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:
- 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.
You must log in or # to comment.
oh man, thank god. dude was a shitstain of a mod and never applied rules unilaterally.
same kind of shit mods that made Reddit what it is today.
guess I can unblock the communities he was a mod in now, but they’re probably dead anyway.
He’s still a mod unfortunately
wtf
now I get the other comments calling this fluff or PR.
It’s just them announcing that they are acknowledging the issue but aren’t doing anything
Thank you for the update
As a comment for people reading this, if you are looking for alternative communities (and help spread activity to other instances), there is
Ah this whole thing clarifies for me what’s been going on for a while. Tnx!
I remember Blaze and others following suite setting up alternative instances. Btw, nice initiative. Some people saw that as breaking up the Lemmy experience, because Lemmy didn’t have enough Lemmirians. In some case it was just the strict mod rules, like too much rulez, and therefore nothing different could b3 posted, in other cases some got tired of the formal and dry posts, and prefered a more informal experience, probably.
So they set up their own shop. Only good to have alternative experiences so that’s good . In light of these revelations it might also have been a bit of personal disagreement, culture wars maybe, or just a different preference.
Ofcourse, I don’t like powerdrunk mods as they kill the mood. I condemn arbitrary use of community rules by egomaniacs. Those communities I try to avoid.
But yeah, it’s sad to realize there are some people doing exactly this with a few of the bigger communities. Hope these revelations lead to a new understanding and improve the overall Lemmy experience.
Really reinforces how bad lw is at anything PR. Which is ironic considering how much they love using it.
Still waiting for an update to their we should get along with flat earthers policy plan
Personally I don’t think mods who shield someone like UniversalMonk for months should be allowed to mod.
Cool corpo speak. I reckon there’s something sincere buried in there, but I can’t be sure.
Personally, I think that .world deserves Jordan Lund because he exudes libbed-out Discord mod energy. It’s the perfect match.
Jordan is essentially the perfect person for .world
If you like them, you like .world. If you don’t, you understand the issues people have.
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.
A reminder that mod order does not always federate correctly, so you may need to head to LW to see it correctly.
Sounds like you guys painted yourselves into a bureaucratic corner and now you can’t find your way out. Too many fucking rules.
They have to have the too many rules so when their mods ban someone they can vaguely point to one, but never remove a moderator who breaks their ToS.
It seems that way, yes.
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
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.
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.
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.
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:
Unfortunately, this guy isn’t even a member of the government. He’s a backbencher in our third biggest political party. OK enough guy as far as I know, people in the NDP usually are, but he’s basically a nobody. Calling him a “lawmaker” is about as generous as they could get.
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
[…] we have already discussed topics like the Canadian politics one with him in the past, as we also don’t consider it acceptable what he did back then. Source
3 hours later, Jordan again doubled down.
They doubled down, with the idea that even though they are elected and can vote, they don’t count as a member of government because they aren’t part of the ruling party. Which is utter and complete nonsense. They are getting a government paycheck, they are a “member of government.” Source
Small sidebar but the Wikipedia page for the Government of Canada says this:
Under Canada’s Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, the terms government and Government of Canada refer specifically to the prime minister, Cabinet, and other members of the governing party inside the House of Commons, but typically includes the federal public service and federal departments and agencies when used elsewhere.[7] This differs from the United States, where the executive branch is referred to as an administration and the federal government encompasses executive, legislative, and judicial powers, similar to the Canadian Crown. Source
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.
Look we didn’t care then, we don’t care now. We removed him from a community no on uses, keeping him on the ones that make us have to clean up from his messes, what’s the big problem with that? We did our job. Now shut up or you’re banned.
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.
lol, jumps to .ml !
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
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:
- starts out nice
- if gets questioned 1st response nice but occasionally unrelated answer
- if still questioned tangents and increasingly escalates tone when answering
- proven wrong using their own words or rules they would go on attack then be silent.
- if still continues on a location they mod will then try to find reason to ban
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.
