I created this post on my local server, calling for what I thought was reasonable action against a self-proclaimed threat to Canada.
Someone in the community disagreed (fine), and reported the post on their hosting instance (lemmy.world), which led to an immediate deletion of the post (on that single instance only).
Think is, I really don’t feel that it was warranted - and neither do most of the community members over on lemmy.ca.
I realize that instances are autonomous, but is there an appeal process to potentially have this reinstated?
So, I’m a mod on lemmy.world and looking at our modlog, the post was removed 2 days ago by lemmy.world admins (not mods).
admin
Removed Post Tucker Carlson is coming to Alberta this month - if we let him.
reason: Deceptive content. Calling to abuse government system.
You might possibly be able to appeal it, but you’d have to hit up one of the admins.
Reading the post, you were basically calling on lemmy to brigade Canadian officials, so, yeah, I can kind of see why they removed it.
It was obviously an admin, because there are no lemmy.world mods in that community.
“kinda see why” shouldn’t be enough of a reason for an admin to interfere with a community. If that’s happening, it should be for clear rule violations that can cause legal issues or bring harm to someone.
Clearly an admin because the modlog event is marked “Admin” not “Mod”.
But yeah, I’m not sure on the rules for brigading. I haven’t looked into it at that level as I haven’t needed to.
I don’t think I’d call this brigading. For me that means you have users swarming a forum or chat room, whereas this is more of a request for political action.
Their post wasn’t “spam CSIS & CBSA so they cant deal with any other requests”, it was “let them know how you feel”.
On the one hand, CBSA and CSIS are both charged with keeping undesirable people out of the country - and someone who stands so strongly against the values that Canada has embraced in law and policy is an exact definition of undesirable to Canada, in my mind.
I didn’t call for brigading (essentially spamming), I called on people who felt the same to let the enforcement agencies know how they felt.
But far more importantly, an admin (not even a mod) on lemmy.world made a judgement call about my post and decided to remove it because of their opinion - NOT because it violated that instance’s rules or any laws that I’m aware of.
Because of an admin’s personal judgement, people on lemmy.world now have a different view of !alberta@lemmy.ca than the actual tone and content on the hosting instance. This puts the admin in the role of moral gatekeeper, which seems like an extremely bad precedent to set.
If all instances were equal, this would hurt lemmy.world far more than it would hurt any others including lemmy.ca; but all instances are NOT equal, and lemmy.world maintains the majority of all users worldwide.
The deeper I look into this, the more I think that this type of behaviour is profoundly harmful to the entire Lemmy community.
As far as it being “just one admins opinion”, I really doubt that. There are back channels for communication at the mod level and at the admin level and I see requests for comments all the time.
In fact, I had one of my own where a user flooded a channel with 19 posts at once, so I went to the other mods going “You know, TECHNICALLY, we don’t have a rule against this, what does everybody think?”
We, collectively, decided, yeah, on that channel? 10 posts a day is fine. We didn’t want a single voice guiding submissions.
OTOH, we didn’t retroactively REMOVE anything, it was just posted as a note “going forward…”
But anyway, the point is there are layers of communication between mods and admins you aren’t aware of.
Appreciate the clarification - and it’s good to know that it’s likely a collective action, rather than individual.
But there’s a fundamental difference - two really - between the example you give, and my post. In your case, it was behaviour (channel flooding) that was the problem; in my case, it was the content of a post that the admins objected to, even though it didn’t violate any rules on the originating instance and community, nor on this instance - nor did it run afoul of the intent of the rules, as far as I can see.
It was strictly a case of the admins deciding “we don’t like that post” and removing it. They became content gatekeepers - honestly, de facto moderators on their own instance.
If the admins don’t like a community from an instance, they should be free to block the community or defederate with the instance entirely; but filtering content based on their view of what they think should be allowed in the community is…
Yeah, it’s just not right. It’s harmful to the community as a whole, and disproportionately harmful to communities on other instances.
As an admin of lemmy.ca I’m also curious what justified removal of this post from your instance, when the community is not hosted or moderated by anyone from lemmy.world.
It makes me deeply uncomfortable to think that outside users are seeing a view of our communities that has been filtered or modified, without having any way to know it is happening.
Edit: I’ve spun out this thread for further discussion, as I think this is an important topic - https://lemmy.ca/post/12845463
Arent federated comments and posts from you instance hosted on each server you federated with? Admins of each individual server have the right to moderate content seen by their users. If they couldn’t remove individual comments or posts, then the only other option they would have if your users are breaking another server’s rules would be to defederate.
In this particular case, I feel like the removal was unjustified.
Yes, but we have a post that is political in nature being removed by admins of the largest instance. If this was child porn I wouldn’t be concerned, but this is on a post that I don’t think even violates lemmy.world rules.
I don’t think instance admins should be actioning reports, unless they are in clear violation of instance rules. Reports should be left to the mods of that community. By actioning on reports like this lemmy.world is effectively acting as a censor, and as the largest instance they control what most lemmy users see. That makes me uncomfortable.
Can’t agree more. All we can do is reduce the user dominance.
I think the federated nature makes it tough to just have a blanket policy of leaving it up to the community mods. Ideally you would want the report to go through the community mods and then the host instance admins first, but you might not be able to contact those instance admins to see if they have looked at the post. You also have no control of the community mods and would not expect them to remove the post because of your rules.
Even with that, I do agree that something should change. As it stands, you can have posts disappear from largest Lemmy server from seemingly arbitrary admin decisions and there’s no formal process to appeal. It seems like you would need some sort of Alliance where you all agree to certain guidelines and have a formal process for these cross-server disputes.
Maybe there should also be some sort of ‘Approved by host admin’ system so that other admins can at least know that you looked at it.
I think that the default should be that when something is deleted it should say deleted by “Admins of whatever” that way people at least know their view is being tampered with and could investigate if they’re so inclined.
This has been an interesting bit of discussion, to say the least. Different instances with different local rules are going to lead to problems like this situation more and more, as lemmy grows in popularity. It’s inevitable, and we’re all going to have to sort it out as the platform matures.
However the more I think about it, the more concerned I am that removing individual posts (or even comments) on a federated instance has the potential to misrepresent communities, through the filter of each instance’s mod/admin biases.
Perhaps a pointer saying “this post was removed on lemmy,world for violating rule (x), and can be viewed on its original instance <link>” would be appropriate. Or alternatively, blocking entire communities with a comparable stub: “lemmy.world has chosen not to federate community@instance.”
Of course in my examples I’m picking on lemmy.world because that’s where this is happening, but the problem and possible solutions are true for all instances.
Looks like the reason given is:
reason: Deceptive content. Calling to abuse government system.
I’m not sure I can link to where that is mentioned, but you can see where I saw this by clicking on “Modlog” in the footer, changing the “action” to “Removing Posts”, and then just hitting the “next” button at the bottom until you see it. Right now it says the mod action was taken 2 days ago and I found it on page 3. But of course, as more actions are taken and more time goes by, both the page and “days ago” will change.
(I’m not an admin or anything. Just weighing in.)
Thanks. Some of the folks on lemmy.ca helped me find the results as well. It’s good to see an alternative angle on it.
