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.
I called this user out a couple weeks ago for spreading blatant, seemingly obvious misinformation. I replied with citations from reputable sources and they accused me of cherry picking. It was a really weird exchange and even weirder was the topic was really inconsequential. Like, why even lie about something so menial?
Anyway, I noticed he was a bit of a poweruser, so I think them posting all the time will be missed, but there's really no excuse to abuse your status to spread lies.
Ugh, thank god. That dude was constantly posting the worst takes, in the sense that a lot of them were straight up lies. It says a lot that I knew who it was going to be about before I even opened the post.
I've had to contact you about that mod more than a few times. You always took action and gave them plenty of chance to fix their behavior.
I wonder how many others got the weird PMs from that mod where if you down voted him often he'd vaugely threaten you for it saying he can see who down votes what
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.
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....
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.
What do you mean by "visible"? Just that you can see total upvotes vs. downvotes, or is there some way to actually see who upvoted and downvoted what?
This is a serious question. I have used Connect for Lemmy since basically day one, and the only thing I ever see is the aggregate total on any particular comment which is my personal preference anyway.
Looks like that whole post was removed as this fella was the submitter. Ah well. It was more odd than funny, really. The submitter (this ex-mod) seemed more focused on driving wedges than actual discussion.
It's not health misinformation, but I remember them from their trolling. I didn't experience any mod abuse (I think), but those posts just don't speak to someone temperamentally suited to mod a general access politics sub.
Anyway, problem corrected. Finding good mods isn't easy and some won't work out. I'm happy that the process worked.
"Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky, they are people who say 'this is my community and it's my responsibility to make it better.'" - Tom McCall - Oregon Governor 1967 to 1975.
Despite my disagreement with some of the policies, I greatly appreciate how ethically and transparently the admins run this instance. I think it serves as a model in those areas. Thank you guys. ❤️
Yeah, I almost never really care when someone says stupid crap or is trolling on Lemmy (or the old place), but his comments were pretty extreme misinformation, so I was one of the people that reported him. Thanks for taking action.
I also appreciate the transparency. I have no personal issues with YoBuckStopsHere aside from my finding some of the things they have said questionable, but I trust mods in general to do what they are supposed to be doing and I'm glad the rest of you have a way to do something about it when a mod abuses their power.
I'm with you. I seldom agreed with him, but he opened up some opportunities for me to practice my arguments on someone with different views. Which is helpful, because there's a lot of them. Just not on here.
I agree that covid misinformation is too dangerous to play around with though, it kills our elderly, who don't always have the skills necessary to navigate the modern information space. So, I agree with where this line was drawn. However, I do hope to see the user again, whether they're right or wrong. The Fediverse can most certainly contain us all, and if we could actually accomplish that, I think it'd go a long way towards more broadly combating misinformation in a healthier, more sustainable way.
We cannot shun it into silence though. We need to learn from the mistakes we've made, even the more recent ones. I mean, if anything was going to be shunned into oblivion, it was anti-semitism after WW2. But take a look around... We must adapt, and we can, too. Adapting rapidly is a human specialty.
Because he also deleted user comments after being removed from his position as moderator - using access to a moderator-bot that wasn't removed yet - we have now permanently banned his account and his alts.
Ah, that would explain why I have an automod message that says a comment was removed, but the comment is still visible in a private window (presumably undone by other mods).
He's posted a bunch of stuff there I've noticed. That's a big interesting difference from the forums of old and Reddit, there's no ability to actually control this site wide when it's a bunch of sites strung together.
No, but there is transparency. On Reddit, you knew it was going on, but unless you had extended mod or admin powers, you could never prove it, and the admins didn't usually want to stop it.
Here, you may not be able to stop it, but it's easily proven by anyone, mod or not, willing to deep dive into the modlog. AND the admins act, even if instance by instance. So refreshing.
I think there are ways to get it not to show up in the modlogs, you might want to look into that. I've seen issues with this. It could be quirks, but the fact that godlesscommie showed receipts tells you something.
Edit: I wanted to add that when I first came to Lemmy, I posted an article here and he removed it. I asked him why and he said that it was an accident and he'll post it again. He didn't, so I asked him if he was fucking with me. He then reinstated it. He's been messing with stuff for awhile.