My thoughts on Hexbear. Posting as the megathread was locked.
My thoughts on Hexbear. Posting as the megathread was locked.
An album to outline a few comments I have received within the past 3 days:
(content warning: extremely toxic and sour comments, genocide denial)
https://imgur.com/a/d63ohQM
(yes, I cherry picked the ones that are either rude or in denial of genocide. I
had to, or else the list would have gotten too long. If you want to see the
entirety of their replies, you should check out my comment history and click on
each link to see their replies.)
TL;DR: Hexbears deny the genocide against Uyghurs in China. They laugh at and dismiss the idea that China is a dictatorship. Having those opinions is fine, but they personally insult the people with whom they don't agree using annoying emojis and terms like troll, shit, shithead, Nazi apologist, colonial comprador, freak, rabid imperialist westerners, condescending dickbag, disingenuous idiot, unimaginative impotent weasel, losers, etc. They say that other people's claims are rooted in dishonest bullshit. One of them even said, "nothing you say has any value, and you deserve no regard." I would say about 33% of them are overly pugnacious and feed on the misery of others. Federating with them brings us more trouble than benefits. The sheer number of other instances that chose to block them is more than enough to prove this.
As the recent discussion about Hexbear unfold and with the megathread locked, I figured I should make a post detailing my experience I've had recently with Hexbears and why I believe that defederation from them is better for lemm.ee.
Denial of the persecution of Uyghurs in China
Many Hexbears (see the linked album for screenshots of their comments) reject the idea that there is such an atrocity going on in their ideal country (China). They describe such a claim as preposterous. They say that me "lying about the genocide" is the holocaust denial I'm being accused of. Their excuses are basically always one of the following:
- Andrian Zenz, a Nazi apologist, claimed that there is. He is a nazi apologist thus his claims must be false. Therefore there is no genocide in Xinjiang. (More on this later.)
- You can't provide any proof so there must be no genocide. (I can understand not accepting things without proof. I do that often, too. But they are simply not even open to the idea that there might be such a thing happening.)
- A UN fact finding mission once claimed that there is no such thing happening in Xinjiang. Therefore the persecution must be fabricated.
One person admitted that there are vocational schools (more commonly known as re-education camps) but that their purpose are to lift people out of poverty. They also claimed that the large number of women who use IUDs are due to them becoming more educated and they voluntarily to implant such devices to not be used as slaves by men. Totally not forced by the government. Another user even attacked my claims by saying that my claims are based on "racism."
I believe that their idea that the UN does not support the claims of the oppression in Xinjiang is outdated. I strongly recommend Hexbears read this report (at least the overall assessment on page 43) by The UN human rights office (OHCHR) addressing the human rights concerns in Xinjiang from 2022-08-31: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf. A quote from its overall assessment, page 43: (emphasis mine)
Serious human rights violations have been committed in XUAR [Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] in the context of the Government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-“extremism” strategies. The implementation of these strategies, and associated policies in XUAR has led to interlocking patterns of severe and undue restrictions on a wide range of human rights. These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.
I am looking forward to hearing what explanations Hexbears will come up with to prove that this report by the UN, the UN that you once cited, is fabricated and that China is treating its Uyghurs well.
Enough debate about whether the persecution is true. I don't want this post about Hexbear to devolve into an argument about whether the Uyghurs in China are being oppressed.
Ignorance of the fact that China is a dictatorship
Several Hexbears have attacked me for calling China a dictatorship. They label China democratic and willing to listen to the people's voices. They do lots of PR for China. How do they even believe that there is any degree of democracy in a country that regular silences topics on its social network? I have, really, nothing against communism, but I do have a lot against dictatorships, and China is a prime example of a dictatorship. They control what their citizens can see on the Internet, monitor every communication happening through their messaging apps, and often detains, without trial, dissidents who dare to call out the government for its wrongdoings. It's literally 1984. (I actually have read that book, and I am using this phrase in a non-ironic manner.) Yet Hexbears are completely unwilling to accept this fact solely because China happens to fit into the socialist ideal that Hexbears covet.
