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Here is a gem of a DM from the troll who led to this even-more-hands-off approach, bragging about how they will get away with their influence/troll campaign scot-free.
Notice the use of the word "we", a tacit admission that they are working in coordination with other trolls. Pretty fucking great, eh?
DMs are outside the purvey of community mods, if you get a problematic DM, there's a report feature that goes direct to the admins of their instance and your instance.
In Boost, the lemmy client I use, it's a long-press on the DM to get to the reporting menu.
The official stance with trolls is "report, don't engage".
So no reaction at all to the fact that UM is now admitting to being part of a larger troll effort, after dozens of people told you that was likely, for weeks, and you dismissed all of them repeatedly?
Seems like we were all right and UM should've been banned long ago. Everyone who said they weren't a troll was entirely wrong. That doesn't seem to be acknowledged here at all.
Read what he wrote, he's talking about alts, not a larger troll effort, and, yeah, he's yanking your chain. Any number have alts were already banned, but we aren't going to just ban someone because of "feels". There has to be more to it than that.
You had dozens of people telling you what he was doing. It had zero to do with vague feelings and practically nothing to do with his opinions, despite that always being the claim. It had to do with very obvious trolling. If I get banned for "sassing" you, that will say a lot
Dozens of people saying something doesn't make it infringing.
The links he posted were absolutely valid news sources. He responded antagonistcally to comments that were antagonizing (which is why we have the slapfighting rule now).
That is simply not true. Initially the replies to him were not antagonistic - he started taking that tone when the community asked him about the disparity between his professed beliefs and what he was posting and asking why he was supposedly voting third party. He then ran the table on the mods by engaging in a constant stream of spammy, low effort comments and you all did nothing. And the more you did nothing, the more frustrated and angry everyone became about him.
The mods should at least be able to recognize your hand in how UM played out, instead of blaming it only on the users engaging in "slap fights". The mods chose to moderate per post/comment instead of also considering an account's overall pattern of behavior.
The rules - as written - seem to indicate a level of judgement and assessment that has not been taking place, and user frustration is evident as many of us see how a pattern of behavior of trolling was allowed to continue for much too long because the user in question almost never went too far in any individual message but was quite clearly outside the rules when looked at as a whole.
I admire your stance on not doing a fast-and-loose approach to bans to protect individual voices, but your job as mods also involves protecting these communities from intentional and purposeful bad actors