If I understand it right, the moderator of the mastodon.world instance has blocked several posts by Hasnain Kazim, as Kazim reported yesterday on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/661473263/posts/10163657720033264/
Kazim is a quite famous and successful book author in Germany and something between left, conservative and liberal. He was journalist for the most important German weekly news magazine Spiegel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasnain_Kazim?wprov=sfla1
Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated. To me from the external perspective it seems that the moderator is abusing his power. He is damaging free and respectful discussion. Furthermore, when a famous person like Kazim reports those experiences to his broad audience, who do not understand the functioning of the fediverse, the moderator also damages Mastodon in general significantly, it seems to me.
What do you think about this case ?
Also, what does “banning” even mean? Lemmings I find love to abuse terminology so that a one-hour time-out period gets referred to as a “ban” (tbf this was inherited from Reddit, no matter how much we’d like to leave the old ways behind, they do tend to cling stubbornly).
But I don’t know how Mastodon uses those words - is he even truly “banned” or merely “banned” for like an hour while the moderator spent that time researching the situation?
From the Mastodon Docs:
A Mastodon suspension (that is the type of ban seen in the screenshot) means the account is effectively deleted. The account no longer appears in search, the profile page is gone, and all of the posts, uploads, followers, and all other data are removed publicly. However, all the data is available in the admin back-end for a period of 30 days from suspension. This is to give the user an opportunity to work with instance admins to resolve any potential issues and have the account re-instated.
it doesn’t get more permanently banned than “deletion of user profile, posts, followers and uploads”
Ah thank you, this is a crucial piece of info that was needed to more properly understand how to interpret the OP. This post would have been better written to not assume that we the reader already knew all of that, but regardless, thank you for filling that in.
The word ban does not imply any duration on its own.
Irl if you “ban” something, like cigarettes, then it does not necessarily imply forever but it does sorta imply until the law is changed i.e. until further notice.
So then if you ban a person for a period of one week, the timeline needs to be delivered alongside the word - “banned for a week”.
Which the OP did not do, and moreover (I am not sure if the post was edited or was always this way), seems to go out of its way to imply a permanent banning? Though the phrasing used was “cancels” rather than bans.
Well, perhaps it’s a language issue, but this OP is also quite sensationalistic, so my fault I suppose for engaging with what is clearly an emotional rant rather than a piece of any substance (again, regardless of whether the original subject is true or not, I am saying that this post does a poor job describing what occurred).