@nemo @fabio @staff Hey folks,
OK, so here are the things I should be doing right now:
• Finishing the bookkeeping for the Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal
• Preparing for the fundraising campaign we’re planning for tomorrow so we can get Joy evacuated to safety
• Preparing for the four verification calls we need to make to help project the accounts of four more families in Gaza
• Maybe even checking off an item from my endless to-do list of things I need to do to help our families in Gaza
Instead, here is what I’m doing:
· Spending the whole morning dealing with this.
This is negatively affecting our work.
I have to ask something of any of you who are allies: Please acknowledge that this is not about us. This is about helping our friends and families in Gaza.
What does that mean?
That means this isn’t about #teamFabio. There is no #teamFabio or #teamAral or #teamAnyoneElse. If you want a team, it’s team Gaza or team Palestine and the goal is to help the people there who are trying to survive famine and genocide.
And we don’t do that by cutting the people of Gaza off from the ~250,000 people actively using mastodon.social.
Not when they’ve both publicly and privately expressed their support Gaza Verified and opened a direct line to us so we’re informed about all moderation decisions regarding accounts from Gaza and when they’ve been working with me in good faith and responding almost immediately to requests. Every account from Gaza that has been suspended/limited by them since the start of this process was with due cause (e.g., sending huge amounts of replies to unrelated posts with the same post; sending automated posts, etc., things that are against own rules too as it leads to accounts being reported and bad will in general.) And every time after I had a chance to talk to the person in question to get them to stop breaking the rule in question, the account has been reinstated. You don’t see this work because it happens behind the scenes. But it does happen.
Is having people from Gaza as spread out as possible on the fediverse good for resiliency? Yes, of course. That’s why we have the friendly servers list and I hope we will find ways of getting people to see it when it matters (before they join) as much as possible: https://gaza-verified.org/guide/#servers
It’s a fact of life right now that people end up on mastodon.social because it is the default option on joinmastodon.org. I’ve expressed by displeasure with this many times over many years and it even cost me friendships. But, again, this isn’t about us. At this point, it would be an absolute nightmare to migrate existing accounts of people from Gaza off of mastodon.social. Even if this creates a rumour internally that they should do this, I’m afraid we are going to end up with people creating accounts on multiple servers, getting reported for multiple accounts, re-verifications… I had a hard enough time the first time that happened because a rumour started that people got more donations on some servers. It was hell. It’s the last thing the people in Gaza trying to survive genocide and famine need right now.
Anyway, I want to both acknowledge the valuable work Fabio has been doing independently with things like the Gaza Verified Archive but also to make it clear that Fabio does not speak for Gaza Verified – Joy and I do. And we are not going to war with mastodon.social, we are working with them to ensure that the accounts of our Gaza Verified families that are on their instance are protected and have access to the large number of people on that instance that can help them with their daily survival needs.
That said, I do hope that mastodon.social will also take note that the account related to this latest flare up (8124) has a long list of posts defaming myself and others for antisemitism. These are libellous statements that conflate criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism with bigotry against Jewish people. I would take a bullet for any Jewish person being persecuted for being Jewish. The fact that I would also do so for a Palestinian from Gaza or that I would condemn Israel and Zionists for committing genocide doesn’t make me an antisemite, it makes me morally consistent. In fact, conflating opposition to genocide with antisemitism – which is what that account does – is about the most antisemitic thing you can do by stating that all Jews support Israel, that all Jews are Zionists, and that all Jews support genocide. If that account and its libellous statements remain up, it would be an idea to see if we can take some sort of collective legal action against the defamation.
But to return to the topic at hand and I have to stress again: This is not about us. This is *not* personal. This is about protecting our friends and families in Gaza and ensuring that as much of the fediverse remains open and accessible as possible at a time when they need all the support they can get.
I hope that we have you as allies in this going forward.
💕
#GazaVerified
Fabio Manganiello
:suya:
pistolero
sicp
GNU Too
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bajax
Aral Balkan
:awesome:🐦🔥nemo™🐦⬛ 🇺🇦🍉
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