You may have noticed a distinct lack of return2ozma. This is due to their admitting, in a public comment, that their engagement here is in bad faith:
I'm sure there will be questions, let me see if I can address the most obvious ones:
- Can I still post negative stuff about Biden?
Absolutely! We have zero interest in running an echo chamber. However, if ALL you're posting is negative, you may want to re-think your priorities. You get out of the world what you put into it and all that.
- Why now?
Presumption of innocence. It may be my own fault, but I do try to think the best of people, and even though they were posting negative articles, they weren't necessarily WRONG. Biden's poll numbers, particularly in minority demographics ARE in the shitter. They are starting to get better, but he still has a hell of a hill to climb.
- Why a 30 day temp ban and not a permanent ban?
The articles return2ozma shared weren't bad, faked, or from some wing-nut bias site like "beforeitsnews.com", they were legitimate articles from established and respected news agencies, pointing out the valid problems Biden faces.
The problem was ONLY posting the negatives, over and over and then openly admitting that dishonest enagement is their purpose.
Had they all been bullshit articles? It would not have taken anywhere near this much time to lay the ban and it would have been permanent.
30 days seems enough time for them to re-think their strategery and come back to engage honestly.
I actually sort-of agree that we shouldn't be banning people because of a "slanted" viewpoint just because of how difficult it is to do that fairly, without creating more problems than it solves.
But only sharing the bad side of something is absolutely arguing in bad faith. A normal person looks at the world and says, what do I think? And then they say it. They're not on "Team Biden." They're not on "Team Russia." They're just a person speaking for themselves, and the people they support, they decided to support because they decided good things about them, but if they learn bad things about those people, it's not like they'll try to cover them up or support that person anyway. They just say what they think about it, not picking only one side and presenting that exclusively.
The example I would keep bringing up for this is the people on Lemmy who support Biden in general, but also give him lots of criticism because of his support for Israel. That's a normal person. They say I like good things, and I don't like bad things. I don't pick one team and then only say the good things about that team and only the bad things about the other team. That's bad faith. That's dishonest.
I mean everyone does it to some degree. It sort of hurts if the side you are supporting is doing something criminal, and there's a little bit of an impulse not to focus on it. But just deciding that you're only going to present one side of the story, no matter what good or bad information emerges, because you think it's "needed" or because that's "your side," is dishonest. It's bad faith. And definitely when you do it to the degree that ozma did it, it goes beyond the level of "well everyone's got their viewpoint" and starts to become "how can I persuade other people to this viewpoint, I have very little care whether it's right or wrong, it's just the viewpoint I have decided to try to persuade them of."
Like I say I don't know how much the mods should get involved in detecting that and banning it. But definitely it's not how things should be (and anyone who tells you that most people operate that way is not accurately describing any healthy functioning message board even within the low bar that is the internet.)
I'm about to break decorum here, but who the fuck are you to decide what constitutes 'normal' behavior? 'It's ok to criticize Biden so long as you still generally support him' is a pretty brazen example of 'bad faith' argumentation IMHO.