Feddit.org announced today that they are changing their rules to match German law despite their server not being hosted in Germany.
Feddit.org now bans
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The sentence "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"
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Comparing Israel to the Nazis
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Calls to end Zionism
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Calling for the dissolution of Israel
And much more. The full original post can be found here, or
Click here for full text of original post:
Hi.
In the past few days, discontent regarding mod decisions in this community has been brewing, particularly when it comes to comments on Palestine, Israel, and Israeli politics and actions. There are also misunderstandings regarding mod intention and German law. We hope to clear that up with this post.
While the servers of feddit.org are in Austria, most of the mods of this community as well as admins of this server live in Germany. Speaking of, our server admins have also posted a write-up on the same topic.
And with that, let's go:
In Germany, antisemitism is specifically sanctioned in German criminal law, both for speech and as a motivation for other criminal behavior. In addition, Germany seeks to protect the Jewish state of Israel (the so-called "Reason of State" introduced in 2008) and thus verges toward protecting Zionism as well. Certain criticism of Israel/Israelis is also categorized as "Israel-related antisemitism".
Since criminal law is involved, enforcement can mean things like police raids and device confiscations. After such police action, it does not really matter if it was appropriate or if cases are dropped or never charged: The damage is done. All told, it's not that fun.
There is also no point in engaging in discussions about the veracity of statements that could get us into legal trouble. In addition, we believe that you can express most opinions without breaking rules.
If your comment contains the following, it will be removed from this community:
- Calling for the dissolution of Israel, or calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.
- Calling for a destruction, annihilation, an end of all Zionism or the like.
- Equating Israeli actions and (historical) Nazism.
- The slogan "from the river..."
- Endorsement of or justifications for Hamas or Hezbollah, or slogans or graphics positively referring to these organizations. These are considered terrorist organizations in Germany.
- ... and obviously: Any of the common antisemitic tropes or calls to violence against Jews or Israelis
Comments will not be removed for the following:
- Denouncing genocide.
- Denouncing Israeli war crimes.
- Criticizing Zionism as an ideology or political movement.
- Referring to the current Israeli government as "criminal," "expansionist," or "far-right".
If your comment is removed nonetheless, these are not the reason. I'd also like to stress that this community was never a free-speech-absolutist zone: It is a (usually lightly) moderated community. There may also be times when bans go too far. In such cases, please DM the @EuroMod@feddit.org account (which all mods have access to).
spoiler To help you understand why, I'll leave an assortment of sources here (translations via DeepL).
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Berlin in mid-May [2024] around 6 o'clock in the morning. A loud, continuous "banging" against the apartment door wakes student Alina T. from her sleep. [...] When her husband opens the door, several LKA officers, two employees of the district office and the SEK "storm" past him into the apartment. Puzzled, he looks at the search warrant. [...] The background to this was a Facebook entry in the student's profile: "From the river [...]
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In November 2023, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and for Home Affairs also issued a prohibition order against Hamas.[60] According to the order, "the slogan 'From the River to the Sea' (in German or other languages)" is a distinguishing mark of Hamas[61]. [...] the current legal situation [regarding "Denial of Israel's right to exist"] is - contrary to what the statements of the Federal Ministry of Justice suggest[63] - anything but clear. Whether incitements to eliminate the State of Israel are prosecuted depends on the respective legal opinion and the prosecution will of the respective public prosecutor's office.
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Press release from the previous government:
In this context, Section 111 StGB, which covers public incitement to commit crimes, may also be relevant. Incitement to extinguish Israel's existence by force may be punishable under this provision. The same applies to calls to publicly display the Hamas flag. If Hamas attacks are publicly cheered and celebrated, this may also be punishable. This means that people who cheer on Hamas's actions or publicly express their sympathy with the attacks may constitute the criminal offence of "approval of criminal acts" under Section 140 of the German Criminal Code (StGB).
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In connection with the controversial Palestine Congress in Berlin, the German authorities have also imposed an entry ban on former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. "In order to prevent antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda at the event", several entry bans have been issued, the news agency AFP learned from security sources on Sunday. One of these concerned Varoufakis. (Notably, Varoufakis would have spoken about one-state solutions ...)
federal reverse (on behalf of the mods of !europe)
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Genuine freak shit. Maybe wait until the government bothers you, don't preempt them
Says the person not at risk of early moring police raids of their home including months long confiscation of all their communication devices and costly legal proceedings to get them back.
