Feddit.org admins have responded to the recent controversy about the pro-Israel censorship on [email protected] and elsewhere on their instance. I thought I’d repost it here for greater visibility (since it’s posted in a mainly German language comm). Also, there’s a fair bit of comment removal going on in there, and the contents are not being shown in the modlog, so it’s a bit hard to tell what’s being removed and how it’s affecting the discussion.
TLDR: They stand fully behind the mods of [email protected] and their actions (Edit: Because the law, or at least the way the law is being enforced, says they have to)
[email protected] mods have also spoken up: https://lemsha.re/feddit.org/post/12550375 (https://feddit.org/post/12550375). Their stance seems to be “We live in Germany, and we don’t want the cops breaking down our door. Here’s some examples”. And that’s totally reasonable, I get that and if I lived under that law I’d be behaving the same way. The question then is, should the biggest europe-centric comm be hosted and modded in such a way that criticism about one of Europe’s most powerful nations isn’t allowed?
Alternative Europe-centric comm, if you’re looking for something censorship-free: [email protected]
You can find their post here: https://lemsha.re/feddit.org/post/12529640 (https://feddit.org/post/12529640)
Previous post about their behaviour: https://lemsha.re/sh.itjust.works/post/37918115 (https://sh.itjust.works/post/37918115)
@[email protected], let me know if this is outside the boundaries of this comm and I’ll move it elsewhere. I’m mainly posting here as a follow up to the previous post.
Quote of their post follows:
Hello everyone,
in the last few days there have been some accusations against the moderators of [email protected] as well as against our admin team of being Nazis or Zionists, mainly because of the way of dealing with criticism of Israel.
We explicitly reject these accusations and will not tolerate such accusations. In particular, people who accuse others in this way without any concrete objective reason are not welcome on feddit.org. This is already covered by our rule of respectful interaction.
First of all, we would like to remind you that the use of feddit.org must be compliant with the rights and regulations of the DACH region. This is explicitly mentioned in our instance rules, and includes Germany (D), Austria (A) and Switzerland (CH). The infrastructure of feddit.org is maintained by the Fediverse Foundation, a non-profit association in Austria. Our Admin team, which takes care of the instance wide moderation, organization and supporting infrastructure operations, is based in Germany. Since we primarily target the German speaking coutries, we also try to comply with laws and regulations of Switzerland.
Even if we do not have to actively search for violations of the law, it is necessary to intervene after becoming aware of them. This includes, for example when moderators or admins receive messages about posts or comments, but also when such content is discovered by chance when browsing Lemmy.
https://www.wko.at/internetrecht/providerhaftung
In the case of “hosting”, the service provider has limited liability if the provider
- has no actual knowledge of specific unlawful activities or content and is not aware of any facts or circumstances with regard to claims for damages from which the unlawful activity or content is obvious, and
- as soon as it obtains this knowledge or awareness, takes swift action to block access to the illegal content or to remove it.
Relevant criminal offenses include the following:
Legal instruments against the dissemination of anti-Semitic statements or statements condoning terrorist acts of the German Parliament (German)
excerpt, unofficial translation
Translated through deepl.com. May not be fully accurate from a legal perspective.
- From 2.1.1 Criminal condoning of criminal acts
According to Section 140 No. 2 StGB, anyone who publicly condones certain types of unlawful acts listed in Sections 140, 138 and 126 StGB in a manner that is likely to disturb the public peace is liable to prosecution. Such related offenses include murder (§ 211 StGB), manslaughter (§ 212 StGB), genocide (§ 6 VStGB), crimes against humanity (§ 7 VStGB), war crimes (§§ 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12 VStGB) and aggression (§ 13 VStGB), but also various offenses directed against sexual self-determination or personal freedom…”
- From 2.1.2 Incitement to hatred
Pursuant to Section 130(1) StGB, anyone who, in a manner likely to disturb the public peace, 1. incites hatred against a national, racial, religious or ethnic group, against parts of the population or against an individual because of their membership of a designated group or part of the population, incites violence or arbitrary measures or 2. attacks the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously denigrating or defaming a designated group, parts of the population or an individual because of their membership of a designated group or part of the population"(…)”1. distributes or makes available to the public any content (Section 11(3)) or offers, provides or makes available to a person under the age of eighteen any content (Section 11(3)) that a) incites violence or arbitrary measures against persons or groups of persons referred to in letter a), or c) attacks the human dignity of persons or groups of persons referred to in letter a) by insulting, maliciously denigrating or defaming them, or 2. produces, obtains, supplies, keeps in stock, offers, advertisements or undertakes to import or export content referred to in number 1 letters a to c (§ 11 paragraph 3) in order to use it in the sense of number 1 or to enable another person to make such use of it.”
