Admin Action and Mod Removal:
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.
Well, you ARE a "miseducator". ;)
Username doesn't check out?
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.
Thank you for your transparency on this. It's disappointing - especially the misinformation part - but it's good to know.
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
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.
This is exactly why I dont like that lemmy makes votes visible. Makes powertripping and targeted harassment so much easier.
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.
Lemmy doesn't show them, but the vote information is all public. People reading Lemmy posts via Kbin can see the voters.
The votes are all visible to admins, with a built in back room toggle for making them public. Different instances change the amount of public info. I believe kbin makes it viewable by default? There are a few others.
Not true. Votes are visible in the database but there is nothing built into lemmy for this.
Lol, this was the guy mod-splaining GenX to a bunch of GenXers the other day.
This sounds like a fun read. Any chance you recall which thread?
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.
Bummer. Thanks for checking anyway :)
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.
Let's see if we can make this place better.
"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.
Say hi to your new mod folks!
I'll give it my best shot.
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. ❤️
<3
Those guys are both dead now probably.
I had to look it up and you're right!
They thank the pallbearers for their support.
No, thank you (:
That was a mod??
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.
Well done! They should make you a mod, we need to get all the centrists off this site.
THANK YOU. And the admins. Seriously.
And above all, for the transparency involved.
🫡
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.
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).
Yep those comments were restored.
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.
Nothing of value lost, good riddance.
THE VACCINE CAUSES PURPLE MINIONS
moderator position please
Nothing can kill the Grimace.
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.
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.
I sometimes agreed with YoBuckStopsHere and sometimes not, but in that Covid thread clearly mod powers were getting to this individual's head...
Probably the same asshat that banned me from WorldNews
Searching the modlog, I don't see any action taken against you, unless it was a different account.
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.
Yeah, I was searching the k1nsey account which is clean, godlesscommie was removed for cause. ;)
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=107790
D: That's good to know, thanks. I edited my comment as well. Since that first time, he didn't mess with anything that I caught btw.
Same account https://imgur.com/a/6Z0G1z6
Nope, that was me! ;)
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=107790
Can't speak out against zionists, Biden, or capitalism.
No, can't tell other users to go fuck themselves. That was the real problem.
But when it comes to alt accounts and "ban evasion" and all that, your new account is clean, I have no beef.
For me, I treat alt accounts like this:
Account #1 gets banned? Fine, it is what it is.
Roll to a new account. If that new account is clean, it's clean, I'm not going to hold old content against you.
If the new account was created to continue the bad behavior? That's ban evasion and also merits a ban.
More like you can't go around telling people to go fuck themselves and calling people names like an asshole or you get removed for being an asshole.
Every person I told to go fuck themselves earned that comment, usually after telling me to go fuck myself
Just fuck each other and get rid of the sexual tension already.