Ad hominem attacks
Another thing people often dislike about Hexbears is that they often resort to ad hominem attacks when they can't win an argument. Just in the last 3 days, I have heard the following terms thrown at me: troll, shit, shithead, baby brain, Nazi apologist, colonial comprador, freak, nerd, rabid imperialist westerners, condescending dickbag, disingenuous idiot, and unimaginative impotent weasel. They love calling people names.
In addition, one user repeatedly claim that my comments are made "deliberately to start shit." Another said that "my opinions does not deserve to be heard" in response to me saying that my reason for leaving so many comments is just to voice my opinions. One even said, "Nothing you say has any value, and you deserve no regard."
At least 20% of Hexbears are immediately hostile and condescending toward people of different opinions. This behavior is unacceptable, and I'm pretty sure that it breaks almost every Lemmy instance rules ever, as well as Hexbear's Code of Conduct: (emphasis mine)
We will ban you if you insult, demean or harass anyone. That is not welcome behavior.
(I am also certain that this is a violation of two lemm.ee's rules: no abusive language and no bigotry. Just in case you didn't know (because I didn't know either), the definition of "bigot" is "one who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ." (emphasis mine))
Nevertheless, I have yet to see mods removing those insults, much less banning anyone. I have reported some of the provocative comments, yet none of them seems to have been removed. It seems like the mods does not really care whether anyone outside Hexbear or those whose ideologies they don't agree with is insulted. I guess that anyone only includes Hexbears. I also invite people to view my comment history to judge whether what I said deserved mistreatment like this. I would say no, but don't take my word for it. Please, do check it out yourself.
To quote our admin @sunaurus@lemm.ee:
Just as we remove bigoted content from lemm.ee, I have also witnessed bigoted content being removed from hexbear.
I don't think that the bigoted content on Hexbear are being removed quickly enough, if at all.
False Nazi apologist labeling
In my recent exchanges with Hexbears, I have also been called a Nazi apologist numerous times. This is a really serious allegation, so serious that I felt the need to give it a section of itself in this post. For what I have been called a Nazi apologist? A quote from one of my comments (note that it was not edited):
[Zenz] is a liar and Nazi sympathiser
I just clicked that link and, wow, that tweet was quite stupid. He should not have said that. What the Nazis did was unexcusable. However, please keep this in mind - that being a Nazi sympathizer does not automatically invalidate one's opinions on other topics.
Basically, what happened was that the post I linked to for the purpose of backing up my claim that there were genocide happening in Xinjiang, happened to heavily cite Andrian Zenz. At the time of writing that comment, I did not know that Zenz was a Nazi sympathizer. After a few hours, some Hexbears pointed it out, and I sent the comment quoted above as my reply. I think I have made it pretty clear that while I condemn Zenz fatuous remarks on Nazis, I still believe that his observations about Xinjiang are not necessarily incorrect. However, numerous Hexbears gripped on to this point and repeatedly attacked and slandered me for defending Nazi apologia or outright claiming that I am a Nazi apologist.
I did not defend Nazi apologia or Nazi apologists. All I did was defend the claim that there is genocide going on in Xinjiang. Yet Hexbears seemed to very much swallowed the disinformation that their fellow comrades were spreading.
"Nazi apologist" is a really serious accusation and should not have been used so rashily by those Hexbears. The fact that they even had the audacity to claim such a thing before reading my original comment is another sign that Hexbears are generally too eager to argue. I strongly condemn their behavior and facetious remarks.
