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 !news@lemmy.world, !world@lemmy.world and !politics@lemmy.world. 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 @MrKaplan@lemmy.world 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:
- Grossly committing a violation of the Terms of Service
- Acting repeatedly against the local community rules
- 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.
Alright so I looked at those Terms of Service.
1.1 - Attacks on People? Check. He’s repeatedly gone out of his way to harass people as demonstrated both via his modlog and the litany of comments he’s left on YPTB
1.2 - Discrimination of Minorities? Check as demonstrated by the fact that he’s been banned from the entirety of blahaj for transphobic behavior.
3 - System Disruption? Arguable considering he’s permanently ruined any credibility that /c/News and /c/World had and has driven so many users to actively avoid lemmy.world at all possible costs. Myself included now.
8 - Misinformation? Check. Removing someones post for a lack of understanding is one thing but you said that you (Admins) talked to Jordan about his behavior on the Canadian thing. Meaning that you knew it was wrong and had told him it was wrong. He repeatedly and continually doubles down on that specific thing. That is misinformation. Misinformation that is then being enforced with the abilities of a moderator. Which also then slides into 1.1 - Attacks on People as he’s actively lying and punishing a dude when he did nothing wrong.
At this stage there are no valid arguments to be made against it. The evidence is overwhelming and has been piling up for months and months and months and months and months.
This is a complete no brainer. You have admins of other trusted instances refusing to have anything to do with him. You’ve got whole swaths of users that are outright boycotting Lemmy.world as a whole and I’m not talking about my random dumb ass. I mean for literal years I’ve been asked why I set up on Lemmy.world. This entire experience has not done anything to sway anyones fears but has done a lot to reconfirm them.
what did you expect the us government shut down yesterday /s
Sorry I’m a casual user, I know a little about this person, but do you mind clarifying the Canadian thing?
So in Canada we use different political terms than the Americans do. One of these is usage of the word ‘Government’. In the US, Government applies to the whole general moving structure of the United States. In Canada the word Government applies to the ruling party specifically in much the same way that Americans use the word ‘Administration’. Jordan was not aware of this.
A user commented that a particular person was not a Member of Government, referring to the fact that they were not in the party that currently forms the Government of Canada. Jordan Lund removed this as ‘Misinformation’, claiming that the particular person was an elected member of parliament so calling them not a member of government was flat out misinformation. Important point to note is this was on the World News community. An American with incomplete information about something removed a comment under the guise of misinformation that was about another country. Personally? This is kind of annoying. But it dropped into rage inducing territory when he repeatedly doubled down.
The comment removed:
Even through context alone it should have been made clear how the word government was being used but Jordan was either incapable of grasping that or refused to. He was called out on it and doubled down on his stance. Multiple users educated him on the subject but he refused to engage with anything that proved him wrong (this is a continuous problem of his). Months later he said the same thing again. Again, multiple users proved him wrong. Once again, he refused to engage.
A couple of weeks ago, I made a rather large post that detailed numerous things that he has done. Like a ton. In the comments, someone brought up the Canadian thing again to an admin of LW named MrKaplan. Kaplan said
3 hours later, Jordan again doubled down.
Small sidebar but the Wikipedia page for the Government of Canada says this:
In that moment Jordan proved one of two things. Either that the admins had never actually talked about the issue to him or (more likely) that he did not believe that he did anything wrong so he ignored anything that was told to him.
He does not accept differing information than that of what he believes, he moderates through an American lens and refuses to take the differences of other countries into account and he repeatedly doubles down on an inaccurate retelling of events as well as an inaccurate definition of the term Government inside of Canada. Doubling down even when an admin publicly says he’s wrong.
This single event alone proves that he is incapable of impartial moderation of /c/World and needs to be immediately removed. Months of this going on and months of this insisting he’s correct while admins publicly say he isn’t. It was this specific inaction by the Admins of Lemmy.world that caused me to move off of the instance. I couldn’t tolerate them willfully accepting American misinformation about Canadian politics being pushed on a WorldNews community. This entire release saying that they’re going to look into things and then decide is, frankly, a joke. He was publicly contradicting something the Admins privately told him and doing the thing they told him not to. They have the ammo they need to from just this one moment stretched over the course of months.
He won’t listen to them and follow the basic rules they laid out yet they will not remove him while he actively violates the TOS of Lemmy.world. At that point there is no justification for the inaction of Admins. Absolutely none. I grant time needed to review, sure, but it’s been essentially 2 weeks since I made that post public in which they said they were already reviewing his behavior for days. Half of a month is not needed for this decision and I can’t stomach this any longer.
Those write ups are really top notch
I wanted to be a journalist as a kid and then wanted to be a news anchor. Might explain a whole lot about my voice and writing style now, huh? lol
But thank you <3
That might explain it indeed!
You’re welcome 😄
Thank you so very much for the detailed write up, I appreciate the time you put into this!
Hey, you asked <3
It’s still amazing but unsurprising they only commented to link here.
https://lemmy.world/post/35918814
This entire post here is just an announcement to say they removed him from a position people didn’t think was still a thing or didn’t know about, then PR to give them an out if nothing happens.
Even in this post they get an out from their users saying it’s fine because they didn’t see it or ignore the comm completely cause they think it’s just a hate place.
Incidentally, tiny data point - I’m fairly active here and this is the first I’ve heard of any of this. And in general the only times I’ve seen him has been what seemd like good mod behavior.
Not saying any of this didnt happen, he shouldn’t be removed, etc. Just that it definitely hasn’t been obvious to everyone.
It’s one of those things where it was more evident when interactions happened in a space he didn’t moderate or where couldn’t get things removed.
Pattern is usually:
No but it was obvious to the admins. That’s the important thing here. This information has been kicked back to the top for a while now. I made a post pointing out a ton of things he did. Dudes list of crimes is so long I left a ton out of that post.
And you didn’t even cover the stuff from months ago, just in the last few weeks.
The admin team is just covering for Jordan, like they’re all on the same team of silencing dissent and need to cover their fall guy.
As a reminder, I’ll donate to .world’s servers if they remove him as a mod before the end of September 2025, UTC.
How many rules does he need to break as a mod before they do something?
My own quitting lemmy.world from a gradual buildup of annoyance, but if I had to condense it to a single incident, it would be the one where they banned discussing the wrong kind of cat food. I don’t think Jordan L. had anything to do with that. I still chuckle over the whole thing and see it as showing failure of the fediverse concept.
Yeah the cat food thing was so stupid and really divided the vegan community on Lemmy. When I was first reading Stamets’ YPTB post I was wondering if it was the same user but that was an admin named Rooki. They were both just using similar tactics of “misinformation” removals to win arguments while being incorrect themselves.
Here’s the context for anyone wanting it.
That you could say fuck that noise and jump to a different instance is proof of the fediverse concept, not a failure.
“The fediverse is flawed if a single instance does some moderation I don’t like” is some absolute clown logic… and then you went to .ml instead lol
lol, jumps to .ml !