jordanlund @ jordanlund @lemmy.world

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1,128

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2 yr. ago

Moderating

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Not that "entire thread". I was rude to the user who came in rudely. They were/are being an asshole.

To the OP who bungled the post? They were treated 100% fairly and made the necessary correction, DESPITE Zaktor's best effort to derail the conversation.

That is addressed in a separate comment.

Any ban I made was for cause, not because "I could". We can pull the modlog on anyone you'd like.

I can't make you believe anything, so there's no point trying. I promised you an honest response to what is, in effect, a lengthy diatribe, I did so. If you can't accept that, then there's nothing more to say.

That rule being "don't advocate violence" which is something Lemmy is all too fond of, Pro-Palestinian or otherwise.

I didn't expect unbiased responses from anyone in this group either, but I made the effort to address what is ultimately a hit piece.

As I stated in the first post: "I likely won't reply individually until I'm done going through the whole thing."

I didn't expect "the whole thing" to end up taking multiple hours resulting in a 17 hour day. I'm getting to the individual replies now.

The community moderator images were provided for the community team and we were asked to add them to our profiles.

Whew! Home stretch, and we're back to the very first thing I talked about here:

Next up? Zionism. He has repeatedly removed posts that are critical of Israel or pro-Palestinian and that's fairly well documented.

The Pro-Palestinian contingent on World is VERY active and VERY angry with good reason. Unfortunately they often make rule breaking posts that have to be removed.

They aren't removed for being Pro-Palestinian, they're removed for a variety of reasons, Youtube video links, image posts, Twitter, and blog posts.

But these two posts stand out to me as particularly obscene. One such example is his patented refusal to ever address proof to the contrary. He listed a source as being antisemitic while using the justification of a Zionist source.

That post wasn't removed for Zionism, that post was removed for being a Substack Blog. We don't allow blogsites. Full stop. The response was the typical whining "But, but, Dropsite is legitimate news!" and my response as always is "Don't care, no blog sites."

Why? Blog sites have no accountability. Anyone, literally anyone, can set up a blog site. Just like anyone can post on Twitter, or Facebook, or upload to YouTube.

Yeah, we don't allow any of those sites EITHER. CNN might have a very good Twitter post, that's going to get removed too. ABC on Facebook? Hell no.

As a mod, I'm not going to engage in a debate over "But, but, you allowed THAT Facebook/Twitter/Substack post, why not miiiiiiiiine?" (and Jesus, THAT conversation happens way too often as it is when we miss a post that should have been removed but either got missed or was never reported.)

When given a litany of Israel critical cartoons but none that are actively antisemitic, he refused to engage. Honestly the entire post also demonstrates a shocking amount of logic that isn't outright Zionist but dancing around the edges and leaving the outline of one.

Honestly not sure what you're saying here? I refused to remove cartoons critical of Israel and... that... somehow means I'm Zionist? Or Zionist adjacent? 🤔

Wouldn't removing them make me a Zionist? I dunno, I've been up for 17 hours now maybe I'm misreading what you're saying here.

Anyway... That's pretty much it for me tonight. Whew! That was a LOT! I'm going to need to bookmark these the next time this stuff comes up. "Here, read this."

This is a news article about him. The whole thing is essentially about how he as a white man is surprised to find out there are negative feelings about Portland. Negative feelings about Portland and Oregon being extremely white and racist.

News article is probably too strong a term. The local NPR affiliate asked for people who had stories about race.

So I told this true story:

This is, oh, 30 years ago or so now. I had a job that involved commuting back and forth between Portland and Chicago (eh, not really Chicago, but if I said "Schaumberg" and "Hoffman Estates", you wouldn't know what I was talking about).

So I was in a cab and the cabbie was chatting away. It comes up that I'm from Portland.

"Portland, huh, you don't have much trouble with black people there, do you?"

Literally the first thing out of his mouth. And I'm more than a little surprised. Is this the first thing people think when they hear "Portland"? Pre-Portlandia, so I guess we have that going for us now. Even odds it's "put a bird on it" now.

So I laughed it off... "No, you know, I know both of them and they're good people."

So I called NPR and told that story on their recorder and they came out and interviewed me. I know, I was surprised too!

“I think Portland had a variety of problems. Race is definitely one of them, yes. But I don’t know that we could classify it as the most important problem. if you look at the homeless situation, there’s definitely an income inequality problem, a mental health problem. there are a whole lot of more pressing problems besides race.”