If this doesn't sufficiently prove that a sizable portion of Hexbear is aggressively toxic, I don't know what will. Therefore, I am in full support of defederation from Hexbears. (I was once actually against this (just 10 days ago), but guess what changed my mind?) The admins of Hexbear have shown little to no interest in removing hate speech on their platform. (I believe that they removed the hate speech targeting our admin mostly for show.) Sure, there are some thoughtful users there, but I am afraid that they will have to ask their admins to solve the problem at hand—toxicity toward others. When the admins one day succeed in putting a stop to the burning hate speech there or when Lemmy devs add the feature for blocking entire instances a feature to users (whichever comes first), maybe we can then consider refederation.
If anyone actually read through the entirety of my long ass post, thank you.
Response to the Hexbear Federation Megathread
To our dear admin Sunaurus,
First, I want to thank you for your dedication and effort you have spent on this instance. I appreciate how much you have contributed to the community without expecting much in return.
I have read through the entire post titled Hexbear Federation Megathread (not including the comments obviously). I understand that you want to keep a freer federation policy and do not want to defederate from anyone easily. However, I still believe that the benefits of federating with them does not outweigh the hate speech they bring.
If we judge any larger instance only by bigoted posts that some of its users make, then we might as well declare all instances as cesspools and close down Lemmy completely. I believe it’s far more useful to judge instances based on moderation in response to such content.
I would argue that the percentage of bigoted posts on Hexbear is significantly larger than any Lemmy instance, including lemmygrad.ml. Take these two instances as a comparison. They share pretty much the same ideology, but people on lemmygrad.ml are generally more kind to other people. Let's look at an example. @johndoe@lemm.ee leaves a comment "oh no they are increasing the tax rate? what are they even using my money for?" on some post. The typical lemmygrad.ml response would detail why they are increasing tax rates. The typical hexbear.net response, though, would sharply criticize @johndoe@lemm.ee's comment and use needless, rude questions to point out that of course the government needs more tax.
This is also why defederation from Hexbear would not "result in the flattening of opinions" on news communities, as some have suggested. We still have lemmygrad.ml.
As you too have seen, there were 1906 comments on that megathread before you locked it and deleted some (36) comments. By viewing the same thread on another instance that has defederated from Hexbear, we can know that there are approximately 1400 of those being from Hexbear. Don't you think that this is a bit ridiculous? That a post on lemm.ee has more comments from another instance? You probably locked the thread for the same reason.
As to the Kremlin propaganda, I agree with your concerns about it. In a way, this is just like me worrying about the Chinese propaganda that China is very democratic, so I can fully understand your feelings. They just keep insisting that those countries are fine because they are socialist. If this isn't bigotry, what is?
However you decide to approach this sticky problem with Hexbears, I want you to know that I am very appreciative of your work.
Edit 1: at time of writing a user also posted the following remarks:
Edit 2: some people don't seem to know what "megathread" I was referring to. Here is a link: https://lemm.ee/post/4543536
Edit 3: as I kind of have expected, Hexbear users are casually ignoring the proof they have been asking for the whole time of the persecution toward Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In case anyone missed it in the post, here it is again: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf.
Edit 4: some Hexbears noticed my proof. And now they are attacking the fact that I am calling it "genocide" but the report did not. You are talking as if you always knew that there were persecution against them in the first place but you chose to turn a blind eye to it.
Edit 5: In reply to Edit 4, I just realized that the group of people who acknowledged the proof I provided did not refute my claims of the persecution in Xinjiang in the first place. Sorry.
Edit 6: At 2023-08-28 14:20 (UTC) an admin decided to lock this post due to the increasing number of reports. In general I am glad about this because this spares me from the hundreds of replies that I probably will get in my inbox tomorrow morning if it were not locked.
Edit 7: As @impiri@lemm.ee pointed out, there was an unpaired parenthesis in my post. I just fixed it. Looking back at that sentence reminds me of Lisp code.
Edit 8: To anyone who didn't know what Hexbear: if you judge them to be not that toxic after reading the comments on this post, please keep in mind that the admins of lemm.ee have removed some of them.
Edit 9: Fixed a grammar error.
