Background:
August 26, 2024 a dbzer0 instance admin instance banned a user, @marcie@lemmy.ml per “Sanctioned mod due to slanderous & unsubstantiated community ban and zero response to appeal. Ban to be lifted once issue is resolved.”
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=9924804
From what I could gather, she received the instance ban after banning an instance member from a community (!transgender@lemmy.ml). Whether or not the community ban is justified doesn’t really seem to be an issue here, an instance ban is an extreme response to a community ban and is inherently an unbalanced action that has vastly different ramifications. This means that no local users can interact with or see the instance banned user compared to one local user not being able to interact with one community on a different instance. The instance ban has much deeper implications than a community ban and should not be used rashly in response to a community ban.
https://lemmy.ml/modlog/14758?page=1&actionType=All&userId=892112
Something that may be worth to note is that the community banned user is a dbzer0 instance admin; however, I don’t see how this could be much of an issue here, especially in terms of moderation, as there are other unbanned instance admins that can access that community. It just seems that this ban was done for personal reasons, possibly in revenge, that perhaps don’t align with this instance’s userbase’s interests.
In fact, being an admin here seems to be part of the reason why it occurred. i.e. Would this instance ban have occurred if the moderator had banned a non-admin user?
If an instance ban on a moderator banning a local user is an appropriate course of action in this instance, then why is this not the case for any other users banned? I have never received an instance ban for community banning users, but should I be banned? Should db0 be banned from dbzer0 for community banning users? Should all community moderators be sanctioned?
Obviously, there isn’t a precedent for this here, and I particularly don’t want one and this is not a proposal to enact one. This is a proposal to reverse an instance ban on a user who I believe is unjustly banned, as an instance ban is not an appropriate response to a single community ban.
Although, if the admin is upset about the community ban, I implore him to visit !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com rather than pinging the user who’s replies cannot even been seen here due to the ban (https://lemmy.ml/post/22023367/14664616) (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/14455427).
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/neurospice
This is a simple majority vote. The final tally is as follows:
- For:
- Against:
- Total: -4.0
- Percentage: 30.00%
This vote has concluded on 2025-01-30 09:30:20 UTC
Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.
- For:
Instance banning someone because you’re personally mad they think that you’re transphobic just seems like a straight up abuse of the feature and a personal block would be appropriate.
An instance ban is to protect users from someone who is a hazard. Nobody on this instance can interact with a trans person because the administration doesn’t like that they think he’s not an ally. Absolutely bonkers to defend this lol.
It’s not even a dispute about moderation on this server. Frankly vulnerable communities need protecting from bad users, banning people for their actions elsewhere is fine it doesn’t need to be reactive. If you’re mad that someone thinks you’re transphobic then that’s between you and them, you shouldn’t try and stop anyone on the instance from interacting with them and potentially learning why they think that.
Trans people can be harmful trolls as well. It’s not a free pass to make malicious accusations and is not the reason she was banned. She was banned for making malicious accusations over what was clearly an anti-tankie post and refusing to withdraw them. Marcie has weaponised her identity in order to cause harm to others. If she gets away with doing this to me, an instance admin as you pointed out, then that raises significant concerns for me about who she is going to target for character assassination next.
Even if this vote doesn’t go Marcie’s way, I will take into consideration what you and Eevoltic have said and be more thoughtful about such bans in the future, instead of responding in the heat of the moment.
And finally, after considering your comments, I have decided to take the “personal” element out of the equation and withdraw my vote on this topic so it is not a factor in the decision making.
If she gets away with doing this to me, an instance admin as you pointed out, then that raises significant concerns for me about who she is going to target for character assassination next.
I have no idea who this person is, and if they have a pattern of behaviour of lashing out and harrassing people then I absolutely think banning them to protect users is justified.
It’s just, from the outside this really just looks like a grudge between two individuals which is smol beans in terms of internet stuff. Some people have called me a tankie, I’ve been called an animal abuser by several hundred people on lemmy.world during the ridiculous cat food thing. Should all of those people be instance banned for libel?
I don’t think so. Unless say they had a pattern of doing it.
I appreciate your feedback and will take in on board.
Against lifting the ban. Allowing bad faith actors to act with impunity results in a communicative structure based around bad faith behavior. That the bad faith behavior was brought to attention only because it hit an admin does not inherently mean that the reaction was a means of personal revenge, it just means that the bad faith behavior was brought, with full and (to the admin) indisputable context, to the person empowered to make the relevant decisions.
Imo Marcie is a bad actor who deserves the ban. This situation arose because Marcie decided to trawl through a bunch of old modlogs to conduct a “purge” of users who she accused of being transphobic in the modlog.
In my case, she found a removed post of mine encouraging non-tankie trans folk to consider blajah as an option instead of hexbear. Apparently that’s “transphobic” and not anti-tankie?
Marcie has had months to reverse this decision or to adjust the modlog reason accordingly but has not done so. Personally, I feel that a tankie maliciously slandering people with false accusations doesnt make for a productive member of our community, so I stand by my decision to ban her. Tankies weaponising trans issues to score points against other instances is not acceptable.
If Marcie is wiilling to change the ban reason to something more appropriate then sure, I’m fine with reversing it. I don’t care about the ban, I care about the ban reason, which is inaccurate and unjust.
Edit: We also have a matrix appeals channel listed in the sidebar that is probably more appropriate for this type of thing, to be honest, rather than dredging up old instance dramas here.
It might have been helpful if you included some of that reasoning in the ban reason.
