If I understand it right, the moderator of the mastodon.world instance has blocked several posts by Hasnain Kazim, as Kazim reported yesterday on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/661473263/posts/10163657720033264/

Kazim is a quite famous and successful book author in Germany and something between left, conservative and liberal. He was journalist for the most important German weekly news magazine Spiegel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasnain_Kazim?wprov=sfla1

Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated. To me from the external perspective it seems that the moderator is abusing his power. He is damaging free and respectful discussion. Furthermore, when a famous person like Kazim reports those experiences to his broad audience, who do not understand the functioning of the fediverse, the moderator also damages Mastodon in general significantly, it seems to me.

What do you think about this case ?

  • AmidFuror@fedia.io
    135·
    6 days ago

    It’s not misinformation if it is true but you don’t like the implications. You can argue that it is not valid to draw conclusions about the attitudes of people in the world based only on those people (or bots) leaving comments on news articles. But it’s not misinformation to say that’s what you saw or that it concerns you if it is actually true.

    • Solar Bear@slrpnk.netEnglish
      21·
      4 days ago

      But it’s not misinformation to say that’s what you say or that it concerns you if it is actually true.

      I’ll contest this. You can misinform people using only the truth. Information can be entirely true and still lead to you being misinformed without necessary context.

      I don’t doubt there are people celebrating murder in Arabic. My problem is that I see people celebrating murder in English every time I open Twitter, but nobody writes that article about English-speaking comments. Selective reporting can misinform people by providing a biased and limited set of information that is otherwise completely factual and true.

      Everybody sitting here pretending otherwise leads me to believe that the point was to misinform, but this misinformation confirms many people’s biases so they’re fine with it.

      • AmidFuror@fedia.io
        2·
        3 days ago

        There’s a difference between comments celebrating murder existing and them comprising the majority of comments.

        • Solar Bear@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          Sure, but go to any English conservative Christian community and you’ll see similar posts, but we don’t get big fearmongering posts about that. We don’t get big write-ups about /r/conservative posters celebrating the ICE murders and how their beliefs are incompatible with Western liberal democracy, even though they are exactly as incompatible. We’re literally living with the consequences of those beliefs right now, while people are still writing hyperventilating posts about theoretical consequences of similar beliefs.

          All I’m saying is, selective reporting is misinforming, especially when there’s more pressing matters. People have a bias against Muslims and hold them to standards that our own religious groups don’t even meet. I’m not arguing that they don’t hold bad beliefs, they absolutely do. I’m saying we need to deal with the same beliefs that already exist at home before we start worrying about that. Or at the very least, start painting with a broader brush and include all of it, not just the easy to pick on groups.

      • AmidFuror@fedia.io
        61·
        6 days ago

        Just curious if you’ve surveyed comments in Arabic in international media articles to determine their sentiment or you just know it can’t be true that they celebrated murders.