FSFE and censorship - not true?

[Daniel Pocock]

(a message that was sent to the old list on 17.09.2018 and blocked by
FSFE censors, can you find any CoC violation in it?  Or is it the golden
rule of censorship: block any discussion about the censorship!)

On 15/09/18 11:54, Andrej Shadura wrote:
> On 14 September 2018 at 23:08, Michael Kesper <mkesper at schokokeks.org> wrote:
>> Hi Andreas,
>>
>> On 14.09.2018 17:18, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
>>> I have read the news about a stated censorship that is ongoing in the
>>> mailing list. I would not be surprised if it were true that this is an
>>> ongoing action however that is impliciting that an action is to be
>>> taken by the responsible moderators of this mailing list to somewhat
>>> fast strip the abusing moderators their rights to moderate any further.
>>>
>>> The sole reason for moderation is to calm a discussion down and the
>>> abuse of moderation will be to kill a discussion off.
>>>
>>> This is a wake up call for moderators on discussion at lists.fsfe.org and
>>> their responsibility is to leave these people out of moderation
>>> privileges right away.
>>>
>>> It is certainly not OK with me.
>>
>> The job of moderators is letting useful discussions happen but not
>> hatespeech and accusations without any substance.
>> Please do not believe _everything_ you read on the internet.
>> For fact checking please all people have a look at the minutiae of the
>> general assemblies and speak to other people.
> 
> Having done exactly this fact checking I can see most of the things
> Daniel is claiming are true, except a few things in which he’s made
> (honest) mistakes. What I disagree with is the bad intent which I
> believe Daniel assumes; I think there wasn’t one originally, and the
> rest is just the result of people not being careful in their
> communications to each other and turning disagreements into political
> decisions.
> 

There is more to it, I have avoided publicizing some private messages
which provide stronger evidence of censorship, disrespect for the result
of the election and various other things going on.  Also, the effect of
moderation is that you don't see everything.

The moderators say they care about the "tone" of messages:

- in the FSFE community, only 28 people are actually members[1] of the
association, FSFE e.V.  Almost all the people who appear to have a
positive "tone" are quite happy and even a little bit smug about the
situation because they are in that group.  That includes emails from
these people: Florian, Reinhard, Bernhard, Erik, Alessandro, Nikos,
Thorsten and others listed on the people[1] page.

- the Fellowship has 1500 fellows, it is much bigger than FSFE e.V.  All
the people posting with a more assertive "tone" are not members of FSFE
e.V. because the whole fellowship thing has always kept them on the
outside.  Look at messages from Matthias H, Stefan, Paul, Luke,, myself
they appear to be fellows and NOT full FSFE members.  So how can they
have a positive view on the situation?

Notice how the vast majority of messages come from people within that
first group?

Even though the second group is so much bigger, notice how very few
fellows (0.25%) are actually engaged in the discussion, while 25% of the
FSFE e.V. members have engaged in the discussion.  Over a hundred people
in the second group simply didn't pay this year: no email to the
discussion list, they just quit.

There are also many people on this discussion list who did not join the
fellowship and do not pay the fees, they may not have any opinion and
may feel frustrated by all these messages, but I would ask them to
remember that the mail server is subsidised by the money from fellows.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://fsfe.org/about/team