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 ?

This post says who he is and that he got banned from mastodon.world, but it does not say what he posted there before getting banned.

The .world network is not known, in general for having unconventional rules or heavy-handed moderation. Without more information, I have to assume he posted something that would get him banned a lot of other places too.

Relevant: pinned post.

Yeah I’d be curious about context, too.

thx.
This case, though, goes beyond a simple case of annoyed users.

Kazim is a bestselling author from Germany, carrying a CNN Journalist Award.
He says he got canceled because his posts were not appreciated by the mod.
This case concerns the basic working and ethical principles in the fediverse, I would say.

That's disappointing to see people who could attract people to the fediverse leave it and with bad memories.

It's in the bottom right of the screenshot that shows his complaint:

Der „Moderator" hier hat allen Ernstes diesen Post von mir gelöscht:

Ich habe gerade Leserkommentare mehrerer internationaler Medien durchforstet. Die große Mehrheit der arabischsprachigen Kommentatoren feiert den Täter von Berlin, die große Mehrheit feiert seine Tat. Und das ist ein sehr großes Problem.

Deepl translation:

The “moderator” here actually deleted this post of mine:

I just went through reader comments on several international media outlets. The vast majority of Arabic-speaking commenters are celebrating the Berlin attacker; the vast majority are celebrating his act. And that is a very big problem.

"Leave 'big tech' platforms, they're abusing their influence. Come to fediverse where power tripping mods abuse their position instead!"

That's his version of events that he's showing to his audience. People who get banned from things often share a harmless-looking excerpt when that's not really what got them banned.

It would be good to have the whole context before reaching a conclusion.

What difference does it make that he is a bestselling author?

Ist halt ne wirklich dumme Verkürzung der Tatsachen, und wenn man sich so die Mehrheit der Kommentare in deutschsprachigen Onlinezeitungen anschaut dann könnte man auch denken die AfD hat 90% Zustimmung.

Ich vermute mal der mastodon.world Moderator hatte keine Ahnung wer dieser Typ ist (ich hatte auch noch nie von dem gehöhrt), aber hat dauernd (vermutlich nicht ganz unbegründete) Beschwerden wegen Islamophobie bekommen.

Edit: ups, sorry, I mistook this for a German speaking com.

It’s just a really stupid oversimplification of the facts, and if you look at the majority of the comments in German-language online newspapers, you might even think the AfD has a 90% approval rating.

I’m guessing the mastodon.world moderator had no idea who this guy is (I never heard of him either), but kept receiving complaints (presumably not entirely unfounded) about Islamophobia.

is there public mastodon modlog?

Ja bin ich dabei, ich kenn den Spiegel seit >30 Jahren inzwischen und hab noch nie von dem Typen gehört.

Nope. Take it to !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Yeah I mean, durr. We knew from reddit et al that this'd happen, and since here it's not a central platform it'll be more so. Everyone is their own little dictator, after all.

The issue is more that people talk others into going into the fediverse in particular to avoid moderation abuse on bigger platforms. You do, but you only avoid facebook moderation abuse if you leave facebook. So long as you go anywhere else, you'll get moderation abused there, sooner or later. The mod abuse is just a natural element of it, unless we'd get a publicly (as in, the people, not a single individual or entity) owned system.

That a tiny minority might have heard the name before ("bestselling" really doesn't mean as much as some people think).

I think "allen Ernstes" is more accurately translated "in all seriousness", not "actually"; so: "the moderator here, in all seriousness, deleted...".

https://www.spiegel.de/impressum/autor-4dd37b50-0001-0003-0000-000000002702

Maybe I am too dense to get this, but how exactly can you be between left, conservative and liberal? Is that being centrist?

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding still of how the Fediverse works.

Any instance, mastodon.world for instance, is NOT Mastodon itself. Mastodon is JUST the software that was chosen. Each instance is allowed their own rules. Each community is allowed their own rules within the instance. If you get banned, think of it more that someone has asked you to leave their home and doesn't want you there.

We have to get away from these ideas of that every instance of Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever completely reflects the entire Fediverse.

