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”
It is a vegan community, that is where vegan views should flourish. A non-vegan admin stepped in and trampled on our free speech.
Free speech means the government doesn't censor you, not that you get to spread harmful disinformation without consequence in a community and instance where it's against the rules
No that's the ~~2nd~~ 1st amendment of the US constitution which only protects free speech from the US government. That it is legal for private actors to censor does not mean that free speech is not being censored.
Its so irrelevant as .world is not a US website.