"Look it's the law, disobeying the law is bad, I must obey the law and report my local ~~Jews~~ pro-Palestine thought crime."
The irony of all the armchair warriors here is too thick ๐คฆ Go get yourself squatted and possibly arrested, that will for sure help the Palestinians that are facing a genocide /s
Better than supporting laws that censor support for people. Some solarpunk you are.
A Solarpunk with better opsec, yes. Maybe you should learn a bit about that yourself.
I have a hard time believing you care about opsec if you think rotating across accounts is a bannable offense.
That wasn't me, but in specific cases where multiple accounts are used for ban evasion or similar stuff that can be justified from a moderation perspective.
And if you do such a bad job that it is easy to guess your sockpuppet accounts then that is really a failure in opsec on your side ๐
Wouldn't be opsec at all if I kept more than one account active at a time or expressed the same views and opinions. You'd probably not have a risk of german prosecution if you and your moderators made use of a similar practice - which is why it's funny that you gave yourself that attribute
Apparently not.
I am not one of the admins effected by this, but I know better than to expose others to such risks over stupid arguments on a public internet forum.
But apparently that is too much to expect here ๐
The OPSEC of "censor discussion"? That's not the OPSEC or solarpunk I'm familar with.
You need to look up the definition of censorship, because you are apparently ignorant or brainwashed by some freeze peach people on the topic.
Asking people not to post stuff on a public forum that could endanger themselves and the operators of the forum is good opsec practise, as is removing such posts that are made regardless of that.
"I think Israel is commiting genocide in Palestine."
Is this personal info that must be scrubbed?
No, that is perfectly in line with what is explicitly allowed on feddit.org.
I dare you to post it and not get banned.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
That is not the same at all.
Yeah, it would only be against the rules to say that genocide should be stopped
That is also explicitly allowed. Are you even reading anything before posting senseless accusations?
Nope, they've been explicit that any calls for violence against Israel are forbidden.
You really love this line, you're posting some variant of it in every comment you make.
You evidently can't read. It is much more nuanced than that.
When you have no argument, just endlessly scream "NO! NO! YOU CAN'T READ!"
Lying fascist.
No, the person you are arguing with is correct.
Please click the link at the top and read the full text of the feddit post which it takes you to. It is okay to dislike feddit's policy, and it is perhaps okay to believe that they are lying and that the words they wrote down explaining what it is are not true.
But this person from another instance whom you are arguing with is accurately describing the content of the text on the feddit post.
No, they aren't. I've read the full text, I've also read the comments from the admin underneath it where they add additional rules.
There is no form of call for violence against Israel that isn't against their rules. Feel free to present one if you believe otherwise
I'm a devops engineer and host quite a few things. Running a point to point VPN is fucking simple for anyone capable of running Lemmy.
Your argument is transparently stupid to anyone with even an ounce of technical capabilities.
Ok great, than explain it to us, because apparently you have no idea about the actual situation Mr. "DevOps Engineer"... (a joke of a job title for actual security professionals). /s
You're as competent a security professional as your beloved Rhodesian military was at fighting.
I also literally did tell you how in the comment above. Setup a point to point VPN and set the remote endpoint address in DNS for the URL. Make sure the remote endpoint is not in German jurisdiction.
Someone that was actually competent (not you) would know how to do that.
~ Average german defense for their complicity in the 1940s.
I'm a communist trans woman with guns who helps house people for free in the USA. I've had ICE and police show up to my doorstep before. For some reason, I doubt a bunch of cishet white nerd guys in Germany are about to have as many problems as I do for hosting anti israel content on a small social site.
Incredible work, comrade. ๐ซก
You are an amazing person, but I find it funny how in the US even the communists have guns.
Communists have always been pro-gun, you can't have a revolution without them. Things get more nuanced within Socialism, once the revolution has broadly succeeded, but an armed working class in Capitalism is harder to oppress.
Great, more power to you, but you do realize that this is still quite a different situation? What you are doing is not illegal (for now at least) and you have some control over the risks you personally take.
Hosting a space for others but still being legally responsible for what they do in that space has different requirements. You would probably also ask people you host to not set up a meth lab in your place.
