Today a question about the Israel/Palestine conflict was posted here clearly in favor of the Palestine cause. Many comments were left both in favor of and critical of Hamas. The is not a question about the politics of the actual situation but rather the mods actions around censorship of comments in this community.

From the modlog it is clear as day that the mods removed all comments critical of Hamas from that post. No comments critical of Israel were removed. Furthermore, the reason given was that they were a violation of rule 1. Rule 1 being “No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.”

The modlog contains the actual comments if you would like to see them. None of them are inappropriate with regards to rule 1 in any way or deserving to be removed for reasons other than the mods apparently disagree with the point of view they exhibit. The people who posted these comments were banned as well.

If anything, I would assume this post as a whole would be removed according to rule 2 of c/asklemmy:

Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.

Yet the post is still up and the mods here seem to have clearly chosen a side and instead opted to censor anything they don’t agree with. Hypocritical much?

Regardless of what you agree with or disagree with on this topic, it should be clear that allowing mods to censor otherwise benign comments expressing a legitimate point of view they may not agree with is not the way to a trustworthy and healthy community. Even if you disagree with these comments on this topic, how long will it be before you find yourself at odds with the mods on something else and have your comments removed and your account banned?

Actions like this completely destroy trust in communities like this and put a platform such as Lemmy which is still attempting to gain its footing on even more shaky ground. If I wanted to deal with powertripping mods I could have stayed on reddit. Shame on you all.