this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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People's Court

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This is a community for Lemmygrad users and admins to discuss administrative issues in a more transparent manner

founded 2 years ago
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The owner has locked it to only allow them to post. That's fine, but all posts they've made so far they've also locked at zero comments to disallow the community to interact with those posts.

This goes against the purpose of lemmy(grad) in my opinion which is interaction and discussion. If the person behind this wants to post static things without feedback they'd be better served by hosting a website and hoping people stumble on it.

It's one thing for admins to lock posts at their discretion because of an nonconstructive turn to discussion or because it's an announcement and they don't want fighting over their rules that they've decided on. Likewise for mods to not allow comments on a rules post or shut down discussion when it becomes unproductive.

The content is also somewhat sketchy feeling. I admit it's true that there can be issues with female on male relationship violence not being taken seriously but such statistics are often pushed to silence and tamp down on the overwhelming societal issue which is in fact male on female violence within and outside of relationships. To shout down feminists with "men can be raped too" is like shouting down black lives matter with "all lies matter" or "white people experience police violence too".

Honestly it rings alarm bells. There's nothing wrong about talking about gendered violence towards men and boys, but this site seems to frame it in terms of persecution, in terms of there being some sort of feminist agenda to silence and shut down discussion on these matters.

Take for example this link from the blog this community models itself on: https://thetinmen.blog/we-are-not-violent/

In it they feature researchers who claim they received bomb threats, had their dogs shot, were shouted down by feminists. All of this rings alarm bells in my head that these people are likely reactionaries using progressive language as a cover. It uses the classic reactionary tact of claiming repression. They claim to have studies showing female on male violence in families being equal to male on female violence. Which is on its face a dishonest framing. Sure women may shout (verbal abuse) and with dishonest twisting of terminology you can over-count aggressive but not actually violent or dangerous behavior and use it to try and equal out men who give women black eyes. But you can't hide the homicide rates and those show us that women and girls are far more frequently murdered by men and boys than the inverse.

Once more, it's not that gendered violence towards men and boys doesn't exist, it's that gendered violence towards women and girls is much more severe, prevalent, has within our lifetime been the subject of tv-tropes and jokes (slapping a "hysterical woman" to calm her down as just one example) and has more severe consequences such as girls and women being attacked, seriously injured, and even killed.

Rape against men and boys is unacceptable, coercion for sex is unacceptable. But the fact is men and boys are the overwhelming committers in volume of sexual violence on women and girls that is actually physically violent, forceful, etc. Men for the most part merely feel a social pressure on their status to agree to sex with women, that they'll be less of a man if they don't agree. Every request from men and boys towards women and girls carries an implicit fall-back of violence, even lethal levels of it for rejecting a male, for denying them sex, intimacy, a relationship, etc and women and girls live with that every day, every encounter in the back of their minds. While such violence towards men and boys does not define their lived experiences, they do not naturally due to a felt prevalence assume that denying a girl intimacy, a relationship, or sex will likely result in her escalating to violence and the potential of bodily harm and danger.

Not taking that reality, that material and historical reality into account when discussing gendered violence makes one dishonest.

The site is evasive in what it talks about, it frames itself as for progressive rights of men and boys and what woman can oppose that? Not I. I'm all for men having conversations about healthy masculinity, reform, male solidarity that isn't to the exclusion of women but looks like support for men by men. But it feels off and the fact the owner has locked any ability to discuss it also adds to the ringing alarm bells. Truthfully if they hadn't done that I wouldn't have spent 10 minutes looking over a few things there and realizing it felt sketchy.

It seems like a lot of this sketchy stuff is papered over and hidden between bland, no analysis, uninteresting, unenlightening, surface level feminist-friendly stuff like roe-v-wade being overturned being bad but then just throwing some statistics out and not really getting into any analysis or insight.

Here's an example of more problematic stuff: https://thetinmen.blog/just-be-you/

"I want to define myself by who I am. Not as a feminist, an MRA or egalitarian, as left, or right, liberal or conservative."

It's alarming that MRA is mentioned as a possibility as if egalitarian which is used by the manosphere to disguise their hatred of women.

And one last one: https://thetinmen.blog/soft-power-and-the-henpecked-husband/

Which seems to downplay the power and reality of patriarchy.