Edit 10: Look at Hexbears making fun of 9/11: https://hexbear.net/post/567620
You collected over 40 screenshots of people on a forum you don't like and made a huge post of multiple paragraphs with citations.
I want to say this in the most polite way possible. This isn't healthy at all. If you're not having a good time on a forum, just don't talk to people who you vehemently disagree with. Or just go outside. You shouldn't be obsessing over internet arguments for days or weeks.
You're just going to have live with the fact some people disagree with you and you're not able to change everyone's mind.
Genocide in China: "Well sure there's no actual evidence but you need to take seriously the idea that it could be happening anyway. This nazi guy has a lot of interesting things to say and I don't think we should hold rabid white supremacy against a guy when he's telling you about how evil the Asiatics are."
The idea that you're a nazi apologist can be gleaned just from a close reading of you complaining about being called a nazi apologist.
Buddy. You need to learn how to take an L in an argument without turning it into your whole personality.
I applaud OP for the the citations and research. I appreciate his linking to the UNHRC report, but nowhere in that report does it mention "genocide". I'd honestly like people to compare it to multiple UNHRC reports on US treatment of its black population.
I'm no expert, maybe China is taking an overly heavy hand in Xinjiang. But to call it a genocide when no evidence exists for mass killing, and when the US war on terror lead to 5 million actual deaths, is absurd projection and and diminishes the value of the word "genocide".
Hexbears deny the genocide against Uyghurs in China
Denial of the persecution of Uyghurs in China
human rights concerns in Xinjiang
China is treating its Uyghurs well.
Uyghurs in China are being oppressed.
It's a weird thing to lead a discussion with the term "genocide", and then use it interchangeably with all these others terms, getting noticeably less precise the deeper into your post.
Also:
They control what their citizens can see on the Internet, monitor every communication happening through their messaging apps, and often detains, without trial, dissidents who dare to call out the government for its wrongdoings.
This is America, lol.
So you stumbled into radically left wing instance, badly prepared and as soon as you encountered some sourced pushback ignored it and engaged in extremely hostile behaviour, yet it's the hexbearians who were rude and should be defedded from?
Just look at your comment history, how much of it was actually defending your position and how much of it whining?
okay but here's the thing - you commented on cth. what did you expect
this is like going on to 4chan /r9k/ or /pol/, being offended, then writing a letter to your isp saying "can you block access to 4chan for your customers"
don't ask lemm.ee to defederate, just block the community
also the megathread is probably locked for a reason
You came into a place with people way more knowledgeable than you on worldwide politics and history, kept saying "No you!" till people got rightfully fed up with your willful ignorance in the presence of people earnestly trying to educate you and shat up the place. So yes, of course it devolved into people mocking you, just like they probably will for making this thread whining about the interaction that you deliberately sought out by going into that space and spouting off some of the most common liberal misinformation on the internet, then closing your eyes to the people trying to correct you.
For anyone interested, this is what this person is leaving out
The previous Hexbear thread was locked after an initial productive discussion, because the thread turned into nearly constant insults and attacks (and this from users of all instances, including lemm.ee). It was creating massive moderation workload, and I think locking the post was preferable to asking admins to spend huge amounts of free time on handling reports.
This post seems even more likely to devolve into the same kind of attacks, and if it does, then it will also be locked. Let me be clear that arguments over which government/media/researchers should be trusted are totally fine on lemm.ee, as long as these arguments don't turn into name calling, abuse, and harassment.
OP: Please always report comments that harass you. If you find that community mods are not dealing with those comments, please stop participating in that community (for future reference, if such a community is on lemm.ee, please definitely also report the community to lemm.ee admins).
I know that walking away from an argument is extremely difficult, but in the threads you linked, there is an irreconcilable disagreement about which sources can be trusted, and most participants seem convinced that they have the full picture and know all the facts. I have a hard time remembering any time when such a discussion has lead to anything valuable. In fact, I think such discussions inevitably lead to the worst kind of low quality insults and trolling from some of the most aggressive posters in any community.