The thing you have to understand is that the Chicago cabby wasn't 100% wrong. Portland is LILLY-fucking white. It's more diverse now than it was 30 years ago, but when I say "more diverse" I mean 67% white, back then it was probably 75%? More? I don't have those stats handy.

When you have a population that is 67% a monoculture (not entirely accurate, there's a significant 1st generation Eastern European community) race is NOT the issue here that it is elsewhere.

There are SUPER ugly reasons for it too. I won't trouble you with the history lesson, you can Google it if you want. Specifically how as a state Oregon was founded on the idea that black people couldn't own land or the whole history of Vanport.

And despite his politics, he struggles to find sympathy or kinship with the Black Lives Matter marchers who occasionally disrupt his commute home to protest police violence. “I do pay attention to them. I think primarily as somebody who works in downtown we tend to be aware of things like that more because of the disruption it causes. I don’t think the disruption they do is particularly productive. It takes people who would ordinarily be on their side and go, why are they doing this to us? The Portland Police didn’t shoot anybody recently that I’m aware of. If they want to be productive in their protests, they should go to where these events are happening.”

This man was just met with the fact that his place is known for being racist and xenophobic and his first instinctual response was “Go protest elsewhere.”

Yup. Because Portland protestors are, by and large, morons "the common clay of the new West."

Protesting here is interesting, people will protest for any and all reasons or no reason at all. But when the city turned upside down for George Floyd, a horrible event that had fuck all to do with Portland, all they did was a whole lot of nothing.

The problem was this, during the day you had the BLM protests, largely a bunch of white people virtue signalling, "look at me! I'm doing something!" But when the sun went down, black block took over the protest. Largely a bunch of angry white anarchist kids, mostly not even from here, who only wanted to break shit and set fires. Look up the vandalism directed at the Oregon Historical Society as an example.

But all in all, the protests from both BLM and Black Block, did nothing. Portland became a punchline on Fox News and for Trump. He opened an illegal operation here where people were literally being black bagged off the streets by federal agents.

They COULD have done something effective, like protest where the crimes committed by shitty cops were actually happening. They did not. And continue being ineffective.

You know all those 50501 protests? Portland LOVES that shit. Do you honestly think Trump is going to go "Well, if PORTLAND is protesting..." LOL. Back under George H.W. Bush (not W., his DAD) he called Portland "Little Beirut" because of the constant protests.

dismissing a right to protest so you can get somewhere faster. Moreover, a protest to make people aware of a problem with racism.

We KNOW. That's why I have a problem with protests in Portland. They are preaching to the choir here.

What I want to see are EFFECTIVE protests, and that's not what Portland does. It's hard as West Coasters because, from a national media perspective, if it didn't happen on the East coast it might as well have never happened.

You want to do another million man march and shut down D.C.? Man, GO FOR IT. I think the last time we approached that (not counting January 6th) was the womens march with all the knit hats? That one was awesome.

A bunch of white liberals in Portland patting themselves on the back for being white liberals? For Instagram views? We don't need that.

Next comment.

Now, let us focus on something in that Discord server.

There have been comments floating about with screenshots saying that Jordan has access to a bot that has admin abilities. I can confirm this. I do not know whether he still has access to it but he did for at least a year. How do I know this? Because I did as well. 

Yup, still have access to it. For the longest time it really didn't work that's unfair. It worked poorly. Lots of times it would do nothing, some times it would work. Other times it would just error out.

I just found out the other day when we were dealing with the Dwazou ban evading accounts that it was working again and it was really somewhat helpful shutting that down. The ban worked, the remove content? Not so much.

I used it again a few days ago when someone was posting, I shit you not, neon sign spam. LOL. Does Lemmy have a significant audience for "neon signs for your man cave"? Somebody thought so.

But really I only use it when a) it's super obvious like you and I had with our stalkers, or b) (like the Dwazou and neon crap) there's entirely too much of it to remove manually.

The reason I prefer manual removal is the same reason I don't like the "Remove Content" checkbox when banning a user, it doesn't seem to correctly populate the modlog. If I'm removing someone for cause, I want that documented. It helps everyone going forward to see "Ok, yeah, this guy was making Nazi comments".

But if we're talking about 40 posts hawking neon signs? Yeah, nobody needs to see that. Modlog or not. I don't know if that's a bug with "remove content" or intentional design.

(Whew) Ok, that's better, back at it...