- From 2.1.3 Incitement to hatred related to crimes under international law
"As of December 2022, the new criminal offense of incitement to hatred related to a crime under international law was introduced in Section 130 (5) StGB. According to this, it is a criminal offense to publicly condone an act of the type specified in Sections 6 to 12 of the German Criminal Code against one of the majorities of persons specified in Section 130 (1) No. 1 of the German Criminal Code in a manner that is likely to incite hatred or violence against such a majority of persons and to disturb public peace…”
- From 2.1.4 Formation and support of terrorist organizations
Pursuant to Section 129a(1) StGB, “(1) Whoever establishes an association (Section 129(2)) whose purposes or whose activities are directed towards 1. murder (§ 211) or manslaughter (§ 212) or genocide (§ 6 of the International Criminal Code) or crimes against humanity (§ 7 of the International Criminal Code) or war crimes (§§ 8, 9, 10, 11 or § 12 of the International Criminal Code) or 2. offenses against personal freedom in the cases of § 239a or § 239b (…), or whoever participates in such an association as a member ”
- From 2.1.5 Disseminating propaganda material of terrorist organizations and using their emblems
“Finally, it is also a punishable offense to disseminate propaganda material of terrorist organizations and to use their emblems (Sections 86, 86a StGB).”
Section 130 Incitement of masses
excerpt, unofficial translation
Translated through deepl.com. May not be fully accurate from a legal perspective.
(3) Whoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or downplays an act committed under the rule of National Socialism of the child indicated in section 6 (1) of the Code of Crimes against International Law in a manner suited to causing a disturbance of the public peace incurs a penalty of imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or a fine.
(4) Whoever publicly or in a meeting disturbs the public peace in a manner which violates the dignity of the victims by approving, glorifying or justifying National Socialist tyranny and arbitrary rule incurs a penalty of imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years or a fine.
Some further links, mostly in German:
- Public approval or condoning of criminal offenses (Germany)
- Hate and Incitement in Criminal Law (Germany)
- Guidelines for the Prosecution of Antisemitic Crimes
- Working definition of antisemitism
- https://www.bundeskanzleramt.gv.at/kampagne-gegen-antisemitismus/fragen-und-antworten/antisemitismus-im-internet-moegliche-rechtliche-konsequenzen/moegliche-strafrechtliche-folgen.html (Austria)
In this instance, we fully support the moderators of [email protected] to potentially remove too much rather than too little in case of legal uncertainties.
One of the triggers for the current debate is this post, which followed the removal of a comment comparing National Socialism with the current situation in Israel, which can be considered a trivialization of National Socialism. Such statements can, among other things, lead to imprisonment. Among other things, the post claimed that the removal had a Zionist motive, an accusation that should always be supported by appropriate evidence and prior to which it should be ruled out that there are alternative explanations.
We will not be removing every comment that goes even remotely in this direction, but we reserve the right to permanently ban users from feddit.org who make unfounded accusations, such as labeling our instance, admins, moderators, or other users as Nazis or Zionists, without substantial supporting arguments. This is especially the case when this is recurring behavior and not an isolated incident.
This includes content such as this post by @[email protected], who was banned from our instance shortly before that post due to multiple incitements of violence and terrorism. This person also seems to be the admin of the instance quokk.au, or at least to have good relations to the admin, since we received a censure on Fediseer from quokk.au around the same time, in which we are being accused of being Zionists and Nazis, and @[email protected] has suggested [to defederate quokk.au from us].
If this censure by quokk.au is not withdrawn in a timely manner, we will defederate quokk.au from our side for these unsubstantiated and untrue accusations. quokk.au is a relatively small instance with only a few local users, which tried to build an alternative news community that is not on one of the “big” instances. Unfortunately, this community also seems to be a poor alternative if this is how their admin typically acts.
:::
I’m going to let this up, since it might affect future posts in YPTB. But I think we need some sort of [tag] to assign to these posts to make them easily findable in the comm. It can’t be
[]since that should be about comm-internals. Any ideas?[Instance]?
