Are moderators allowed to ban people and list a fake reason? This conservative has defamed me by listing the reason as homophobia. Kinda funny coming from a right winger lol. Is this acceptable on lemm.ee?
Are moderators allowed to ban people and list a fake reason? This conservative has defamed me by listing the reason as homophobia. Kinda funny coming from a right winger lol. Is this acceptable on lemm.ee?
The admin owns the instance the community is on, but the communities themselves are created by moderators. They can do whatever they want that doesn’t break the rules that govern the entire instance. Which includes banning users from their communities for any reason they want
Here’s the thing: no one’s going to do anything about it, but technically this may amount to libel.
On reddit you’re banned via private message, so no one knows why you’d been banned, even if the reason is bogus. If someone accuses you of something in a comment, you can defend yourself. You have the right to reply. But in the fediverse you’re banned and if the mod does it for a made-up reason, that false reason is publicly viewable in the modlog without you being able to do anything about it. They’ve maliciously damaged your reputation without any recourse, right to defend yourself / right of reply.
Now imagine at one point OP’s username is linked to their actual name. An employer does a google, finds they’ve been banned for homophobia. Some arsehole doxxes OP, and sends a picture of their being banned for homophobia to their employer. They’re fired for allegedly being homophobic on social media. At that point, a good lawyer could potentially prove libel and damages caused. OP’s clearly annoyed by all this. Now imagine someone with too much time and money on their hands.
It’s real amateur hour shit. Sure being sued for libel is incredibly unlikely, but there are only downsides to not erring on the side of caution with stuff like this. Want to ban someone? Make up a generic or non-defamatory reason, or simply call them a dickhead, and go on with your day.
Stuff like this, the failure to respect GDPR/Privacy and NetzDG laws, a failure to properly deal with CSAM material… it’s a ticking time bomb under the whole fediverse.
No one is disagreeing that mods can ban for any reason. But if I link a reading comprehension course to someone in a reply, because they are dumb as fuck, are they allowed to put any reason they want there such as homophobia? If that is the case, I could ban someone for spamming their youtube channel but list the reason as ‘dropping n bombs’.
The instance doesn’t have rules barring it, so yeah; they are allowed to. As shitty as it is.