Welp, it happened. For the first time a Lemmy comment of mine was removed because a mod didn't like the viewpoint expressed.

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨mo_ztt@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

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.

Modlog

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.

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Comments

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spaduf@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is not an appropriate community to post this.

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- mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - CorrodedCranium@leminal.space ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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
    
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- chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Is there a community for criticisms of moderation? I’d subscribe to that
  
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  - federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I posted in a meta community
    
    lemmy.world/post/8226045
    
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Deceptichum@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s .ml, they probably deleted it for saying you don’t support Hamas.

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- mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I literally just now realized you’re probably right.
  
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- ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Anything but support of Palestine and Hamas is against the views of .ml.
  
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Lauchs@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- PlasterAnalyst@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Do you support the N. Korean government? If you don't then you're just racist!
  
  That's what you sound like.
  
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  - Lauchs@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Because I don’t think it’s cool to accuse the Israeli government of having a policy of rape? Jesus, get a grip kid.
    
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- mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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 on war. So yeah, I think on that part you’re right.
  
  This is the great stuff that happens when you let people talk about stuff, 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.
  
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  - Lauchs@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Read the first paragraph of the first link you submitted “An Israeli Defense Forces officer who has been imprisoned since 2017 for multiple sexual offenses, including the rape of…”
    
    In other words, the Israeli defence force arrested the guy for rape.
    
    If you actually have news that indicates rape is a government policy, then post the article and see what happens.
    
    But, one of the tried and tested approaches for right wing trolling is to lobby a whole bunch of accusations with some nonsense ina semi related thread and force everyone else to go and debunk them ad nauseum, it’s not particularly enjoyable and is exactly why we have moderators.
    
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- deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    And burning them with cigarettes, pissing on them, beating them to the point of broken bones, attacking them with dogs in prisons, and of course all those children they’ve been killing. And sometimes rape.
    
    Wait – I’m being antisemitic again; my bad. I was influenced to my antisemitism by reading too much Haaretz and The Times of Israel.
    
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  - Lauchs@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You know, come to think of it, maybe if I think a group is doing things with which I disagree, I ought to be able to make up whatever other offenses too. It’s like when women who have abortions become racist and transphobic, which is why abortion should be prohibited. /s
    
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bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
welcome to t the club
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- mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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joewilliams007@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- AnonTwo@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I mean...if you want unmodded entirely, don't you just go to 4chan?
  
  You need some moderation and they can't all be exploitive self entitled if that can be argeed on. it has be working somehow
  
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CorrodedCranium@leminal.space ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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slurpeesoforion@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- PlasterAnalyst@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think it has a lot to do with the American election. The Israeli government has put the Biden administration in a real bind now. If they don't support Israel, they lose the Jewish vote. Now they are losing young people by supporting Israel. Israel greatly benefits from Republicans.
  
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- Lauchs@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Read the comment again, closely. Arguing the Israeli government has a policy of rape is pretty gross.
  
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  - mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - slurpeesoforion@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s not a position I’m arguing. It may have been part of the reason he was banned. But not relevant to my argument.
    
    And no modern army has rape as a policy, explicit or implied. Many turn a blind eye to it when it does occur, but hardly policy. Even Russia, with documented cases in Ukraine, don’t have it written down.
    
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Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
People are completely brain rotten on Isreal Palestine. Everyone is dug in and mods will remove anything even slightly trying to strike middle ground.

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jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Likely not just a case of a mod removing it because they didn’t like it, but someone reporting it to the mods requiring them to deal with it.

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- mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The mods are not required to remove comments that are reported. It’s their decision whether or not to.
  
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  - jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    True, what I’m saying is, it likely wasn’t a case of a mod idly browsing and taking offense at it, it was probably reported.
    
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finthechat@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
First_Time?.jpg

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ginerel@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

lemmy.ml
first time [...] a mod didn't like the viewpoint expressed.

Haha, wow, first time?

Welcome to this place. Lemmy.ml is notorious for being run by the actual tankies that created this project. See what they support, what they don't, and have an opposite opinion on that. You will get the boys telling you how it acchually it is not and call you a glowie CIA agent or whatnot for not siding with them. The Reddit migration probably made them more accepting of opposite opinions, but probably because things have calmed down more a bit lately, they started aggressively moderating stances like yours and probably anti-Kremlin takes as well (seriously, before that, if you were against the Russian invasion in Ukraine or against China's politics you would have been accused of being racist towards them - but hey, you can say whatever you want against the USA, or The West, you can't be racist against these, can you?).

Anyway, here's a longer take by FediTips that explains the issues with Lemmy:
https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379

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- mo_ztt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah. The weird thing is, I actually deliberately went to one of those instances (I genuinely can’t remember if it was lemmy.ml or lemmygrad) when I first joined and had some arguments with them. Back in those days they not once removed any of my comments. They yelled at me and downvoted me and of course I think their opinions are dead wrong, but I was actually a little impressed with how they let me say my anti-genocide things. I actually learned a bunch of stuff by arguing with them; among other things I got exposed to John Mearsheimer who I think is pretty sharp.
  
  That was why it was a little shocking when this comment got removed. It wasn’t, like, friendly and happy, but I didn’t think there was much in it to disagree with. Maybe one word.
  
  For what it’s worth I’m planning to do my own instance using kbin, so I can have my own little walled fortress and interact with the people on Mastodon also, and also no one can ban me even if the whole rest of Lemmy goes crazy. YOU CAN’T STOP ME
  
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