Months ago on /c/World, Jordan Lund was talking about the media fact checking bot. He claimed that he would be removed if he removed the bot. That the moderators serve at pleasure of the Admins and they would just replace him. This is directly at odds with an Admin then immediately saying that it wasn’t true.

This also demonstrates that he is not willing to take any criticism or pushback at all on things that he agrees with and would rather push that blame onto someone else to avoid it himself. Now how do I know he was actively for this? Because in the Discord channel when the bot was made and announced, Jordan was literally the first person to respond and say that he was down with this. Something I verified from two different sources and by seeing it with my own eyes.

As you say "moderators serve at the pleasure of the admins" and also the top mod of whatever community they have been added to.

It is not my "job" to second guess the Admins. They run the show, full stop. So when an Admin puts a lot of work and creates a bot, I'm not going to tell them "Hey, don't do that."

Specifically, with the MBFC bot, yeah, I thought, and still think, it's a good idea. Was it perfect? Well, no, but it was the best we could do for free. Or free-ish, TBH I'm not sure if there were fees involved in the API use. I can tell you the alternates I looked at were more money than I personally would pay.

The alternative is manually checking every site, especially those that get reported. In most cases we'd see a report of something like "This is a propaganda site!" and the MBFC bot was right there marking it "Questionable". Easy peasy, get that crap out of here.

The real problem was with small, new, or niche sites. I remember once a report in World that a particular site just "didn't look right". And, yeah, it looked SUPER janky. Like Geocities 1998 janky. But the reporting at first pass LOOKED solid (this was before all the AI nonsense going on now).

The bot knew nothing about it. Nobody did, it was kind of a cipher. I initially allowed it based on 2 things, the reporting appeared accurate, and it was for part of the world that was under-represented news wise, Africa.

Then we found out the reason the news looked legit was it was just a copy/paste from other legitimate news orgs without attribution. Yeah, removed.

But when the complaints on the bot came in, I told people honestly "Hey, I'm open, what's an alternative?"

At best the response was silence, at worst it was angry noises. So we put it up to a vote and got the bot gone.

Next comment:

Next we shall focus on him gaslighting and lying to or about everyone. Including the Admins of LW.

A few days ago, Jordan accused someone of being transphobic, homophobic, violent and racist on YePowerTrippingBastards. Both the person themselves as well as another user looked into those accusations. There were no demonstrations of that behavior.

As I stated in that thread, modlog says otherwise.

https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=11119076

Specifically:

The response I got was "Hey, that's not necessarily homophobia/transphobia" and my internal reaction was "Are you shitting me?" my external reply stands. "Tell that to someone being misgendered."

I want to add here, this is EXACTLY the kind of user that makes YPTB impossible to take seriously and why I tend to be less than kind to YPTB users. Is it fair to paint everyone with a broad brush? No. But when you see over and over again:

"kill yourself", harrassment, personal attack, harrassment, harrassment, harrassment...

But it's all there in the log, you can read it yourself. These are the people hanging out here and the people other perfectly innocent people are choosing to hang out with.

Super hungry, grabbing food and I'll be back for more...

Here's another example of an entire thread showing he isn't fit. If you want more just look at his profile or search his name on basically any community.

This entire thread

That thread? Really? You have no idea what that was all about.

@Bonus@piefed.social made a post that broke the rules of the community. I quite politely explained that it was removable, why, and told them how to fix it. @Zaktor@sopuli.xyz then interjected themselves when the issue was all but resolved, decided to be an asshole, said it was an example of bad moderation, etc. etc. The usual attack, attack, attack. And it wasn't even their post!

OP fixed their post and actually apologized to me for having to put up with Zaktors bullshit and there was no harm done. Surprise! Zaktor turns up in YPTB and I was pointed here by the very same user who was moderated and corrected their post.

Next comment.

But I did mention earlier that we'd get back to this so let us. Jordan has demonstrated time and time again that he looks for a fight, actively enjoys trolling, and wants to be as antagonistic as humanly possible. There are times he's summoned into YPTB with an @ but other times he isn't. Honestly I don't want to go through each and everyone of these showing that this is shitty, troll-like and antagonistic behavior.

Do not mistake refusing to back down from a fight with seeking out a fight. It doesn't take an @ to bring me here. More often than not someone sends me a PM along the lines of "You seeing this shit?" and honestly, I don't unless someone links me to it as was the case with this post.

TPTB has this idea that mods in general (and me specifically) are no lifers just looking for excuses to fuck with people. I can't speak for other mods, but that's not the case for me.

