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.
While the study is not conclusive, that does not mean it is not a significant and useful piece of evidence. Conducted fairly and with acknowledgement of its flaws, it should be taken into account over the use of a simple classification system describing animals in their natural habitats.
I disagree that the admins should be fine coming down on anything they perceive as potentially abusive practices, as I think that sets a bad overall precedent.
Science is a continuously evolving thing, by design, and there is nothing wrong with using the best information that we have available at any given time.
I think it’s funny that the vegan mods in question pivoted effortlessly from “this is our place, fuck you, you are banned, we’ll decide what is and isn’t allowed” to “halp halp they’re censoring me, what about my human rights, you can’t do this”
What’s inconsistent about that? Communities have their own rules, which often are and should be much stricter than the sitewide rules. For example, a pro-Harris community may decide to ban pro-Trump posts (or vice versa) to keep it on-topic, but that wouldn’t justify a site admin removing the mods and their comments for that. Some communities exist specifically for debates, while others choose to be more of a safe space type.
Yes, and instances have their own overriding sitewide rules. Some instances exist specifically for misinformation or the encouragement of reprehensible behavior, or at least advertise themselves as a safe space for it, and some don’t.
It’s also relevant that (edit: Rooki’s I was wrong) the community’s first reaction was the kind of reasoned discussion that some people are now saying should be the answer (as opposed to this heavy handed censorship), and then only after (edit: Rooki’s) reasoned discussion was deleted and they were banned, did they shrug their shoulders and say well if just hitting the “fuck you” button is within bounds then I’ve got one of those buttons too.
I think it can be written down as a useful learning experience for the vegan club about how the world works, if they decide to learn from it.
It is a vegan community, that is where vegan views should flourish. A non-vegan admin stepped in and trampled on our free speech.
I’m gonna start a community which is devoted to kidnapping vegans and feeding them an all-meat diet and cite some dodgy studies about how that type of diet actually leads to better health outcomes for them as self-reported by other enthusiasts within the vegan kidnapping enthusiast community
Yep
More common, I think, than someone saying “well I opened the door to it by trying to ban them first, it’s only fair that I have to find a new instance now, that was a valuable lesson and now I understand better how it probably felt on the receiving end of the bans I was happily handing out before”
I think it’s funny they thought they could censor an admin. I fully support Rooki on this.
100%
That’s the funniest part to me. Rooki was extremely evenhanded about it.
They posted misinformation, Rooki left it up posted a counterpoint. They banned Rooki, Rooki didn’t ban them in return, just restored the counterpoint and removed their ability to ban. At no point were any of their free speech rights interfered with in any (edit: any unreasonable) way, and now they’re all butthurt that they are no longer able to censor the admins on their own instance, in service of promoting animal abuse.
Good luck guys. Like I say I would look at it as a learning experience about how the world works.
(Edit: I had my chronology wrong. Rooki wasn’t the author of the initial vegan-cat-debunking comments that the !vegan mods deleted that sparked the whole thing off)
