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Admin Action and Mod Removal: (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by jordanlund@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] miseducator@lemmy.world 107 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 52 points 11 months ago

Well, you ARE a "miseducator". ;)

[-] wolfpack86@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago

Username doesn't check out?

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[-] frickineh@lemmy.world 69 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] kescusay@lemmy.world 62 points 11 months ago

Thank you for your transparency on this. It's disappointing - especially the misinformation part - but it's good to know.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 57 points 11 months ago

Thanks so much!

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

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 36 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago

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!

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

If you're reading a community, clicking the modlog button in the sidebar will return only results from that community.

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[-] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

If you remove the comment, people won’t see the counter argument.

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.

[-] wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one 13 points 11 months ago

This is exactly why I dont like that lemmy makes votes visible. Makes powertripping and targeted harassment so much easier.

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[-] solidgrue@lemmy.world 47 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Lol, this was the guy mod-splaining GenX to a bunch of GenXers the other day.

[-] Bo7a@lemmy.ca 9 points 11 months ago

This sounds like a fun read. Any chance you recall which thread?

[-] solidgrue@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago

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.

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[-] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 42 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 35 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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. ❤️

[-] Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Those guys are both dead now probably.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

I had to look it up and you're right!

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[-] Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

No, thank you (:

[-] MightBe@lemmy.world 35 points 11 months ago

Let's see if we can make this place better.

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago

"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.

[-] antik@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

Say hi to your new mod folks!

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[-] Goferking0@ttrpg.network 32 points 11 months ago

That was a mod??

[-] SuperIce@lemmy.world 27 points 11 months ago

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.

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[-] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 27 points 11 months ago

THANK YOU. And the admins. Seriously.

And above all, for the transparency involved.

[-] antik@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

🫡

[-] netburnr@lemmy.world 25 points 11 months ago

You mean this guy, who posted 24 minutes ago?

https://kbin.social/m/politics@lemmy.ml/t/729533

He's just moved on tonother instances it seems.

[-] antik@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago

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.

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[-] WashedOver@lemmy.ca 14 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 22 points 11 months ago

I sometimes agreed with YoBuckStopsHere and sometimes not, but in that Covid thread clearly mod powers were getting to this individual's head...

[-] USAONE@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

Nothing of value lost, good riddance.

[-] crsu@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

THE VACCINE CAUSES PURPLE MINIONS

moderator position please

[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago

Nothing can kill the Grimace.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Candelestine@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] antik@lemmy.world 17 points 11 months ago

After he was removed as a mod he abused his access to a moderation-bot to remove users' comments. So he is now perma-banned from this instance.

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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023

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