I clear the mod queue, and in my idle browsing of the groups I moderate, I remove content I come across organically. I might see a post clearly showing "youtube.com" or some other obviously bad domain and go "Well, fuck, that has to go."

Hilariously, just the other day an established user, @TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world posted a video to Politics and I had to reply in the effect of "Dude, you know better than that!"

There was no drama there, they got their links and communities mixed up, eh, it happens.

But I'm not stalking communities or users looking for people saying shit about me, or trying to find ways to fuck with people. You might not believe it, but I do have better things to do.

Moderating is a lot like pruning in that respect. In another week or so it's time to go out and brutally hack down my roses so they can grow back in the spring, my wife hates seeing the de-nuded rose stumps and yells at me EVERY YEAR, but it's necessary.

Next comment:

But let us take a look at some of the actions he has taken, shall we?

A few months ago a Canadian used a Canadian term in referencing Canadian politics and a Canadian Government. Jordan Lund, an American, misunderstood what was being said. Instead of asking for clarification, the post was instantly removed with the logic of "Misinformation".

Jesus, this thing AGAIN. What this involved was someone being overly pedantic about the definition of "Member of Government" was.

They, innacurately, were claiming that an elected official, who is a member of the Canadian Parliament, didn't count as a "Member of Government".

I attempted to talk them down, explained that, as a matter of fact that person IS an elected official, is able to cast votes, and that does, in fact make them a "Member of Government".

They doubled down, with the idea that even though they are elected and can vote, they don't count as a member of government because they aren't part of the ruling party.

Which is utter and complete nonsense. They are getting a government paycheck, they are a "member of government."

To use an American example, the Democrats are completely and utterly castrated. They can't do anything, they can't present anything, and they don't have the numbers to actually stop anything, but they're still all members of government, with official positions, official staff, official offices, and very official paychecks.

So, yeah, I removed comments claiming an elected official was not a member of government as misinformation.

Next comment:

The job of a moderator is to apply the rules in an unbiased fashion. To read the rules, interpret them if needed and then carry them out. Personal influence is not supposed to be a part of it. You're supposed to treat it like a position of authority and respect, to respect the position and not abuse it.

Agreed, and I would add one more thing that is my own personal take. Moderation should be done publicly. One of the things that chapped my ass about Reddit was the silent moderation. Locked threads, shadow bans, etc. etc. etc.

I knew going in that putting a public face on moderation was going to make me a target. I'm OK with that, and I'd rather be a target than have people come into a thread full of:

deleted

deleted
deleted
deleted

Don't get me wrong, the modlog is GREAT. But someone encountering a deleted thread or a locked post or what have you shouldn't HAVE to go to the modlog to get that information.

Jordan has not had this realization despite numerous people pointing this out to him. Instead he will say stuff like... (cites removed they won't quote well here)

I always consider the audience, and, unfortunately, when it comes to YPTB my default position is "dismissed with a subtle jerking off motion."

Am I overly flippant here? Absolutely. Most complaints about me here come from users with incredibly vile content in their modlogs and I give them all the respect they are due which is to say "none whatsoever".

Someone is saying mean things about me and their modlog reveals calls for violence, "kill yourself", racism, homophobia, etc. etc. etc.? No, I'm not spending time debating them or defending myself against them, they can fuck right off.

That being said, when people ask me directly either in public or in PMs "Hey, why did you do what you did?" I give them honest answers. They may not LIKE those answers, but they get them.

Now, let's temporarily ignore the fact that he went into YPTP to actively antagonize and harass multiple users

I don't seek out YPTP, I got namechecked, small difference. Same with this post, someone pointed me to it so here I am. For the most part, I don't pay attention to what happens here.

He's saying that if you don't antagonize him then he won't antagonize you. That it is "fair fucking game" to increase harassment of a user if one harasses him. This is a repugnant and troll-like mindset at the best of times but in the hands of a moderator it is genuinely dangerous.

I refuse to stand by and be bullied. Just because I'm a mod does not give anyone free reign to attack me, and certainly not to attack me for doing an unpaid gig that's cleaning crap out of communities.

The best negative comment I see frequently is "you're a fucking janitor!" and I'm like "Yeah, that's fair." But you honest to god don't want to see what happens if the janitors aren't doing the job.

I'm not going to respond to vile and hateful comments with "Oh, please sir, you aren't being very nice. Please don't try to hurt my feelings." You deal with bullies directly and with force, it's the only thing they understand.

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