On the surface this story looks about as common as it gets. Maybe I’ll have a hard time convincing you there’s smoke without fire, but I’m gonna try. To assert my dignity and also because I think the case is strong.

Quick summary: Last year, I commented on a post in feddit.org/c/Europe about a stabbing spree by an immigrant in Germany. The mod @federalreverse@feddit.org showed up a week later to slap me with a temporary ban for “racism, gaslighting” (see screenshot). I complained and we had some back-and-forth in private. I defended myself and refused to “change my opinion”. The mod got irritated and shut down the conversation with a snarky “Congratulations, you’re now banned permanently”. A week ago (i.e. 10 months later) I sent an unban request to the mod team, promising meekly to stick to the rules (which AFAIC I never broke). The same @federalreverse@feddit.org replied (the others stayed quiet): “You will never be welcome in this community. Don’t ask again.”

PLEASE READ ON before you skim the screenshot.

First: I know what server this is, so I have to ask (beg?) you to make an effort and assume good faith. I am not, in any way, racist. Obviously, this is completely unfalsifiable, hence the mod’s lawyerly use of the word “latent”. I could provide tons of anecdotes to show how unracist I am, but what’s the point? Ultimately there’s no way for me to prove the purity of my innermost convictions. This is IMO what makes the “Assume good faith” rule so important - and the racism slur so powerful and open to abuse. On economics I’m solidly left-wing, on cultural questions I’m a go-slow centrist. In Europe a big cultural issue for basically generations has been non-European immigration, particularly of Muslims. Yes yes, red lights are now going on. Controversy! Here is my position on that: immigration is fine, we just need to be careful about speed and numbers or else integration will be a problem. And Islam is fine (of course it’s compatible with democracy, the far right is wrong about this as with almost everything else), BUT we just need to be honest about the potential for jihadi violence (which also hurts Muslims BTW - for instance the Muslim police officer among the Charlie Hebdo victims). That’s it. If I’ve lost you already, then things are going to go downhill from here. So: no, I am not even anti-immigration, let alone some kind of proto-fascist. FWIW I usually vote green.

Second: I want to set the record straight about the bit of my comment which seems to have precipitated all this:

It is common knowledge that during the year following the Syrian influx several hundred people were killed and over a thousand injured in a series of spectacular terrorist attacks.

Apparently this is not common knowledge. One respondent called it “huge hyperbole”, a second concluded I was “full of shit”. Then @federalreverse@feddit.org turned up to ban me for disinformation or wrongthink or whatever. But what I wrote was correct. The three main attacks (1, 2, 3) in 2015-16 in France killed 235 people and injured 877. I was in Paris at the time and I heard the ambulence sirens and saw the helicopters myself. That was just 3 incidents. There were lots of other Islamist attacks, mostly smaller but some comparable, right across Western Europe during those years. This does not diminish the awful far-right terrorism that also happened.

So my comment was not hyperbole or bullshit, and it was obviously relevant to the article. It was an uncomfortable observation, sure, but I don’t see “Causing cognitive dissonance” as a reason for deletion and banning in the Feddit Europe community rules. BTW: those rules are really serious (“We follow German law”). They would be quite good if the mods respected them.

For my troubles I have been branded a racist and I can no longer participate in one of the higher-quality communities on Lemmy (where I had mostly been posting about economics and the environment).

It feels humiliating and unjust. I’m fine with speech-policing, but thought-policing really bothers me. Who was this @federalreverse@feddit.org to pass judgement on my supposed motivations?? Just judge me on what I write, FFS. And if you don’t know the relevants facts, that should be your problem, not mine.

This experience (with one or two others, alas) has left me with the impression that Lemmy is maybe not, after all, the place for calm, reasoned, nuanced, good-faith discussion after all. I still want that not to be true. Anyway, I feel a bit better now this particular mod’s abuse is on the record.

Thanks for listening.