4d ago

It seems some higher level moderation of communities may be required

lemmy.blahaj.zone /post/21955972

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/22062206

Lemm.ee Conservative Community has had an Elon Nazi salute post up for two days now.
IDK about other people but it makes me feel sick to the stomach being federated with such content. I don't really have any problems with Lemm.ee as a whole but I feel like having an uncritical Nazi salute on the network goes against everything Blahaj stands for.

Blahaj Lemmy Meta @lemmy.blahaj.zone

StarlightDust @lemmy.blahaj.zone

5d ago

Lemm.ee Conservative Community has had an Elon Nazi salute post up for two days now.

lemmy.blahaj.zone /post/21955972

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16 comments

Hi Lemm.ee, and @almost1337 -
Sorry for the late resolution on this. As @JuiceMachine said yesterday, the post is now removed. So is the non-Lemm.ee user that posted it.
Our admin team has a general philosophy to remain as unbiased as possible, and to not over-police content on Lemm.ee. As the sidebar says, the rules are simple. We will typically leave things up and let the downvotes speak for themselves. However I will agree: that post should not have stood for 2 days like it did. !Conservative@lemm.ee might be the most controversial community on this instance, and I feel that we have not been able to properly manage it. This is due partly to technical limitations and several moderation quirks of Lemmy. Specifically: When a user reports a post in a community, the report goes to that community's moderators, as well as the instance admins. When one of those parties resolves the report (with or without action), it disappears from everyone's report queue. That being said, we (the admin team) almost never see reports from !Conservative@lemm.ee. Putting 2 and 2 together, something is definitely wrong.
I want to be transparent about our next steps. At this point in time, we are not planning on deleting the community, but we have removed the mods. Step 1 is to observe the report queue ourselves for a bit, and then make a decision. We don't want to censor unpopular views, and we also don't want to harbor the hateful content that sparked this post. Please continue to report and let us know.
Thank you!
- We don’t want to censor unpopular views, and we also don’t want to harbor the hateful content that sparked this post. Please continue to report and let us know.
  With conservative communities, you don't take this risk by avoiding them. They harbor disinformation and harmful content, even if it isn't expressed in a direct way. In our current context, they are harmful by nature.
  Even if these communities did not exist, we would still encounter their viewpoints (conservative) in other contexts, one way or another. For example, a discussion about unionization in video games within a gaming-related community will still include their views.

You're going to run into this with almost any "conservative" community. To be a conservative, you have to be somewhat tolerant of Neo-Nazis to some degree, with the current way the world is. So you either need a non-conservative moderator or you'll have a situation where the conservative moderator will perpetually be stepping in to say "now cmon guys, we all wanna have fun but the site admins are really specific about not saying the quiet part out loud, so keep thinking it but not saying it"

Hello all, I have been reviewing this post and will first mention the facts I can confirm about said post:
This post was made February 14th at 7:04 AM ET by a user from a different instance
Post was removed by admin EllaSpiggins February 16th at 11:44 PM ET
Post was heavily downvoted, with all comments denouncing it's existence
I cannot see when it was reported, but I suspect it was reported sometime over the weekend and Ella removed it once it was discovered. This is someone who is a common poster in that community and has had no other posts or comments removed here or anywhere else otherwise.
From my perspective, otherwise we don't see a ton of reports from anything in that community. I do wish the post was removed sooner, as this definitely is something we do not tolerate on lemm.ee. Ideally a mod for the community would have seen it and hopefully removed without a report, but they may have missed it or not had a chance to check things. Again, I can't see when something was reported to know if it was hanging out there for awhile.
Now looking currently, I don't see any other posts (at least on the first couple pages) in that community which look to be problematic. I understand the disgust behind this post but we aren't going to remove a community based on one post (that is removed) from a user in another instance. If there are other posts in this community I'm not seeing that are Nazi promoting/sympathizing, violent, or otherwise harmful we NEED to have them reported to take action.
As has been mentioned in another comment, if you don't like the content from the community than you can and should block it from your own view. If the content is in any way harmful or illegal, please report and we will remove it and ban users if necessary. Looking forward to any additional thoughts/comments, thanks!
- From my perspective, the people who are participating in this community aren't even lemm.ee members, but they are by their nature putting an undue moderation load onto the lemm.ee instance. If they absolutely want to have their own echo chamber, then they can create it on their home instance instead of taking advantage of the looser rules here.
  Again, from my perspective, even if they aren't technically violating any rules now, it's just a matter of time before they start to push the boundaries. I expect this will happen sooner if a large number of users block the community, thus drastically reducing the number of people who are likely to report malicious activity who are also reading the content.
  I would rather have them take their content back to thelemmy.club, lemmy.today, lemmy.lol, or lemmy.libertarianfellowship.org than continue to have it hosted here.
- No problem with a community promoting Breitbart, FoxNews etc ?
  Theses sites are respecting the rules ? There is no bigotry, lgbtphobia, etc in them ?
  This is 100% no hurting content ?
  ... Ok good to know.
  
  See another reply above from @beneeney@lemm.ee, now that all of us admins have had a chance to discuss this completely we have made a decision on what actions to take. Thanks!

Have you reported it to admin? That comm is a joke, and in no way represents anyone else on .ee

...Why is there a conservative magazine in lemm.ee to even begin with?
This sounds pretty easy to nip in the bud. With a bulldozer.

Waiting to see, maybe I will have to delete this account too...
That community is a joke. How can we tolerate this ?
There is just breitbart and fox news craps in it.

To be honest, while I would encourage admins to ban outspoken Nazis and those who call for the oppression of others, I would also not call for the removal of the Community itself. Let conservatives have a home here, but be clear about the rules they must follow. Ban individuals, not the community. Those who are not fully bought in to the conservative ideology may benefit from the exposure to leftist content that this widely federated Lemmy instance enables.
That being said, I would definitely hope the admins are monitoring to make sure that Nazism and violence are not being freely encouraged on this platform. The fully bought-in MAGA folks are definitely testing the limits, moving from dog whistles to actual threats and harassment.
For this who don't want to see their content, I would encourage you to block the Community in Lemmy's settings, or in your client. Its super easy and effective, and to be honest I had forgotten I had them blocked until now and had no idea what was being posted!
- The problem with this idea is that lemm.ee does not have strong moderation and content rules, and that is the exact sort of environment that extremism worms its way into and takes advantage of. I don't expect the admin team to have the time to police the community with a fine enough comb to catch all of the bad content, and I don't trust the moderators of any self-titled conservative community to do that job properly.
  These communities are ultimately more trouble than they're worth, and as such I would prefer to see them shunted away from the major servers. Let them build their own hexbear, lemmygrad, or ml. But I don't think that their regressivism and bigotry have any place here.
  
  If you happened to see my previous reply, ignore it, I deleted it... I came back to this post after a long day at work and typed a bunch of shit that made no sense.

https://lemmy.world/comment/15137768
- That’s only effective on the blahaj instance.

16 comments