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’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.