I honestly can’t tell if this one is just lemmy.world’s moderation being shit as usual, or if the fact that the stories getting removed are Russian is actually relevant.
Here are two stories of mine that have been removed from [email protected] for being “not onion-y”:
- Trump says Russia has shown willingness for peace by not taking over all of Ukraine, calls it ‘pretty big concession’
- Moscow hit by massive drone raid for second night ahead of Putin’s Victory Day parade
Stories that are fine, on the other hand?
- “Can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights?” our tech columnist asks. “Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close. But I was intrigued.”
- ‘Trump 2028’ apparel on sale at the Trump Organization’s online store
- Trump tariffs: US president says foreign movies to be hit with 100% levies
I sort of suspect that what’s going on here is a combination of genuine stupidity on the part of the users (having trouble making the leap between “Victory Day” and “Moscow hit by massive drone raid”), plus passivity on the part of the mods (one possibility is that it got reported because of salty pro-Russian people, which the objectively not-oniony stories did not, and the mod just blindly obeys whatever reports say).
Regardless. Moderation on lemmy.world is a pile.
I think [email protected]’s point is nothing but apologetics. I looked at the post they linked to, which helpfully highlights dog piling that was initiated by a couple pro-authoritarian communities:
According to the people doing the brigading, the article is only wrong because it was written by sources that are too Western for their nationalist liking.
I mean pretty clearly lol. “Your images are doctored! Here’s an undoctored image!” What this random thing that for all I know is a film-camera picture of a fancy globe at the planetarium, that clearly has its lighting all jacked up, with no attribution and no explanation of even what the hell we’re looking at? “(silence)”
You can tell they don’t get much experience talking with dissenting opinions or trying to be persuasive to undecided people. Which is, of course, the point of how their communities get moderated the way that they do, to preserve that.