While I know there isn't a consensus on this topic among lemm.ee users, I personally don't think defederation is the correct approach, especially after reading through a lot of lemm.ee user comments about the topic recently. I think user-level instance blocking will solve the problem for most users who are not happy with this.
Just a side-note: the way some people casually throw around the insult "nazi" is completely ridiculous (and I don't just mean hexbear users here - I've seen it from users of many instances - but it seems to almost always come up in any thread about hexbear). In my opinion, this only serves to weaken the memory of crimes against humanity that nazis committed. If anybody reading this finds that they often call others on Lemmy nazis, maybe have a deep think about whether you haven't been participating in softening the meaning of "nazi".
I read the tldr
From what I'm reading it seems you just don't know how to block people and move on. Don't let words get to you my guy. At the end of the day that's all it is. Words. They cause 0 physical harm. Just block and move on.
There’s an unclosed parenthetical about 0.6km into this post
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TL:DR you lost an argument and want to make it everyone else's problem.
No thank you, I made an account on this instance because I felt like world was going too far with defed.
This is why instance blocking as a native client feature is needed. I am aware some apps such as Memmy, which I use, implement it in a 3rd party way. However it’s clearly not easily done for everyone in all situations. Defederation is going too much toward an echo chamber; inability to have enough control over the content you see is also an issue.
Personally I see value in having access to misinformation via lemm.ee; it is useful to know all perspectives when that is helpful. However, I don’t wanna see that shit everyday.
Long story short: I think for now, block accounts and communities or use an app with instance blocking. Wait for instance blocking to be native. That’s my 2 cents.
I think instance level blocking from the user side is coming soon™, so that should help if you want to avoid us.
In general I don't think taking internet arguments with strangers so seriously is helpful or healthy. And before I get accused of hypocrisy, I've called out dunk tank posts on hexbear for similar reasons.
Hexbear is a toxic shithole
I suppose the parallels to this being a shitty plagiarized version of "Iraq WMDs" from 20 years ago, conveniently involving a Muslim-majority province of China with known oil reserves above that of Iraq, major BRI routes running through it, deposits of lithium and other minerals, ETIM and ISIS activity (and known US involvement) until 2016, are all purely coincidental then?
Xinjiang was actually largely left behind and destitute until Xi Jinping became chairman in 2013. Widespread poverty and neighbouring Afghanistan under fire from US and UK bombings also didn't help matters. Since then, according to the Xinjiang White Papers, there is no metric suggesting anything resembling a genocide. Wages, life expectancy, literacy, living standards have all increased. There is plenty of Uyghur culture on display in China, a HSR connects Xinjiang to the rest of China from the city of Urumqi (though a route should be alao extended to Aksu and Kashgar IMO) and they still learn not only their Uyghur language, but Mandarin on top of that and job skills, allowing them to better integrate with society at large. Agruculture is also being mechanized throughout China, including in Xinjiang. The province is still one of the lower-income ones, but living is cheap and it has not been "poor" for several years now. I've heard people say that Xinjiang has the best food, so there's also that.
Oh and allegedly, the people in Xinjiang are among the most anti-West in China. If that's true, gee I can't imagine why...
I really don't understand lemm.ee policy here. Hexbear is clearly a SPAM instance, but because they spam under the guise of leftist principles we're just gonna let it slide. If explodingheads was this active and this toxic they would be de-federated 100%. Hexbear users brigade and spam every thread including this one. Being actively hostile, launching bad faith arguments. Don't engage with these turds, just block and move on. We NEED instance blocking or lemmy is fucking toast.
Your personal crusade against Hexbear is very very very amusing. Please continue.
So, are you or are you not a Nazi apologist then?
Enough debate about whether the persecution is true. I don't want this post about Hexbear to devolve into an argument about whether the Uyghurs in China are being oppressed.