Are we able to see your removed post? It might help to understand the context here a bit better. You might have been transphobic either in that post or somewhere else, but I’m not the one who banned you so I wouldn’t know. I’ve seen that you are cis from some comments (please correct me if I am wrong), so please know that you might have accidentally said/done something iffy even if you didn’t think that was the case. I’m not accusing you of being transphobic, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t that per se. I’m inclined to trust a trans mod’s judgment here for a trans community.
Regarding your edit, I contacted db0 beforehand in regards to the nature of this proposal. I was told that this was within scope of this community. I didn’t know about the matrix chat, but feel that this should be a community decision rather than behind closed doors and obscure modlog entries. I also didn’t want this to be a drama-fest so I did not post this to yptb.
The original comment was as follows:
PSA: Any trans people looking for a non-toxic instance would do well to consider !trans@lemmy.blahaj.zone or another trans-friendly community. While Hexbear claims to be trans-friendly, they don’t cater to western progressives at all, so you better be willing to embrace their whole marxist/leninist tankie schtick.
Also note that the charts in this post are essentially meaningless, as this wasn’t in any way a statistical random sample of users, and this was even acknowledged by the original poster on Hexbear. Due to self-selection bias (this survey was conducted in their trans community, after all) you cannot make any meaningful inferences about the proportion of trans people on Hexbear as a whole. It may well be representative of the subscribers to their trans community though.
I acknowledge I probably shouldn’t have posted it in the first place, it was a bit of a troll. For context we were having some inter-instance drama at the time. But to be clear there’s absolutely nothing there that is transphobic, though I do regret posting it now.
This is what I got in response:
I got a short Rule 1 ban from Dessalines and that was that, or so I thought. Two months later, Marcie takes over the community, still holding a grudge. Then trawls though the modlog looking to conduct a “purge” of “transphobes”. And now here we are.
Edit: Around the same time she labelled the ml admin nutomic transphobic and demanded he step down, and then encouraged all the trans users on ml to migrate to hexbear because it was a “safer space”… so you know, it was a weird time lol.
So I understand that this is like petty drama, but it’s not clear to me why this justifies an instance ban.
It seems briefly summarised:
- a user doesn’t like you
- the user bans you from a community you do not participate in on a different instance
- you are upset at the ban, and the listed reason, you feel that this is not the way someone should behave
- you ban them from the entire instance you are an admin on
It seems that the last action is just out of step. Instance banning makes sense to protect users from harassment, spam, or harmful content but here it basically seems like instead of blocking a user annoying you a tool to silence a community hazard is deployed against an individual whom you merely disagree with.
Has this user behaved in ways which necessecitates protecting the entire community from them that are not part of this?
I feel i’ve been quite honest and open about this whole thing and provided as much detail as is needed for someone to make up their minds at this stage. Some/most folks think it’s was a reasonable call and some don’t. I’m committed to accept the outcome of the vote, but not to get into a protracted discussion about it.
Well in the absence of evidence that this extends beyond an interpersonal drama I have to say that it is my opinion this is a bad decision.
OK, then just vote for your preference and try to convince others likewise. That’s why I added the democratic system here, so you’re not beholden to the whims of the admin team only.
I appreciate you posting some receipts and acknowledging that you probably shouldn’t have commented that.
I think there might have been an issue with this:
…consider !trans@lemmy.blahaj.zone or another trans-friendly community. While Hexbear claims to be trans-friendly,…
It kind of implies that you don’t see hexbear as a trans-friendly place which is very strange as they have very strict polices regarding transphobia. You can argue all you want about not wanting people to migrate to hexbear, but they are undoubtedly a trans safe space. It comes across as disinformation which might be why you copped a ban. The ban might have also been for other reasons not apparent in your screenshots, but we ideally need a dialogue between both parties to understand better.
Not to pile on but it’s morning and I’m in a waiting room so I thought I’d add to this and it didn’t feel fair to edit my comment when you probably aren’t checking the thread a ton.
I wanted to ask; why are you repeatedly attempting to justify the behavior of the person who instigated this exchange (eg, maybe you said something transphobic and didn’t realize it, maybe you were actually banned for disinformation) while holding the person responding to a higher standard?
Not trying to insult anyone here but I feel like what we’re looking at is the same as when you have two kids fighting in school. Unless you’re taking this same approach to the person who threw the first punch as well as the kid who reacted badly, that’s not really justice.
I didn’t think you opened this topic to litigate users’ opinions of hexbear?
Your editing kind of removed all the context from the quoted sentence, so I feel like I’m being straw-manned a bit here because you’re responding to your own edit.
I’d like to vote against lifting the ban. But my instance has downvotes disabled. Could I transfer voting rights to my dbzer0 alt? @FundMECFS@lemmy.dbzer0.com I understand if you prefer not to transfer to an empty alt account, so alternatively my slrpnk.net alt has some post history as I use it as a feed. @FundMECFS@slrpnk.net
Sure I’ll switch it over.
Edit: switched
I think the ban is less about revenge and more to do with that person spreading libel such as calling someone transphobic for not liking hexbear campists which is patently ridiculous.
Granted, the optics of this are not great though.
Anyway, if the ban is expired as it seems from your screenshot, I will vote to lift the ban and put this behind us.
There is a larger discussion to be had at some point about what to do about campists spreading bad faith libel like this.
At some point, I would like to completely automate ban/unban threads like these via threativore. I.e. open a vote via threativore for ban/unban, and have the effects be handled automatically based on the vote.
