Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments.

Feddit.org announced today that they are changing their rules to match German law despite their server not being hosted in Germany.

Feddit.org now bans:

The sentence "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"
Comparing Israel to the Nazis
Calls to end Zionism
Calling for the dissolution of Israel

And much more. The full original post can be found here, or

121 comments

This kind of seems... reasonable? Like, they have and convey a compelling legal reason for needing to do this. There's plenty of other Lemmy instances where these opinions and statements can be freely expressed. Further, they're explicitly allowing discourse that conveys similar sentiment but doesn't go against German law.
I guess my question is, what's the objection here?
- Mostly that they host the main Europe-centric comm, !Europe@feddit.org. You can see the problem when criticism of Europe's most powerful country is censored in said comm, and users banned, for relatively innocuous comments.
  
  That's a fair concern; maybe the recourse is just to move the community to a different instance? If the community as a whole is largely in agreement, this shouldn't be a difficult task. Even less of one if the mods agree.
  
  The mods don't seem to think it's a major issue, I haven't heard any of them actually admit this is a problematic situation to have. Some folks have set up a new community at !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
  
  which country, and what kind of criticism?
  
  Germany, and any criticism of Israel, or dealings with thereof, that crosses a somewhat arbitrary (for those of us living outside Germany) line.
- They do not. Their servers are not hosted in Germany. If their moderators feel like they would be endangered for not following German law they should step down instead of applying their German censorship to a European server.
  Their moderators and German users appear to proudly agree with these German censorship laws in the comments beneath their post. So the legal part looks more like a convenient excuse.
  
  Agreed. They support the genocide and are hiding behind the law to save face.
  
  Jesus fucking Christ. Witch hunt much?
  
  I’m not calling for the admins to be burned at the stake. If you don’t perceive an obvious slant in their words that’s fine - I’m sharing my take just like they’re sharing theirs.
  
  They still allow you to call out on the genocide, how are they supporting it?
  
  The admins are also German, though, and seem to suggest that they feel at risk by this, as well. Maybe it's just time for another European instance to start up, with admins not in Germany, who feel comfortable hosting this discourse?
  
  Given that the main issue is they're the host for !europe, an alternative comm has been set up at !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- To all you folks who're downvoting this comment: Are you basing your opinion on OP's biased, slanted account of this policy, or did you read the actual post from the Feddit admins? You don't have to answer me, but if it's the former, maybe self-reflect that you're here complaining about censorship and propaganda, yet you're doing so in response to a very propaganda-laden post that misrepresents the actual situation.

121 comments