This is prompted by this post over on fediverse at lemmy.world which details that user’s content being moderated on lemmy.ml and then that user being banned from lemmy.ml. They provide screenshots of the modlog at that time and explain what they think is problematic overreach on the part of the moderators involved.

If you’re familiar with all of the “anti tankie” stuff that boils up regularly, you can imagine that this post has a number of up-votes and a bunch of “discussion” about tankies and lemmy-ml etc. And of course, you can imagine that the moderated posts were in some way allegedly critical of China.

For me personally, as someone who isn’t a bona fide communist, I find it all pretty tiring as, to me, there seems to be pretty obviously a lot of “red scare” rubbish to all of that (and I’m also generally rather happy to hear from people I don’t necessarily agree with).

What prompted me to post this though was:

1. It seems that the modlog of the posts/comments in question got cleared, and that many in that thread claim that this isn’t uncommon
2. More broadly/nebulously, what could be a lack of practical clarity in the rules of the instance and maybe what could be done to better facilitate a more inter-connected fediverse/threadiverse.

On 1 …

the modlog for the relevant user (SpaceCadet at feddit.nl) seems to be bereft of any moderation other than the bans they incurred. So it does seem that the modlog was cleared in some way. Or the user is lying.

Is this an admin/mod feature I didn’t know about? Was it done by the admins manually? I can imagine that one would want to remove especially egregious content from the modlog and would happily do so manually if necessary. In this case though, my best guess is that the relevant thread was this one where there already seem to be some content potentially as egregious as that posted by the “aggrieved” user.

But this does raise some eyebrows and I would ask any of the involved mods/admins for any clarification.

Generally, it seems to me that modlog clearing isn’t ideal and should be registered as a sort of meta-moderation action (though any DB access an admin has can ultimately enable any editing, but then again, federation nullifies some of that AFAICT).

On 2 …

which is just general thinking out loud stuff …

Like I said, this stuff comes up again and again, and typically around China, where AFAIK, some real sino-phobia has settled-in in the west (not that anyone here needs to know that) and of course mods/admins here are rather vigilant against that.

What seems to happen though is that the dialogue seems to get boiled down to a sort of “free-speech, moderators overreaching” complaint. AFAICT, the moderation actions in question are motivated by removing what appears to be sino-phobic (or similar) content as racist typically under Rule 1, and more generally, I imagine, removing what seems to be “trolling lib” content.

The thing is that I don’t think the rules really capture the perspective and politics that’s being brought to bear in these contentious moderation actions.

Sure some “trolling red scare libs” will always do what they do. But for some I think the rules and their application can actually be confusing (however obvious it may feel to the admins) and don’t help them see their bias or the clash of world-views they’ve encountered (to whatever extent such could be a motivation in designing the instance rules and moderation policies).

Moreover, I think this misalignment can inflame the “furor” that tends to erupt over such “incidents”, as excessive or “power-tripping” censorship is a pretty simple issue for people to invoke and generate “outrage” with. Indeed, from what I’ve seen, the likelihood of lemmy-world and/or others defederating from lemmy-ml is higher now than in the past. Active efforts to move communities off of lemmy-ml have certainly been mustered.

Which is what the fediverse is for, of course, but it strikes me that all up there’s been a poor attempt here at drawing clear boundaries around different world-views and how they’re likely to clash and be moderated in the event of such clashes.

What could be done better … I’m personally not sure … and I recognise that there’s likely a good amount of condescension in me criticising the communists here who’ve been trying their best to manage a good amount of trolling/brigading over the years (including creating a new platform to avoid prior censorship!). Moreover, I’m personally not really on top of the sorts of things of this nature that do tend to get moderated here (which is why in part the cleared modlog and the drama that seems to have been provoked by this piqued my interest).

But in my potentially naive world view, it’d make a lot of sense for there to be a comment somewhere around the rules clarifying the sort of things that many westerners/“libs” will find “strangely” un-tolerated here, and where that comes from conceptually/ideologically, and where the admins/mods generally stand on moderation policies just in case there’s any “free speech” or “censorship” angst. Though I do recognise that that is likely to attract its own tirades which may be the reason there is no such statement to begin with.

Now of course, lemmy ml doesn’t need to make everyone happy, and I’m not suggesting anything like that. The admins may be quite happy to defederate or be deferated by the annoying “libs” AFAIK, and I’d understand that.

But I’ve certainly seen the admins speak and behave generally in favour of a relatively widely inter-connected fediverse, and so I imagine that they could be in favour of a moderation policy or approach that better aided such.

Like I said, I’m thinking out loud here and don’t have any particularly strong opinions. And, as I hope has been clear, I’m not interested here in pushing any stance on whether any particular moderation should or should not have occurred. Generally, when moderation is taken, my personal interest is to try to understand it (thus my interest in the modlog situation), and then try to reconcile that with broader fediverse structures/policies.