A recent post collected some comments by moderator Yobuckstopshere which were reported for being Covid misinformation. Further, comments calling out the misinformation were being removed.
This was reported to me, and after a short examination, I engaged the lemmy.world site admins who took the following actions:
Yobuckstopshere was removed as moderator from both Politics and World News. The comments were removed, and they were banned for 3 days.
This is tough for me since I value their contributions to Lemmy, and why I had to recuse myself beyond getting the Admins involved, but if it were anyone else, the comments would have been removed and the user banned, and so here we are.
Similarly, I don’t like exposing behind the scenes drama so to speak, but I also believe in transparency in moderation action. It’s why I reply to posts and comments before I remove them citing exactly why they are being removed. I feel everyone deserves to know why action is being taken.
Unlike reddit, there is a process for removing moderators who appear to have been acting in bad faith. Your first line of defense is other moderators, but we are also in regular contact with the lemmy.world admins whose decision is final.
Which is a weird flex on the face of it. We have better things to do than determining where up and downvotes are coming from, unless it’s a suspicious amount coming from a bot farm or something like that. Vote manipulation needs to be examined, but not your random downvotes.
I got it twice.
Both from threads where hed have the single up vote from himself and 20-50 down votes from everyone else. So I don’t know if he was sending them to everyone or what.
Also, I didn’t remember it at the time, but now I remember when Lemmy was just taking off and this sub was asking for mods. One of the top mods stated requirements was potential mods would not remove misinformation because that would be biased against Republicans…
https://i.imgur.com/0Maach1.jpg
In fairness, I only saw misinformation posts from that one you just got rid of.
But thought you should know the whole mod team (except probably you as an admin) had to say that misinformation was acceptable on this sub before they could be a mod.
The ironic part is that exchange wasn’t even about the one you removed.
To be clear, I’m not an admin, I’m a mod like the rest, I just talk to the Admins on the regular. :)
In general, if someone is just misinformed, I like to treat it as a teachable moment.
“That’s incorrect, here’s why, citation 1, 2, 3.”
If you remove the comment, people won’t see the counter argument. I had this in a recent thread in a MANY TIMES SMALLER community I moderate where someone was going off on the book “Gender Queer”. Tons of reports, tons of downvotes.
Polite replies, cited sources, and eventually they gave up and deleted their comments themselves.
In here, unless a comment is blatantly hateful or batshit crazy, I’d leave it as well. But if someone is unironically going on about Jewish Space Lasers or Pizzagate, yeah, that kind of stuff is dangerous and will get removed.
Lol, my bad then. Not sure why I thought you were an admin all this time.
In any case, this sub has had a marked improvement since you were added, so thanks for all the hard work for no monies!
A lot of the other mods are stealthy. :) Good people but they don’t comment publicly. I’m the polar opposite. If it gets to the point where I have to remove a comment or a post, I want folks to know why.
Which means I get a lot of the hate, and the trolls, and the stalkers too. LOL.
I wish there was a way (or maybe I don’t understand how to do it) to filter the modlog by community. That way we could all potentially know why something was removed… assuming the mod bothered to say something about it obviously.
If you’re reading a community, clicking the modlog button in the sidebar will return only results from that community.
I can confirm this is the way to do it, just click on modlog on the bottom of this page and you will only see the log of this community.
You can filter by the user, so if you want to see your own stuff that was impacted, that’s do-able.
If there’s one thing I don’t like about how lemmy handles things, it’s this. It places moderators in a position where enforcing the rules punishes everyone who responds to the rulebreaker. I seem to recall this not being the case when I first arrived.