I like the transparency on lemmy.world around this sort of thing.
I also appreciate that volunteer admins / mods of suitable calibre must be tough to find. It seems to me that the type of people who would make good mods just wouldn’t be interested in the role.
IDK what lemmy.world’s community team is?
Also, it’s not really clear what role JL presently has, if any. Like if he was removed from the community team does he still have other responsibilities ?
Jordan no longer has any responsibilities or privileges beyond being a community moderator at this time.
The original description of our community teams can be found here, but over time this has changed a bit. We’re looking to have this more clearly defined again and are talking to the two active members of the team to figure out a good way forward. Currently, this includes for example reviewing communities with unresolved reports that keep piling up, trying to find new moderators for those communities, and it can also include helping out with instance bans to provide more coverage throughout the day when trolls or spammers show up.
As far as transparency is concerned, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, especially on the timing aspect. We’ve also had more reports in the past about Jordan, but they were either resulting in internal conversations or not necessarily enough to take further actions.
Why the fuck is he still a mod? He’s a well-known fascist and bigot. You should remove him as a moderator immediately. It’s pretty fucking obvious to everyone but you, apparently.
Almost like .world likes that he has those qualities…
Edit: Ignore this, I somehow misread the section detailing their conditions for removing mods as removing members of their team. They are more active than I thought, but it sounds like they at least require a fairly high bar for gross violations, although this may qualify.
~~Do they remove people as mods? My understanding is that’s up to the other mods of the relevant community. I would expect admins to generally stay out of that unless the community is actually abandoned. Otherwise, they should let mods run communities independently when possible.
They expressed their distaste for JL’s actions, but I would think it’s not an admin’s job to judge a mod as unworthy of running their community unless they do something egregious enough to warrant an instance ban.~~
but it sounds like they at least require a fairly high bar for gross violations, although this may qualify.
By the bars they laid out? He already has violated all of them. He clearly meets the standards needed for removal of a community moderator. They said that he needs to have commited gross violations of the TOS but he has and they’ve been documented for months.
but I would think it’s not an admin’s job to judge a mod as unworthy of running their community unless they do something egregious enough to warrant an instance ban.~~
He has literally been instance banned from other instances because he violates their TOS. LW won’t apply the same enforcement despite the fact that he violates their own TOS.
Him being the mod is the reason you keep cleaning up his messes. It’s the reason you needed to make this post.
His actions as a community moderator are what everyone has a problem with.
It’s literally the problem that everyone has. God .world is just incapable of reading the room.
I would love to know what the issues were or which post raised those concerns, because I am missing context.
it’s a range of private and public reports, some of the public ones can be found in [email protected].
I would take any and everything you see in YPTB with the largest grains of salt. Most of the posts there are from frequent flyers apparently unaware and unable to see that they are the problem. The comments to those are from similar frequent flyers. Basically every post there is framed to make OP entirely the victim and often are turned into some kind of conspiracy-laden narrative about the mod(s) involved. Frankly, YPTB and similar communities are beyond redemption, IMO.
I will admit I do not know (nor particularly care to know) the specifics of this case, but some of the communities Jordan mods are targets for some of the worst people in this place, and he’s only human. So don’t crucify me if there’s some egregious offense I’m ignorant of and don’t take this statement as a direct defense of that. I’m merely pointing out that the guy takes a LOT of abuse from some real, uh, how do I put this charitably…“characters”.
Lemmy, of late, has lost many of its more rational voices, so please keep that in mind and exercise caution when asking the inmates what they think about the rules of the asylum.
You can find plenty of examples of users who deserved their punishment, and plenty where the mod was power tripping, and plenty where both parties were out of line. A mod being accused of something in a post doesn’t imply they’re guilty of it, only that the poster thinks so. It’s like a public forum where people can bring attention to alleged abuse of power when they might otherwise be silenced by an imbalanced power dynamic.
