Hello World,

as some of you might be aware, there have been various accusations against one of our former community team members, Jordan Lund.

We have removed Jordan as a member of our community team a week ago, on 23rd of September, due to various behavior that we do not consider acceptable for a member of our team. We haven’t posted about this earlier, as we’re still in the progress of reviewing and making decisions, and we originally expected to be able to conclude this earlier, within a time frame where we could have presented the final outcome in the first post.

During his time with Lemmy.World, Jordan has been helping out our team with various admin-level tasks, as well as moderating a few large communities, including [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]. As far as we can tell, most of his actions, including moderation actions, were in alignment with both our instance rules and also rules and spirit of the affected communities.

Unfortunately, this does not apply to all his actions. We have identified multiple cases of conduct that do not align with what we expect from members of our team. We currently do not have any explicit rules or code of conduct for our community team or other team members like instance admins on top of our ToS/bylaws, as we expected to have a common understanding of acceptable behavior. In the past we already had discussions with Jordan about some of this behavior and we believed that to be enough at that time. Going forward, we will be working on a code of conduct applicable to all members of our team, including community team and anyone above.

Being a member of our community team provides additional privileges for selected members, such as the ability to appoint community moderators, update our community spotlight or even banning users. In Jordan’s case this included permissions to appoint community moderators and ban users from the instance.

As of today, we are not aware of misuse of these additional privileges. Once we have reviewed other actions taken by Jordan we will also review these types of actions taken by Jordan in the recent past. If you believe that you or someone else was incorrectly banned from Lemmy.World, you’re welcome to appeal your ban by reaching out to our team. As we currently have some technical issues with our ticket system, I recommend sending an email to report at lemmy dot world for the time being, visting our Matrix room #general:lemmy.world or reaching out to @[email protected] directly, also possible via Matrix at @mrkaplan:lemmy.world.

Following our instance rules, we have a few cases in which we may remove community moderators from their communities:

1. Grossly committing a violation of the Terms of Service
2. Acting repeatedly against the local community rules
3. Extended periods of inactivity, as evident by lack of public interaction and/or failure to respond to reports

We are still discussing whether we consider his behavior a “gross violation of our ToS”, as there are definitely some arguments to be made in favor of that. This includes for example using incorrect gendered pronouns, which we will update in our ToS in the coming days to make it more clear to everyone that this will not be tolerated. Due to his previous and current position we are still discussing what our final resolution to this issue will be as far as instance rules are concerned. Whether or not a person is trolling does not justify using incorrect pronouns for them. We have also informed Jordan that we expect his behavior in this regard to change immediately.

We’re currently also in conversations with other moderators of communities moderated by Jordan to review their position on his behavior within their communities and whether they believe that his actions in those communities were appropriate and in line with the community rules. As a reminder, the order of community moderators in the sidebar has direct impact on the moderator hierarchy, where a moderator listed earlier is able to remove any moderators later in the list. This means even if an action might not (yet) be taken by instance admins, other community moderators may be able to remove moderators if they’re no longer desired to be part of the team. Especially community rules about civility and respectful conduct do not appear to have been followed in a number of cases, and we are reviewing with the community moderators whether this is in line with other content they would usually moderate/not moderate.

It should also be noted that not all things reported to us are actually or clearly violating our rules, even if we may not agree with them. For example, we currently do not have rules about moderators removing other people’s arguments, especially as “misinformation”, to strengthen their own misguided arguments, and then continue to accuse the other side of misinformation later on. We do expect our team members to not use positions of power to “win arguments” or falsely accuse others of misinformation, when this isn’t actually the case. Therefore, while this example is not something we tolerate for members of our team, having this happen on community level (by a person who isn’t also holding a role above community mod at that time) is currently not something we are enforcing.

Once we have worked out a CoC for members of our team, we will post about this separately and also gather community feedback on whether you believe that enforcement of that (or parts of it, or more things) should also include moderators of Lemmy.World communities.

Additionally, we will also be looking at expanding our community team a bit in the near future, as we have both lost some people over time and recently also Jordan. We will also be posting about this separately, currently expected to be in a few weeks, with a description of expectations and responsibilities.

We will also be updating this post over the coming days until we have finished our review and actions.