I don't want to get too into the weeds of the content and it's merits. Because even if the content were incredibly uncontroversial and in no world could be considered sketchy or one-sided, even if it were something we all agreed upon as Marxist-Leninists just by our nature, the lack of ability for discussion is in my opinion against the intended nature and function of lemmy.

If you're going to post something here you have to deal with people replying, even disagreeing with you. You don't have to respond, you don't have to even look at their responses if you don't want to, you can chuck something out there into the feed and then ignore all discussion. But others should be able to.

I ask admins to consider whether this content should be here and whether this community should exist given two separate issues:

  1. The locking of the whole community against interaction and just using it as a posting board for someone's stuff which seems counter to lemmy's intentions and function.

  2. The questionable content present

edit 13 hours in: Since looking more into it since I wrote this post I have changed my mind. I was too conciliatory in my language. So let me be clear. I think this rises to a case of global rules violation, hatred, misogyny and the OP and sole moderator should be appropriately sanctioned. No benefit of the doubt is deserved given the language they used on the sidebar about the stuff they were posting being useful

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Not a lemmygradder, but I agree. Literally all of the "very useful infographics" are manosphere talking points, and the source blog is clearly just MRA propaganda wrapped up in a coat of false progressive paint. The deliberate refusal to allow discussion is clearly an attempt to take advantage of the shortcomings of lemmy's algorithm to force reactionary content onto lemmygrad users without any ability to shout it down. Posting that shit would catch you a permaban on Hexbear, and I'm surprised to see it handled any differently on the 'grad.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Our blueprint is that users are allowed to create communities and then moderate them as they wish (within site rules and some soft limits), as there's more than enough communities to go around. The process works, because if there's a suspicious forum being created the community comes together to discuss it like here and takes a collective decision!

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (1 children)

collective decision

What are we? Communists???

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

hexbear is more authoritharian than us joever

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not handled different per se. Probably just unnoticed or waiting a few posts to see what it turns out to be.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

My rationale here is intentional locking of not just the community to only the single moderator and poster but also all the posts themselves indicates on the balance they knew what they were posting was wrong, against instance rules and so on and intentionally used such locking as an attempt to prevent these posts from blowing up into critical discussions that would turn against them, get them called out, and get the whole thing shut down and thus a sign of knowledge it was wrong, and active attempts to evade the rules.

And as such that this offense should be considered not an accident, not a little boo-boo, not a tiny little mistake from someone new to this, not a learning experience, but intentional, bad faith, malicious against our users and thus not deserving of any leniency that might be shown someone who had allowed engagement. Not deserving of any benefit of the doubt as it were to any explanations they might offer.

I think it shouldn't matter if the person who posted this comes in here, red paint on their hands sobbing how they didn't know and apologize which is like the thief caught in their den sobbing to the police only then that they knew it was wrong, not of genuine desire for repentance but part of a cynical strategy to appear remorseful and lessen punishment.

Additionally, the sidebar describes the content as "useful" that's a positive connotation, not neutral, not critical. They can't claim they were meaning to post this as dunking content because 1) it's against site rules to create another shitreactionaries say community and 2 their sidebar and lack of their own commentary (I have archived the sub in case they change this) indicates they agree with it. The sus nature of the locking takes even the questionable and defensible parts I think into criminal territory. Much as trying to hide or destroy evidence often indicates a guilty mind at work.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I don't want to agree with this, but I think you may be right, I very much would be willing to accept a "I'm sorry I ~~got caught~~ tried to do this." sort of excuse, but that's probably far too soft. I seem to be going to bat for this much harder than most under the idea that it was possibly supposed to be against this particular source that they keep posting, but if that were the case, why ban comments?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

As one of the users who interacted the most with this person I have to recognize that you are completely right here. Creating a whole new community supposedly about violence against men when there is already a community for that, locking it so that only him can make posts and comments, then proceeding to post whatever that shit is without any possibility of push-back, not to mention his immediate antagonistic and accusatory tone and hiding behind "no u"s when confronted and the fact that he IMMEDIATELY deleted his account without bothering to try to make a case for himself after being caught... all of that is just too suspicious. We are a safe space for oppressed minorities in an oppressive world, we can't afford to give benefits of the doubt when this much against him.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago

Did not take me very long from learning about the existence of this community, to agreeing wholeheartedly with you. I feel that putting controversial content up and locking discussion is as bad faith as you can be.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago

Absolutely, community has to be removed. It is definitely part of the mysoginy pipeline targeting disenfranchised men.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Based on the discussion here, we decided to remove that community. Thank you to everyone here for doing work in researching what this was about.

o7

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I wonder what prompted the OP to make a community dedicated to reposting stuff from a blog that has been inactive for 2 years. How did he even come across it?