As a means of holding mods or even admins accountable, I consider it to be one of the most important communities across all Lemmy instances. I also find the drama personally entertaining.
Recent example of YPTB mod resigning following a power trip
Ban reversal
Ban reversal
So is Jordan being a weirdo defending his stupid moves there also meant to be ignored?
Glad to know since you got called out at some point you think it’s safe to ignore. Way to broadcast that about yourself.
I see blahaj banned somebody, yawn. That’s not empirical evidence of anything, don’t see the relevance to this mini-indictment of Lund. If he’s abusing his power as a mod, then you laid out the case for that, fine, but blahaj’s bans are just as credible as those of any sublemmy, which is to say, not at all.
a high profile mod is banned for being transphobic and continues to be transphobic after others explain how transphobic they are
As always if someone complains about Blahaj, they were banned from being transphobic and got pissy about that their actions have consequences.
So they should ignore Jordan’s own comments there?
No no, .world is infallible and the place that documents their issues is the evil space to ignore.
Off instance? Like they got banned for things they did on another instance?
I’m not sure if I’m understanding you correctly.
That community contains several posts about JL’s behavior, like this one:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53505862
Some of the issues did occur in posts / communities on other instances.
Yeah I don’t make a habit of going off instance so that was just my initial reaction to seeing the url.
I did eventually follow the link and read enough of one of the posts to get the idea.
You’re really limiting yourself there. The whole idea is that you’re connected with a bunch of other instances where you can see things that aren’t hosted on your instance.
That’s kind of like saying you only visit art galleries that are in New York, because that’s where you live. There’s a lot of great stuff there, sure, but you’re missing out. And in this analogy, you have a free ticket to a bunch of other cities with interesting art galleries of their own.
I use the Lemmy Universal Link Switcher userscript to convert all off-instance links to my home instance when I hover my mouse.
This link will keep you on Lemmy.World, if you so wish. Handy tool in general. Lemmyverse.link
that community primarily is people reporting on behavior of moderators that they disagree with
its more of a community that functions more like “AITA” (am I the asshole?) where they list the ban and reason and ask if the community believes the ban was justified or not.
the post detailing the behavior or jordan lund was actually not within the true rules of the community, but was allowed considering just how many jordan lund posts had been made in the entirety of the community.
he is quite notorious everywhere for his extreme moderation habits. stamets was just detailed enough to put time into documenting as much of that behavior as was possible in a single post.
considering that lemmy world is a sort of catch-all for a lot of first time lemmy users, its reasonable to be concerned by such extreme moderation.
You can’t expect the .world admin team to be accurate about another instance, they don’t even understand how their moderators operate.
such extreme moderation.
I don’t have that experience. In the before JL times it was worse, and there where no clear rules set. He and his then team set up some clear rules with the mod team then, discussed them openly with the community, and was strict with the following the rules but usually pretty consistent afaik. That’s quite a rare and important attribute in modding. Doesn’t mean I always agreed, but then that’s impossible. With some people in certain instances and commnuties any sort of good conversation is almost impossible. So there are always some unhappy ones.
Well that’s my take. Don’t have all the bits of his " mod casefile" and that’s not of my business… He’s always operated in good faith and haven’t seen any weird mod shit from him. Good mod.
Jordan making small good changes doesn’t change the fact he acts like he knows better, then bans anyone who proves him wrong.
I can only speak from my own experience, since I don’t have any other, and I haven’t seen or experienced nor seen directly any weird stuff.
But it’s clear that some users have a negative experience, and they have elaborately stated their case. One can acknowledge that.
But one experience doesn’t make the other untrue , though I’m not personally invested like others seem to be. Also, changing or dethroning a mod, won’t solve too much of the long-term problems large community have, imo. Remember, that they do it all free and they don’t get paid nor a sponsorship out of this. That’s why I feel this subject requires proper attention and a balanced approached to find out what has happened. I can only trust that @ Kaplan and @ Ruud and their people, are doing exactly that
