In my view as a long-time moderator, the purpose of moderation is conflict resolution and ensuring the sitewide rules are followed. As reported today by !vegan@lemmyworld, moderator Rooki’s vision appears to be that their personal disagreement with someone else’s position takes priority over the rules and is enough to remove comments in a community they don’t moderate, remove its moderators for the comments, and effectively resort to hostile takeover by posting their own comment with an opposing view (archived here) and elevating it for visiblity.
The removed comments relate to vegan cat food. As seen in the modlog, Rooki removed a number of pretty balanced comments explaining that while there are problematic ways to feed cats vegan, if done properly, cats can live on vegan cat food. Though it is a controversial position even among vegans, there is scientific research supporting it, like this review from 2023 or the papers co-authored by professor Andrew Knight. These short videos could also work as a TL;DR of his knowledge on the matter. As noted on Wikipedia, some of the biggest animal advocacy organizations support the notion of vegan cat food, while others do not. Vegan pet food brands, including Ami, Evolution Diet, and Benevo have existed for years and are available throughout the world, clearly not prohibited by law in countries with laws against animal abuse.
To summarize, even if you don’t agree with the position of vegan cat food being feasible, at the very least you have to acknowledge that the matter is not clear-cut. Moreover, there is no rule of lemmy.world that prohibits those types of conversations unless making a huge stretch to claim that it falls under violent content “promoting animal abuse” in the context of “excessive gore” and “dismemberment”.
For the sake of the argument, even if we assume that the truth is fully on Rooki’s side and discussions of vegan cat food is “being a troll and promoting killing pets”, the sitewide rules would have to be updated to reflect this view, and create a dangerous precedent, enabling banning for making positive comments about junk food (killing yourself), being parents who smoke (killing your kids), being religious “because it’s not scientific” and so on. Even reddit wouldn’t go that far, and there are plenty of conversations on vegan cat food on reddit.
Given Rooki’s behavior and that it has already resulted in forcing the vegan community out of lemmy.world and with more likely to follow, I believe the only right course of action is to remove them as a moderator to help restore the community’s trust in the platform and reduce the likelihood of similar events in the future.
Hi all,
For the sake of transparency, we are responding here, as remaining silent will also send a message to the community. We are actively reviewing all the information posted in this thread and all other linked sources. The entire team is being brought up to speed on the events that have taken place, but this process may take some time. We are all in different time zones, and many of us have professional and personal obligations that may take priority. Please bear with us, as there is a lot to review. We promise that after our review, we will respond to the community.
Thank you.
Any updates or this more of a week to month wait?
Looking at the modlog, Rooki reinstated the two !vegan moderators and restored one of the mods’ comments about an hour ago. Rooki also edited their own comment referenced in the OP to say the following:
Personally, I’m not fully satisfied if that is the end of it. The changes look like Rooki admitting that the issue is not clear-cut, but Rooki’s conduct as a moderator has to reflect the rules, not something as arbitrary as Rooki’s level of disagreement with someone’s views at the given time.
Nobody should have to convince Rooki that something is not misinformation. Rooki (or any other instance moderator) must not even think of interfering on that basis. The word “misinformation” is not in the rules in any shape or form, and the only thing remotely close to it is Lemmy.World accepting that “The content provided on Lemmy.World is not necessarily factually true”. If anything, the rules side more with the community moderators’ judgement by saying “Your participation in individual communities will only be acceptable on the condition that you abide by their rules.”
Edit: Added more to the sentence on Lemmy.World’s rule related to misinformation.
I love how this comment is how I find out what’s happened
In the absence of announcements, my understanding is that it’s highly unlikely that Rooki will be removed for the misconduct.
Firstly, it doesn’t take a team of two admins and seven moderators nearly a week to investigate a matter involving a handful of comments and six users. Secondly, if it were a broader investigation into Rooki’s overall conduct, you’d expect Rooki to at least be asked to pause their moderator activity for the duration, but Rooki continues to ban people and remove comments.
Ironically, one of the users banned by Rooki for trolling today is EndlessApollo, whose comment and subsequent ban by !vegan launched the whole chain of events.
O/U on if they actually do a statement?
At least they admitted fault and learned a lesson.
However I’m also not adequately satisfied with this behaviour. This is an egregious example of someone not understanding how community works and then stepping in to boss them around about something they know little about.
I’m calling on the Lemmy.World team to appointment a vegan admin to oversee the community of [email protected] and for the removal of Rooki as an admin.
I would probably consider that community lost and promote the other ones on the other instances as much as possible
Why should we care if you or [email protected] are satisfied?
More than I expected. Still wonder if they’ll actually say something