What I'm doing is illegal in my jurisdiction, ICE showed up for a reason. The law can eat my ass no one should be homeless
Fine, I don't know your situation, but there is still the difference that you chose to take that personal risk intentionally, while the feddit.org admins did not.
Unforced error really, there's a lot of secure hosting providers that take anonymous payments. Could easily say you transferred domain control to someone else to avoid liability when the law passed. They're doing this because they have no convictions and are lazy at best, at worst they support Israel.
Not really.
You can't become anonymous and retain site ownership. The site would've needed to be shut down and a new, somehow completely unrelated site would have to be started.
Besides, even if that were done you bet your ass a random German lawyer would immediately sue the new site for violating Impressumspflicht. That's one quick way to get the police investigating your site. Your OPSEC better be close to "hosting an illegal streaming site" level.
Even German forums about piracy would rather have an impress and remove illegal content than remain anonymous and evade police - see tarnkappe.info.
I'd argue every small social site should run on the principal that they will be prosecuted like an illegal streaming site. You can divest yourself of liability and doxing with basic opsec.
An example: host on 1984.hosting and pay with mined or donated Monero. Only access the site through a computer specifically for that purpose, and only with Tor / Tor Browser and a Linux distro such as Qubes, Tails, or less suspiciously, Fedora Atomic. Memorize credentials if possible, if not encrypt them on drive with a strong password via a keepassxc databases. If you are hosting the site properly, you can transfer the site podman/docker container and url with databases and info intact with no effort. Make sure the computer for managing site management stuff wipes itself on every shutdown sans credential info, has secureboot, and an encrypted drive. As an admin account, only access the site through base Mullvad Browser with a VPN (ideally Mullvad) or Tor Browser on a computer of your choosing.
You can easily say the site is no longer yours and your payment information will reflect this. This has been done before. Germany can ban the site but it'll be easily discoverable through other fediverse servers, Tor, and VPNs. They would have to ban anything that uses acitivitypub, and again, even in that scenario you can use a VPN or Tor or self host a vps with the instructions above to access it normally anyways.
Simultaneously, you lose all rights to the site and risk a hostile takeover with no possible recourse.
It's also significantly more effort to retain this level of anonymity from a state actor. I don't even think there's a single Lemmy instance which follows all those steps.
The thing is, as of right now German censorship doesn't warrant this. Yes, it sucks you cannot freely speak about Israel. But frankly, since it only requires you to adjust your wording minimally without changing the message ("Israel should be destroyed" => "I support a one state solution where everyone in current-day Israel and Palestine can live freely, similar to how South Africa abolished apartheid.") it's really not worth it.
Should Germany turn fascist and ban all opposition, it is too late for feddit.org and their moderators anyways. If Germany doesn't, feddit will be fine like this and reduce the strictness of these rules as German sentiment towards Israel slowly worsens over the coming years.
Hostile takeover? Not if you don't share credentials. The passwords and so on should be random and encrypted.
And yes, if Germany is going to execute you for potentially hosting a small social site that occasionally could criticize Israel you've got bigger problems and should choose to fight or flee.
Sorry, I meant either confiscation of the domain or the server provider deciding to take everything down. The latter can be mitigated with backups but it will nevertheless result in long downtimes.
There's generally no legal recourse or protection if any instance involved in hosting the site decides to break contracts. This sort of uncertainty sucks and has to be taken into consideration.
Confiscation of the domain isn't a big deal. As I've already said, there are many anonymous hosting providers that have been tested on the Israel issue and came out the other side. 1984 is one, ADL served them an injunction in court in Iceland and 1984 was successful in fighting it and also avoiding divulging any info about activists.
If you wanted to it's also possible to proxy server traffic so that the main server is never divulged which makes it very easy to swap domain names and providers. I consider this overkill for this use case though, would be necessary on a streaming site or something, though that should be hosted in Russia to avoid issues anyways, Russia essentially allows for the piracy of non Russian data.
You would have turned in Anne Frank.
Right, people arguing to not expose others to the risk of police raids are "asckually Nazis". You realize how absurd that is? Anne Frank was found during a police raid...
Are you fr? Are the feddit admins (appropriate as fuck name) hosting Palestinian refugees in their server locations, now?
Eur*s and their guilt tripping for shit they caused in the first place I stg