Since it looks related to the jurisdiction of a server and not a community
Hm, probably something that can encompass both 3rd party instance and comm matters
[instance and community]
[Discussion] or [General]? Anything that’s not about specific incidents.
I feel this is more of a topic on the moderation practices of a different comm, should have a more specific tag. [comm meta] or [comm policies] perhaps
How about just [Policy]
I’d go with the latter, since the former seems open to confusion (and overlapping search results)
Why not keep it simple and use [comm]?
I’m trying to prevent confusion with topics about this comm
Politics and legal?
I suggest anything re mods or admins of feddit should be tagged [Arrogant_Kuntz]
if i were feddit.org i would probably be asking everyone to migrate to another instance
I saw this the other day and in that time I immediately deleted my account on Feddit.org. I’m not going to associate myself with this server if they are going to uphold and support Zionism. I don’t care if it is for German law or not. Also their whining and complaining about defederation is laughable and makes them seem more petty than lemmy.ml, who didn’t whine and complain and threaten counter defederation when they got blocked by any of these other servers.
This is a historic moment because it’s the first time that a server I’ve joined has ended up becoming one of the few servers I actively work to embargo however I feasibly can.I’m personally not a fan of the legal situation, but you can’t mod or admin from prison and evading a country’s law is pretty hard in the long run if you live in that country.
The question then is, should the biggest europe-centric comm be hosted and modded in such a way that criticism about one of Europe’s most powerful nations isn’t allowed?
You can discuss whether this legal situation is wrong or not and whether the German government should support certain countries, though, if you don’t include stuff like “you’re a nazi/zionist/etc.” (usually unhelpful, anyway) or “this country should be destroyed” (I don’t think it’s super necessary for discussing Germany, unless you also want to destroy Germany).
That said, I agree that it’s probably better to move English-language discussions of that topic to a different instance; German law enforcement is pretty gung-ho on that topic and frequently breaches the law itself.
I don’t think they realise I can’t see any messages from them as we de-federated days ago. As for the record, I am not @Deceptichum but I rarely use Lemmy and trust their input here and what they’ve shown me is validation enough.
The fact that Feddit.org is more upset about the comparison to Nazi’s than they are for allowing genocide deniers to exist on their instance is reason enough for our position to continue. If Feddit.org can show serious systematic changes in how it deals with its hate speech problem, we may consider changing our stance in the future.
It is only hate speech if the Israeli genocide is questioned in any matter not approved by the clown German regime 🤡
I had some completely unrelated issue with those mods. But it led to me abandoning and blocking that community.
Being a mod is not easy. No everyone is fit for it. I’m bot specially harsh as I, myself, am not fitted to be a mod.
There’s not shame in stepping back if things got out of hand. If things are going so complicated, specially with severe legal issues involved, and potentially a lot of people not happy with the way they do things, maybe is better just to stop and let others try to mod an EuropeanCentric community.
I’m going to go and try [email protected] I’ve always felt great affinity with how decisions are made in this instance, so I’m hopeful.
I’ve added feddit.org to my personal instance block
TLDR - We were just following orders.
Germans gonna german.
I blocked their instance. I did comment on that post, and the replies weren’t worth responding to. They can argue the granular details of what Zionism is, and is not—I don’t care. I could be factually incorrect in my replies (I am human and capable of error) but I still stand by them. At the end of the day, it’s not worth the time and effort to engage any further with them.
I’m going to get back to the leftist memes and shitposts, just as god intended.
I still stand firmly with the people of Palestine, and hope to be able to support them further from here on out. I don’t have any extra money to donate, nor do I have the time to be able to go out and protest (I work 3rd shift and have to sleep during the day). But I will try my best to do more.
The Palestinians deserve for their voices to be heard loud and wide. Fuck Israel, free Palestine.
So that the gist of it is that they’re doubling down on the Zionist apologia and the IHRA definition of antisemitism basically. And are trying to frame all the issues as some trolls making accusations against them instead of something to consider. Good to know.
Just so everyone is aware I made a [email protected] community thinking this might happen. If you want a Europe community that isn’t run by Zionists or an instance committed to an actively Zionist policy you should check it out.
Also IMO as much as @[email protected] may cause issues, if Quokk.au wants to defederate that is their admin’s decision and trying to blame another user because their admin chose to defederate is disgusting and childish. Shame on Feddit.org for acting like children on the playground calling someone else a “tattle-tale” for getting actioned by admins after being called out.
