A user posted the question What opened your eyes to what’s happening in Palestine? on !asklemmy@lemmy.ml.
As is evidenced, multiple comments have been removed by mods. The Mod log shows the moderator removing multiple of these comments due to “rule 1”, which on lemmy.ml is:
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
The mods then also banned some of the commenting users for a few days.
This all lead to a post by one of the affected users to AskLemmy, accusing the mods of “removing all comments critical of Hamas”. “No comments critical of Israel were removed”, the user alleges. The post has since been removed by the lemmy.ml mods as well and the user banned for 14 days.
It does. I have experienced it myself. The Mods have themselves stated that there is no freedom of speech in lemmy.world.
Additionally, because many people have an incorrect understanding of it: Bias is not exclusive to any specific individual or group of individual. Every individual and group of individuals has bias. All Human Beings have bias of one form or other and that is simply because the Human Conscious is a reflection of the Material Conditions and is not independent from it.
I guess as always, users need to assess how the moderation of communities fit wit their own views, and change communities/instances if needed.
You are correct, and therefore there shouldn’t be freedom of speech for the sake of it in any social media platform worth going to. “Free speech” ignores the values of respect, ettiquite and gives plenty of room for trolls and flamebaiters to play games with moderators. Seems like a nightmare for a server operator to manage.
To have a place where people can have level-headed discussion about topics including controversial ones, certain ground rules need to be set, which inherently are limits to speech. If you don’t like the rules or how they are enforced, the freedom that you have in Lemmy/the Fediverse is to move to another server in line with what you think are better rules/rulers, or for you to bother with the moderation work yourself in your own community on your own server where no one tells you what to do.