And like you've mentioned, they often rationalize it in such a shallow way that they don't actively label it as xenophobia or racism.
Or at least, in theory, at some surface level. It often takes very little for those same people to be outwardly bloodthirsty, nationalist, xenophobic, and racist. Most are just averse to the negative connotations of being labeled as such and don't self-criticize. This means they can be shamed and policed, not that they are just authentic smol beans that don't need hard line treatment.
I'd agree that the communication is important but I think it needs to be a blunt and forceful hard line response. And I think, "you were banned for orientalism" is sufficiently explanatory. If they don't care enough to read for 10 minutes and figure it out, they're very unlikely to respond well to an explanation accompanying the message. In fact they're more likely to try to debate it. Such folks need cognitive dissonance and time to ever have a positive response.
Also, these folks are not quite so innocent. There are very real and authentically believed aspects of white supremacy in what they're doing, they just aren't used to having it policed or using that label. It's the "acceptable" forms they get to have fun with on Reddit. The change in norms is going to be a surprise for them regardless of whether you add two more sentences to a sidebar or ban message.
I guess I can imagine one other benefit, though: when they inevitably screenshot their ban message and whine in a more white supremacist safe space, it will be easier to make fun of them.
IMO the filter is exactly as easy either way. They either comply or they don't. They'll either seek knowledge/shut up about it or they'll throw a pity party. Either way the correct first step has been taken by the mods.
100% on the value for mods avoiding burnout, though! That is super important for handling this flood of new users. The mods are incredibly patient and deserve some help.
Racists don't deserve to be informed.
Everyone has to learn somehow. Surely you, yourself, were ignorant of this at one point, and had to be taught. Even if you were fortunate to learn at a younger age than others. No?
But why are you advocating for racists?
I'm not. Why are you evading my question?
It's not our job to educate racists.
They are not advocating for racists.