There’s already a [email protected]
I started [email protected]. Which is probably a better choice since europe.pub is also "commited to enforcing German law and will probably face these same issues in the future when the truth and reality inevitably disagrees with German Zionist Law.
From europe.pub’s TOS:
Content illegal under Austrian, German, or EU laws (e.g., child exploitation, incitement to hate, or terrorism advocacy) will not be tolerated.
Good point.
None of this addressed the locking of post regarding the current genocide with 0-1 posts.
They are actively removing the ability to discuss, regardless of opinion, Israel’s genocide and only Israel’s genocide.
None of this addressed the locking of post regarding the current genocide with 0-1 posts.
That was previously explained here: https://slrpnk.net/comment/15701097. I think it made things worse, but hindsight is 20/20.
They are actively removing the ability to discuss, regardless of opinion, Israel’s genocide and only Israel’s genocide.
That is true. For legal reasons, so the blame should fall on the govt of Germany, but true nonetheless
This is using “for legal reasons” very broadly, too broadly and shifting any accountability away from the moderation.
If entire country cannot be discussed “for legal reasons” on a large Europe community then should be a strong justification to move the community to somewhere that it is not a problem.
Have you read the post? There are 3 things you cannot say about Israel:
- Israel is as bad as the nazis
- Calling for the (violent) destruction of Israel
- The slogan “From the river to the sea”
Anything else has zero risk and can be freely said.
The first one is objectively speaking a hyperbole so it’s not necessary for discussions. Use any other genocide to draw a parallel to such as the US’s genocide of the indigenous population. The second one can be interpreted too vaguely but you’re save if you just put the word “peaceful” anywhere when advocating for a one state solution. The third one is a slogan that shouldn’t be banned but is, so just don’t say it.
Yes, this law is too broad and designed to criminalize discussion about Israel. In a moderated forum this law is trivial to follow without changing the message behind any comment.
If entire country cannot be discussed “for legal reasons”
Sir, that’s called censorship and this is a Wendy’s
so the blame should fall on the govt of Germany,
Is that what everybody said last time? At the Hague and whatnot?
I’m not going to condemn people for choosing to follow the law while they live there and without knowing the context of their situation. The law is what has to change.
Rubbish.
Edit: to clarify, law is being used as an excuse here. It doesn’t need to change, it is feddit admins who need to change.
Shocking that Zionists would double down on the genocide. Just shocking!
Unheard of even!
Maybe we can ask the ADL if Palestine has humans worthy of life next. Surely we’ll get a the default and sane answer of “What? Yes of course.”
Oh so they aren’t Nazis and Zionists, they’re just poor little cowards who so scared they support Nazis and Zionists.
“We’re not Nazis and Zionists, we just platform them and censor anti-fascists and anti-Zionists.”
Feddit is now one big Nazi Table.
Specifically feddit.org
also .uk
Dear admins of feddit,
Instead of suspending overeager mod and apologising, you have doubled down.
If you are afraid of “police knocking to your door” (which is moronic by the way), what about removing these cretinous mods and migrating the community to another instance? I suggest the one you mention in your post.
an accusation that should always be supported by appropriate evidence and prior to which it should be ruled out that there are alternative explanations.
where is the evidence that the law was broken. I guess not
we fully support the moderators of [email protected] icon Europe to potentially remove too much rather than too little in case of legal uncertainties.
So they concede they censored it after all… Actual post for readers to review:
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/80186c3d-fad5-4003-b2be-fe3dd34701d0.png
So at least we now know that zionist censorship will be permitted on the server. People can make up their own minds on this.
This includes content such as this post by @[email protected] avatar Deceptichum , who was banned from our instance shortly before that post due to multiple incitements of violence and terrorism.
Red herring to distract from the original censorship issue and root cause of this entire drama.
As predicated, this response was done in bad faith to either cover up clown behavior ie unified front type thing for an org or because they are in fact Zionist enablers. We really can’t tell as of now.
TLDR. Citation of the laws does not mean that the law was violated. They conceded original comment was censored. This is the same shit that happened with lemmy.world and luigi…
another regime front propaganda server detected: feddit.org
I don’t support de-federation since i don’t support unnecessary censorship but these people will need to be monitored, with time it will become obvious if they are in fact Zionist
For purposes of disclosure: i had a ran in with them last year and coped a ban for calling out German oligarchy as being nazi nepo baby heavy. pretext for censorship was “tone”
