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 ?
Imagine if we judged entire nationalities by YouTube comments.
If we weren’t using English as default,that would actually be a pretty accurate method to see at least clusters of nationalities
Not really. The most accurate thing would simply to identify the people who are saying such things as a group. Creating arbitrary correlation with some shared aspects is well arbitrary at best, or worse just a dog whistle.
I postulate that people posting comments in arabic languages on international news sites are by a large majority people who live in the respective countries outside of immigrants that still feel more connected to their country of origin than to the countries they are currently in, comparable to the fact that people posting in german are with a 95%+ probability coming from the DACH area or are immigrants into other countries.
No dogwhistle here. Specific languages point to specific geographic areas where these languages are prominently spoken, and if you are using german on the comment section of the bbc, people will rightly assume that you come from the DACH area.