This is a pretty ridiculous thing to say, right after relitigating the whole discussion. You deny the genocide being carried out by Denmark against the Danes (which I just made up), but I don't want this to devolve into a discussion about that so let's just close it there. See how unfair that is?
That's not how it works. You don't get to lob accusations at us and then say we're not allowed to defend ourselves from your allegations. This post is very much acting in bad faith and engaging in crybullying.
The fact is that you can plainly see in this user's post how we've caused them to walk back their claims by raising legitimate criticisms. They're now admitting that their primary (afaik only) source alledging genocide is a Nazi sympathizer, and now the criticism has changed from "Denying a genocide that is definitely happening" to "Being overly skeptical about the possibility that a genocide may be happening. This to me proves that we've raised valid points and don't deserve to be deplatformed.
If I were debating someone who was denying the Holocaust, I would not have to move one inch, because the Holocaust is very well documented and well established. The homework has been done, the case indisputably proven, and the only people who deny it are Nazis and Anti-semites. But what OP is trying to do is to skip past the part where they actually have to collect that kind of evidence. The world they're trying to build, whether they realize it or not, is one in which politicians need only say the magic word of "genocide" to rally everyone to support aggression - just like they did in Iraq. And we at Hexbear consider that to be an extremely dangerous norm to set.
Additionally, equating claims with dubious evidence to something well established as the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust trivialization, for which OP has been correctly called out for. Once again engaging in crybully tactics, they came to our instance and accused us of being equivalent to Nazis, and then when we turned it back around on them, they run off to teacher to whine about how it's "a very serious allegation." Don't dish it out if you can't take it.
I fully expect that posts like mine will be used as evidence that we're hijacking the thread with political discussion. But this discussion is the primary reason why OP is calling for defederation. But despite this, they "don't want this post about Hexbear to devolve into an argument about the Uyghurs." Once again, they want to jump straight to the matter being settled without discussion or consideration of evidence.
@randint. Lemm.ee admins are now dealing with multiple reports from this thread. In reviewing the conversations they are heading off topic and some have become arguments and abusive. As such I will be locking this post now before there is either further escalation of more significant levels of reporting.
Is this for real? This is the funniest shit I've read all day. You can't be serious lmao
I don't know which of you folks is doing this, but your "impersonating the world's most clueless and brainwashed liberal" bit has gotten way too elaborate.
being a Nazi sympathizer does not automatically invalidate one's opinions on other topics
lol. lmao.
ok Bardfinn
I like the idea of defederating with instances like this. People gripe about creating rifts between users but like, are we really labeling the trolls calling everyone else trolls as “honest users”? lmao
They can have their own pissing contests in their own living rooms. It shouldn’t be our responsibility to field their fucken CCP sponsored bullshit in any random comment section because “it should be the user’s choice what content they see”. This is a cop out.
Defederate now, you can always refederate later when user filters are a little bit more fleshed out. As it stands you’re just encouraging their behavior by giving them a ticket to act with impunity, and they’re really loving the high horse.
Hexbear is literally just nazis who discovered how to be facetious. Nothing genuine comes from that shithole. They don't even discuss anything, just push blame for their hardships on "white western liberals". They have to stick together and bully their way out of disagreements because their "points" lack reasoning.
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Instead of crying for defed, move to an instance that already has.
I’d recommend just blocking the troublesome communities, I do find that there are occasionally good posts on some of their communities. Hexbear comments get pretty goofy though.
Can we stop with calling for defederation shit, it's kinder garden.
Why don’t you just move to an instance that blocks anything that hurts your fee-fees? Why do we all have to be dragged into your petty drama?
I choose lemm.ee specifically because of the conservative defed policy.
Left vs right, commie vs capitalism, West vs Rest, Nazi vs Zionist: these are not things I want someone else filtering for me. The only things I want defederated is spam and illegal content.
Fuck echo chambers.
