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.
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.