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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

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.

  • Hey I saw your reply and I couldn’t really grasp how this would be so I want to engage in dialogue, feel free to ignore this if you don’t want. I’m not looking for a fight.

    I was on reddit when the bulk of HK protests and the crackdown happened. There were many people posting about their own government treated them brutally and violently to suppress the protests. What has struck with me was the story of a person who was lured to the railway station, forcibly taken on a train to the mainland and beaten until he agreed to sign a confession. Do you think these people sharing those experiences or sharing news articles highlighting their plight are somehow racist?

    Now, I’m not a white person, neither am I Chinese. However my grandfather has undergone similar experience as a young person when he tried to protest against authoritarian actions of the government in our country. This makes me perhaps more empathetic to plight of people sharing their experiences from HK and sometimes I share this with others? Does that make me racist/orientalist?

    Lastly, I’ve known a handful of people from China of which most were extremely nice and hospitable to me. Many of them are my friends. After seeing struggles they face under this government and their past experiences, I honestly want them to be able to live under a system where they suffer less. I really have nothing against people of China. They’re amazing. That doesn’t extend to whatever government they might live under.

    • I appreciate your response, and I understand that seeing that content on western-controlled media platforms like reddit, can be very jarring.

      I maintiain many megathreads on these topics, but I’m convinced they’d be met with a negative reaction. People just do not tolerate anything positive being said about China. They’ve been inundated with a constant flow of anti-China atrocity propaganda from the western media giants, every single day, for years, in a way that warps their perspective, in the same way that some of my older family members have been made increasingly more racist by fox news.

      It took me many years of being lied to consistently, growing up in the US during its wars on Iraq and the peoples of the middle east, to question the source, and subject everything that comes from these platforms with a high degree of scrutiny, especially when the US is the one doing the demonizing.