Anyway if you're reading this demoncracy, please keep all this in perspective. These are just posts on a niche online forum. This will all blow over soon either way so please please please take care of yourself.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

I was wondering about that one. I wanted to ask some questions about why it was being shared, but you know, the comments were locked. I think sharing questionable sources is fine if people want to discuss them, but not allowing discussion implies that they aren't comfortable with that discussion (like the person posting this knows this isn't a good source, and fears people pointing that out).

I would personally move to have it no longer have locked comment sections, and clear and appropriate discussions about the source in question (perhaps even a disclaimer) at the top of every shared article. We can still learn things from awful sources, even if the thing we are learning is "how awful sources will twist and manipulate language and sympathy to sound more reliable"

EDIT: I'm now thinking the community should be deleted, and not just simply opened up to comments. It adds nothing and is just posting manosphere crap masquerading as leftist content, with no sign of criticism or analysis of that content. Adding comments won't help, as we already have shit reactionaries say for that sort of stuff.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

We can still learn things from awful sources, even if the thing we are learning is “how awful sources will twist and manipulate language and sympathy to sound more reliable”

The question really becomes "is that actually the case tho", I feel. Which, I have my doubts; but the last time I got my dander up about a community that was around here, it turned out to be a total necro that somehow had made its way back into trending.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

No, this one is being posted in actively by the sole moderator of the community, it's one person sharing these articles for unknown reasons, because they don't allow discussion.

EDIT: I'm not saying you're wrong about this being disingenuous, I'm saying that I don't know the motivation here and don't want to jump conclusions, but it is looking more and more like you're on the money.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The sidebar literally says "This is community solely for reposting their very useful infographics."

Useful. Useful. That's a positive connotation. Not that this despicable shit they're posting, not that they're dunking on them, not that it is trash (which already belongs in shitreactionariessay) but that it is USEFUL.

And what's sad is if they hadn't been so obvious we'd have a lot of people giving them the benefit of the doubt when they wouldn't if this person was doing anti-BLM racist dog-whistling instead of sexist dog-whistling, if this person was doing anti-trans dog-whistling they wouldn't get any benefit of the doubt and I'm asking they not get any here given the strong evidence of intent with the locking to prevent feedback.

I wish people wouldn't give this person the benefit of the doubt. If you're going to post content from a place to a dedicated community you created, using lemmygrad resources to rehost it and then denying others the opportunity to critically engage with it, you'd better be damn sure that it isn't reactionary, isn't hateful, isn't against site rules. If it's questionable, ask others, simply allow engagement like every other damn community on the website.

I really do not think evasion on technicalities and "oh I didn't understand how this worked" should work here. You don't get to claim to be a smol bean not good at running a lemmy community person when the content in question is hateful and the evidence against you is this bad. It doesn't matter that devoid of all context it may be fine. Devoid of context, "all lives matter" sounds fine, in light of BLM however we know what it really is. It'd be like posting suicide statistics of purely CIS people, not elaborating, a few times mentioning trans people and insinuating they get too much attention and just continuing to post that and insist you just care about cis people and they need a voice too because the voice of the trans people is too loud. The voice of men in this conversation must start with acknowledging clearly that women are disadvantaged by patriarchy, that women suffer the most from gendered violence.

It's cherry-picking to sew a narrative whose unspoken implication is "those feminists hate men, we need to talk less about women's problems and more about how much it sucks to be a man".

Since looking more into it since I wrote this post I have changed my mind. I was too conciliatory in my language. So let me be clear. I think the moderator should be permanently banned.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

I'm being more lenient than most because the admin seems to be very young, and so I would say is better off being corrected and informed of their inappropriate behaviour rather than being kicked out entirely. But ultimately it is the admin's decision as to what they would like to do. It isn't our community's job to tolerate toxic ideas and give forgiveness to people supporting them, especially if they're aware of their support being something our community would disapprove of (as the inability to comment seems to indicate).