This comes with a big caveat. I think the world still sees us this way. And I think we HAVE to do a better job of, "This is a platform and if you're banned you're gone." Instead we should help folks understand, if you're kicked off an instance, there are a dozen others. There is a community for everyone. Hell, run your own or ask and folks can run one for you.

I will 100% disagree with a LOT of folks on a LOT of issues and I'd never want to host socials for the majority of folks. BUT I will absolutely defend your right to exist on the Fediverse and even help you, to a point, set up your own instance. But everyone needs to be mindful, that those places can and will still ban you. But you can at least get your message out to your community.

I don't know what was said as I don't speak German. I also don't know why he was banned. But that is .world's right to eject anyone from their community they don't want. If the person decides to leave and not come back at all, that really sucks. But they also have the right to start their own community and continue interacting.

I've banned someone from TubeFree.org. I've blocked folks. I've refused to allow someone to create an account on TubeFree.org. Am I censoring someone? Maybe, but I'm attempting to build a specific community.

I'd absolutely LOVE to see any of these big instances have communities start their own instance. We shouldn't have monoliths in the fediverse. The more diverse the network, the better. Honestly I'm trying to help communities run their own for their own community. I've even been talking with folks and attempting to work with folks on a spin up your own image to run from a business or home that is plug and play.

We NEED people to run their own, control their data, manage this themselves. We're not there yet, but I honestly think someday we will be and everyone will just have a presence on the Fediverse. A community blocks you? You won't even notice because YOU control YOUR digital identity.

Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated.

This is not an objective fact but an opinion (whether well-substantiated or not I cannot tell). I am not clicking on a Facebook link to learn more, so thank you for adding some additional context here.

There is also a !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com community that will certainly agree with you that anything done by a .world community moderator is by definition wrong.

As for myself I have no opinion on this currently, but only questions like banning one person does not make a place authoritarian/fascist but a pattern of such events would. All that this post says though is a complaint about the one person - again, whether justified or not I have no idea, as other commenters here are likewise saying, we simply do not currently have the facts to be able to judge properly.

Not at all. Audit log with moderation decisions technically exists, but is visible only to admin and moderator, and contains only actions by local staff.

Yeah dunno. Did they follow instance rules? It states inflammatory posts need a Content Warning and I can't tell whether the author is in violation of the instance CoC or following the rules?! Seems there is no such warning on the screenshots. We could probably ask the admin or mod in question. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it wasn't... We don't really know any details besides how Kazim thinks they've being wronged.

He has made the same original post on Bluesky as well. So you can probably see the other posts he has made.

Interesting article about him here — https://www.dangerousspeech.org/counter-speech-case-studies/hasnain-kazim

He’s doing Mastodon a favour. He can always return to anywhere on the fediverse. Complaining that one moderator on one Mastodon instance was mean isn’t news, but maybe it is if it’s a journalist. Good for him.

Unfortunately, his account has been suspended, not freezed (which would retain the account - but simply prevent him from using it), so he cannot migrate his followers to another instance.

Also unfortunate, that a pick-your-poison moderation policy choice remains apparently a brand new sentence for any "normie".

Anything can be a bannable offense when someone is enough of a little internet fascist. Probably won't kill the fedv off entirely but is damn sure not a selling point for anyone not already here.

"Hey, you know the people who get all officious and pissy about the tiniest atom of your every utterance? No, not the altright, the ot- yeah. How would you like to go discuss shit on a forum where half the major instances act like that? No, not Reddit, you wouldn't have heard of it as it's pretty niche for some reason. No? Yeah, didn't think so."

That was the only article I could find about him too.

It gave plenty of examples of him trolling bigots, almost nothing about him being a journalist except something he did for a student paper as a teenager

It seems very likely that he was fucking around and got banned for trolling.

Thanks. The selection of texts makes it clear that he has slowly moved from being a serious journalist to a pundit that publishes mostly opinion pieces that cater to conservative and latently racist audience and are likely also attempts at rage baiting left-liberals. Basically an opportunist exploiting the "also show the other side" bias of liberal media like the Spiegel and I would not be overly surprised if his next move is to support the far-right (the AfD is very open to opportunists with migration history or LG(BT), like Alice Weidel).

