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Swasticars
89 readers
6 users here now
A community devoted to mocking Tesla and their Nazi CEO until Tesla decides to dump the Nazi or the share price tanks completely.
Post memes, news articles, photos of unfortunate events and protest pics here. MAGA and Musk's fanboys are NOT welcome and will be banned on first post or comment.
founded 8 months ago
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I suppose most of you came to Lemmy because you'd had enough of Reddit. Maybe you thought Reddit sucks or is poorly managed? Didn't like certain changes there? Maybe you got unfairly banned or suspended? Maybe Lemmy was your backup plan, or still is? In my case, it's a backup for when my Reddit account eventually gets permanently banned. By the way, this will be a long post of text. Fair warning. I know people don't enjoy reading these days. Sorry.
As of this writing, I'm on a 3-day ban for supposedly encouraging harm or violence, which I didn't do. I'll add the photo of what I got banned for at the bottom of this post. I'm currently waiting to see how my appeal goes. While my account there is only a few years old, I've only really been using it for the past 200 days or so. In that time, I have had my account suspended three times, all of which were successfully overturned on appeal because I didn't actually break any rules. And in all cases, the reason for the wrongful suspension/ban was for "encouraging harm or violence." I have also had seven warnings, all but one were successfully appealed. All this in 200 days. Hmm....
So this is a thing that keeps happening. And it happens because there are no bigger snowflakes than MAGA and Musk supporters. The so-called free speech party is anything but that. To be fair, it's not actually my speech that is an issue for them. It's me, personally. So they trawl through my post and comment history hoping to find anything that they can report to Reddit's admins which will be taken out of context or completely misunderstood. I know this, because comments that had been up for months and months without issue have sometimes been the ones they reported.
Sometimes the bans or suspensions are done by automation, a bot - meaning that no human looked at the potentially violative content. This is bullshit of course. For a bot to automatically suspend you, it requires many bad-faith reports from different accounts. Targeted harassment like this is almost always organized off of Reddit, usually some "conservative" Discord or some other non-public forum safe from the prying eyes of Reddit's admins. Anyway, these incels clearly have nothing better to do than to harass others and try to get people's accounts banned. They get off on that petty and juvenile shit.
Anyway, as I mentioned, I just got another ban. Surprisingly, I hadn't had a warning, suspension or ban in about three months until today. They had been happening about once per week on average. I haven't changed what I typically post -- anti-MAGA, anti-Trump, anti-conservative and anti-ICE stuff mostly. The only change I made was blocking all of the moderators of a certain conservative sub. That really seemed to make a difference in lowering the harassment I get. Go figure!
And I never comment, post or vote in any of the pro-MAGA, pro-fascism subs. I stick to my friendly subs. Today's offending comment/image that got me banned was in a sub that tracks what ICE is doing. I made the comment five days ago, in response to a group that is identifying ICE agents, and that group's websites are constantly taken down by the actual Nazis in the US government. And sub moderators and Reddit admins keep taking down posts that mention the Ice List or provide a link to it.
Truth be told, I'm not a fan of social media, and I'm including Reddit and Lemmy as social media. These are my only social media accounts. I don't have accounts at or use any other services like Twitter or Facebook, Threads or Bluesky. I won't be heartbroken if I can't use Reddit any longer. I find it useful to a limited extent, much bigger audience generally, but many of the restrictions are asinine. Those restrictions leave no room for nuance or context. Admins consistently fail to use proper discernment. It's impossible to explain that nuance or context of your banned comment or post when appealing a ban because you get ONLY 250 characters to appeal. They purposely hamstring your appeal defense. Sure, they're busy, they've got tons of appeals to go through, because tons of people are getting banned every fucking day. Maybe the problem is the ease in which people get banned, with far too many of them undeserving of being banned to begin with? Maybe? Maybe it's Reddit's bullshit reporting system being abused by bad faith actors? Maybe?
I've not encountered any of this harassment on Lemmy. The things I've posted to Reddit I've also posted here. In fairness, the userbase here is far smaller than Reddit. The worst I've had here on Lemmy is the same users who downvote practically every post I've made here. Eventually they'll get bored of that, if I don't get bored of posting here first. I'll probably get bored first.
My real issue isn't that Reddit restricts free speech, which it absolutely does and we can discuss forever whether they should. It's that Reddit has consistently sided with the Nazis and billionaires when deciding which speech it is going to restrict while allowing far right extremists to carry on advocating for actual violence against others. People were getting warned and banned for even mentioning Luigi Mangione's name, or posting up Super Mario Brothers gif images that Reddit freely supplies to all users. Why make that choice if not to support the very same people who are making everyone's life worse? What concerns me most is that people can't freely organize against the fascists. Fuck, even the Eat The Rich sub on Reddit doesn't allow comments that use the word the "revolution" out of fear of losing their sub, because the Reddit admins demanded it. That sub also started moderating posts and comments about Luigi, including several of mine. It's absurd. People do need to talk freely about fighting back against the Nazis. And if they can't do that, then we must assume that those online services support the Nazis.
Speaking of Nazis, the image I posted on Reddit follows. As you'll see, it is a WW2 propaganda poster that someone photoshopped and put a red hat on it. It doesn't advocate for violence. It advocates for defense from those who seek to be violent: fascists, Nazis, Proud Boys, MAGA.
The original WW2 poster can be seen here.
I know this was unnecessarily long, and I know that few people will read all of it and even fewer will care. The TL;DR is that the fascists are succeeding in part because Reddit and other social media are enabling them. And we have fewer places to post about what is happening with candor. At which point will these sites let people organize a proper defense against authoritarianism and fascism?
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