I took a 2 month ban from worldnews@lemmy.ml
There was no message to say a ban had been applied. I messaged a mod to say I had trouble posting and asked if there was a ban applied. I got no response.
I eventually spotted there is a modlog, and low and behold it mentions I was banned for 2 months for antisemitism. I have to say I found this appalling.
When I dug further it turns out that I gave a reply to someone asking why the phrase “from the river to the sea” is considered antisemitic. I replied that is considered as referring to the genocide of the Jews in Israel. I gave a newspaper article link that showed a Labour MP who was removed from the party for using the quote.
The comment has been deleted, there was no information given regarding the ban, there is no point of reference to contest the ban. It is crass beyond belief. I am extremely insulted that someone gets to label me antisemitic for something that is very evidently not, and then hide behind an unbreakable barrier.
Edited to remove one sentence. It stated I would leave all Lemmy instances. Context in comments below.
Second edit: I finally got a moderator to respond to this.
from @OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
You reported antizionism as antisemitism. You did an antisemitism.
Your source to support your claim also relies on antisemitism and the conflating of Jews and Israel.
I guess this is a community to ignore. Thank you for the responses. I will not respond to anymore here.
My response was:
Thank you for your response. Your community your rules. I made a post to try and get my head around this idiocy last night.
I will not use your community again.
EDIT: please update the ban log to reflect this. There is a huge difference between your reasoning and antisemitism.
Hey, I’m the mod that banned them.
I’ve made it very clear that equating zionism with jewishness will not be tolerated.
It is antisemitic to equate an antizionist slogan with antisemitism, because equating jewishness with zionist settler colonialism is literally tied with the “jews are foreign agents” nazi bullshit.
Let’s roll with your interpretation that the slogan is solely Antizionist. That would make the poster misinformed and incorrect; in this situation, the right thing to do is to talk with the poster, informing them, while checking their profile for potential Antisemitic activity. This also works great when the user is not rational (i.e. a bad faith agent) because it gives you better grounds for a ban.
Another issue that I see is ban length. A short ban is great as a warning, or to tell the user to cool their head; while permaban is great when you want to convey “we the mod team do not you here, fuck off”. A two months ban is the worst of both worlds.
I talked to them and they doubled down, I believe my judgement based on their activity was correct.
Long bans because the massive amount of calls for genocide and antisemitic bs because of the escalation of genocide in gaza mean we don’t want to have to deal with people immediately coming back. Give people time to cool off.
Sorry for the wall of text.
I honestly do not think that your judgment was accurate in this situation, and I think that you jumped the gun; the poster sounds genuinely clueless. However I’m fully aware that I don’t have full access to all the info necessary to conclude shite here.
Large bans don’t decrease your workload, they increase it.
Trolls and bad faith agents might wait for a short ban to expire, but they won’t wait for a large ban - they’ll evade it with an alt account and call it a day, and now you’re playing whack-a-mole with them. With a permaban at least you’re telling them to fuck off, even if they won’t listen.
For more sensible users, the large ban is unfair, and conveys “we still want you here… but we’re too lazy to deal with you thing right now, so shoo”. Other users are not blind, they will notice that the mods overreact to rule infractions and they will avoid reporting things, except for petty reasons. Now you’re bound to fine-comb threads manually to enforce the rules because nobody is reporting shite.
Either way, you’re doing more work than you would otherwise.
A better approach here would be to contain content prone to trigger rule-breaking comments. Megathreads work like a charm for that; they allow you to fine-comb a single thread instead of the whole community. It also helps to bring up the content diversity of the community.
Another thing. I do agree with you that automatically tying that chant to Antisemitism is itself Antisemitic; however you’re taking for granted that all users are on the same page when it comes to that, and both of us know that the media is spamming them with misinformation that conflates Israel with Jewish people. In those situations it’s better to issue an official statement, explaining what will be considered Antisemitism for the sake of rule enforcement. (It helps to inform other users too.)