Buddy...

No one has to let anyone else post on their instance...

If the mods didn't want them on a community, or admins didn't want them on their instance, that's their choice.

Like, there's ~10 million "mastodon" accounts, over half on Bluesky, and only like 10k on mastodon.world.

This isn't a big deal

Yes but the banned person running their own instance will likely also be defederated...

Common Mastodon L

Because Mastodon is a predominantly leftist platform, they'll always be doing stuff like this.

People's first impression tends to color how they view something. Fair or not, the first Mastodon instance you join tends to affect your view of the software, and the Fediverse as a whole.

If people tell you to join a social media website, and you get treated poorly when you join, why would you want to stay on that website's social network?

I don't see anything in the Bluesky posts I would expect to get moderated on a .world server. Odd.

Yep. But I'm not sure what Centrism is, exactly.

In America's Overton Window, Centrism typically means Classical Liberalism, while eschewing far-left mindsets like Marxism.

Yeah, the "mastodon.world" framing is.... not good.

When I first made MULTIVERSE, I made the URL piefed.soulism.net. Then, I changed My mind. Now it's multiverse.soulism.net. I am not offering people piefed. I'm offering people MULTIVERSE. We have our own branding, our own mission, our own values, our own rules. I have no interest on selling normies on the idea of Piefed. I wanna sell them on MULTIVERSE. MULTIVERSE is not piefed.

But lemmy.world is lemmy. Mastodon.world is mastodon. They do not represent themselves, their own values, their own meaning-making. They represent other projects. And I think that's dishonest and kinda boring, and kinda bad for the fediverse.

They banned him for trolling bigots!?

Come to MULTIVERSE! We love left wing trolls! Come sign up and tilt some bigots!

american?

One can have many different views on political decisions. We have many models and axies to describe and categorize them, but no model is perfectly describing the complex reality

some Ideas one can have:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies
only few of them are mutually exclusive

What do those words mean? They are far to broad. What does my opinion on Tariffs have to do with my opinion on health care?

Classical liberal (but not liberal) at least has meaning - lets not kill each other even though we are of different religions (and in the last 200 years expanded to: lets not hold slaves and lets allow women to have rights). However because that is so broad there is lots of room for disagreement on details within that category.

It's right there:

A post of him was deleted where he reported that a majority of arabic language comments in international media were celebrating the attack in Berlin on a Pride event, and were also celebrating the guy who weaponized his car. He says that this is a big, massive problem in that post.

He then just posted "The mods have deleted my previous comment, is that for real?" while citing the same comment again - this is what got him banned.

!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com material.

Comment up higher has context. He got banned for some Islamophobic reporting.

If someone gets banned from an instance, they are free to move their account to a new instance and still keep their followers.

Someone doesn’t just get to break instance rules just because they are a successful author. Attitudes need to change, if you approach the fediverse like corporate social media, you are doing it wrong.

What’s his excuse going to be once he gets muted on bluesky?

I thought that only a delete by the instance admin prevented account migration on Mastodon? That ought to be changed if not. The whole point of mastodon is the freedom to move without losing followers. If your whole following is predicated on the actions of moderators, that’s not healthy for the network

Nope. He was simply stating the fact that arabic-language comments in international media have a large majority of people celebrating the guy who weaponized his car and killed people at Berlin Pride with it, and that this was a large problem. After that comment was deleted, he cited it with the additional comment that he had been censured by the mod and that this was pretty astounding.

This means that the Mastodon.world mod neither likes when it is shown up that arabs are celebrating when someone kills gay people in germany, and that he has very thin skin regarding critique towards his moderation style.

Any instance, mastodon.world for instance, is NOT Mastodon itself.

It's this very thing that especially those who only came to Mastodon for reach often don't understand.