From what I understand of the admin of the community, they are trans, young and have quite a lot of hangups and issues that they are working through in not particularly healthy ways, I'm worried that kicking them out entirely will deny them a potentially vital lifeline, though I do agree that the community should be banned (and if they continue to showcase support for toxic ideas they should be kicked out too). But I think my red line is a bit looser than a lot of other people's here. I think it is better to make it clear this behaviour is unacceptable rather than kicking them out outright, but if they are kicked out I would respect that decision, I understand why people would want that.

They still haven't commented here about their rationale, but have posted multiple times in their community since then, so I'm becoming increasingly convinced that they know what they are doing is wrong and are hoping it flies under the radar. I suppose in my circumstance of not banning them, they could try a similar thing in the future, if they did, I would firmly support a ban.

EDIT: Fogor words

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

For what it's worth, I agree with the sentiment here. This community should definitely be banned and deleted, but banning the user entirely might not be necessary just yet.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thus they must agree with the articles is my contention. They agree, they know others do not agree.

Further it is against site rules to post shitreactionariessay type content outside of that community. This is also not that, it is posted uncritically by one person trying to spread the message and viewpoint of the blog. It's like if I share a bunch of Nazi memes about black people and crime without comment, in a community I created exclusively for that purpose, that is stated to be for that purpose and not only do I not critically comment on them but I lock the comments to prevent anyone else from dunking on them. What's the difference between me at that point and an unironic Nazi trying to spread their propaganda? The answer is none, distinction without a different.

This is misogynist propaganda, it violates the cardinal rules of the site. It was obviously done this way to prevent feedback, dunking, etc. As such the originator should not get the benefit of the doubt. I have no doubt they will if confronted claim ignorance, claim they only saw some good bits, make up all kinds of excuses that sound plausible enough and I am calling on the admins of this instance if they believe the blog referenced to be misogynist, to be MRA, to be reactionary or to have such content in any amounts to do the right thing to protect users and not accept excuses however finely tailored but to act and remove this person permanently. Just as they would if it was crypto-homophobia, just as if it was crypto-racism.

The locking of comments (and posts to a lesser degree) IMO is a slam dunk indicator of intention to not allow criticism or discussion and when posting reactionary content that already violates the rule against posting outside of one community for that, shows that by virtue of not criticizing such content, not offering explanation, and not allowing others to critically engage with it, only to engage with it on the terms of the dubious authors that they agree with it.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (7 children)

I suspect the locked comments thing is a mistake as the sidebar explains it's only supposed to be posting that's locked, to allow the community to function as a kind of blog. That said, after seeing the first couple of posts in my feed, I've been ignoring the community and hovering over the block button as it doesn't seem to be Marxist content and that's what I'm here for.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The evidence with the locking of all these posts shows in my mind that the OP knew what they were posting was wrong, reactionary, anti-Marxist content and was afraid of being called out on it. That in my mind cinches it over from just someone being ignorant and posting bad stuff that they're not knowledgeable on or maybe are holding over some reactionary views from before becoming a communist to the fact they KNEW it was bad, and wanted to hide that, didn't want to be called out, wanted to sneak it in without discussion and that in my mind should take this kind of offense from a slap on the wrist and an assignment to be educated to a permanent ban for intentionally trying to spread this stuff knowing it was against instance rules, knowing it was bigotry, knowing it was reactionary and trying their best to keep it going for as long as possible by lowering ability for people to critically engage.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I agree that they likely knew this was reactionary content and didn't want a response calling them out on that, but do you mean banning the user's account entirely, or just removing the community? I'm fine with the latter, not fine with the former before the person posting this content explains their rationale behind this. (Though if they refuse to do so, it is probably because they know it is because they just don't want to be called out.)

If this is the people's court, I do think that people doing things like this should explain themselves and their actions, rather than the rest of us assuming the worst. (Though obviously if their defence is a backhanded non-answer or they don't reply at all, we probably will be forced to assume the worst.)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (26 children)

Inviting @[email protected] to make their case before a decision is taken.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Really nice of you to bring this up. 100% sus, the admin joined Lemmygrad, idk, like a week ago and immediately started pumping out these posts. This needs to be investigated

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

This may come accross as rude but I swear, online socialist communities never fail to attract the weirdest people.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

I'm finding that community and its admin's vibe just off. Hard to pinpoint what's wrong, but i wanted to add to the general feeling.

Somehow, it doesn't feel like it belongs here.

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