All Fediverse newbies, except for those who escape from Reddit to Lemmy those very few who escape from Instagram to Pixelfed, are being railroaded to Mastodon without being told a thing about the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. That's because those who on-board them either think that Mastodon is hard to understand already, what with being decentralised and having "instances" and stuff, and the Fediverse, as a network of tons of wholly different stuff, is incomprehensible level: eldritch. Or they don't know about the Fediverse outside Mastodon itself.

In fact, most Mastodon newbies seem to not even be told about Mastodon being a network of lots of independent websites. They may think that Mastodon is a network in the same sense as Facebook being a network.

So for those who joined via the Web interface, Mastodon tends to be a website. Namely the server that they've joined.

For them, mastodon.social = Mastodon = the Fediverse. Or mastodon.world = Mastodon = the Fediverse.

For those who joined by loading and using the official app without taking a glance at any Mastodon server's website even only once, Mastodon is a phone app, just like Telegram is a phone app, and Facebook is a phone app. They don't know fuck all about what's happening behind the app, and they don't care as long as it works.

For them, the Mastodon app on their phone = Mastodon = the Fediverse.

Private, spare-time Mastodon users will eventually learn that Mastodon is, in fact, not one website or simply an app, but made up of many such websites called "servers" or "instances".

The next step will be for them to learn that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That all these Mastodon "servers" are fully connected to other wholly different websites a.k.a. "servers" (or whatever the respective Fediverse server application calls its servers). For example, this happens when they receive an answer to one of their toots that's way over 500 characters long (which they deem technologically impossible in the Fediverse because Mastodon can't do it), and that contains stuff like text formatting (which they deem technologically impossible in the Fediverse because Mastodon can't do it).

Even private, spare-time Mastodon users may be stuck in such a Mastodon-only bubble that they take two years or more to learn the latter.

Now, professionals, that's a wholly different matter. They don't have time to engage with the community. They can barely catch up with the comments on their posts. If they read them at all, that is. They don't read what the community has to say outside these comments either because they don't follow anyone who's really engaged in the community.

Thus, they never come across a message that even only gives them a hint on what the Fediverse actually is. Nothing that they actually pay attention to on Mastodon tells them that Mastodon is not just one website or a phone app that neatly hides what's happening behind itself.

They can have joined in early November, 2022, days after Elon Musk's Twitter takeover and still think that Mastodon is one website. And either they've never heard the term "Fediverse", or they think that "Fediverse" is another name for Mastodon, i.e. that one website that they think is Mastodon.

Kazim probably was too professional and too busy to see what the community was posting about. So he kept on "knowing" that mastodon.world = the Mastodon website = the Fediverse.

After that comment was deleted, he cited it with the additional comment

...

So, if we take you're unsourced opinion as fact...

1. He had a comment removed

2. He reposted the same comment with even more "context"

3. Mods banned him

And now you're shocked and want people to be outraged because Mastodon worked as intended?

You want us to...

Do what exactly? Stop using the instance none of us are using? Go yell at a mod because they did what they volunteered to do?

He posts mainly on Facebook, and copies some posts to bluesky and (up to now) to Mastodon, to support big tech alternatives.
Also on FB you will not find anything that you "would expect to get moderated on a .world server". He is very balanced and respectful (but also very clear) in his posts on complicated topics, as I must grant him, even if I do not always agree with him.
It is a significant loss for the fediverse to lose a German top author. Fediverse needs those accounts to attract normal users.

That’s because

$

You typed all that and didn't realize Jack Dorsey owning Bluesky has something to do with everyone being funnelled to Bluesky?

It's over half the masodon accounts...

To me it implies he doesn't really fit in a political box. But yeah centrist.

User on .world account complains about .world moderation.

This isn't a new problem, folk have been warning about it for a long time on Lemmy. Folk didn't want to hear it. I personally have zero confidence in their moderation. The cases I saw lacked impartiality and occasionally maturity. There are better instances. .sh.it.works for example.

I cannot imagine an organisation that appointed these moderators/admins would do particularly different on a mastodon server.

Best you can do, is move away from .world so folk see there is more out there to the fediverse than them. All eggs in the .world basket is a scandal waiting to happen.