So, leading up to the election, there was a very obvious tide of “let’s all vote for Jill Stein” propaganda on the political communities. Basically, linking Kamala Harris as hard as possible to the genocide in Gaza and the US’s current bad immigration policy, in cartoonishly lazy ways, and in ways that violated the site rules (for example posting dozens of stories a day with the same messaging, from the same account, apparently with the mods’ blessing).

It’s been fairly quiet since then as far as US politics. There are still some isolated communities that are clearly written with the exclusive goal of shitting on Democrats or boosting up Russia, but it’s not really a front-and-center feature of browsing Lemmy like it was pre-election.

So the mod who was harassed out was FlyingSquid. From time to time, people would have these extremely performative freakouts about how Squid was power tripping, banning anyone who disagreed with them and arguing with everyone, which had a grain of truth (the arguing part, sometimes, but not the banning part) but it all got blown up into some kind of emergency so consistently and so emotionally that it felt to me like some weird kind of deliberate campaign.

If you want to see another more recent example, check this out:

https://lemmy.world/post/27393569

Jordan is the mod being harassed and being accused of racism and censorship, in my view, there, with the persistently repeated myth being that he is a Zionist and will delete from worldnews any anti-Israel story.

Let’s be real here, you would have removed it even if it was in a “actual news agency”.

Ah, the good ole “I’m not racist, I had a roommate who wasn’t white” argument.

Terminal liberal brain. PTB.

Thank you for censoring a journalist who died to get the word out, using made up rules. You must be very proud of yourself.

Another Jordan Lund post, another chance to remind everyone that @jordanlund@lemmy.world is a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.

Jordan Lund is a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.

And so on. Literally all he did is remove a link to Substack, and tell the person who posted it that they should post instead the same story from some more reliable source (of which he provided multiples they could use). A number of accounts then commenced a loud hours-long freakout about what a piece of shit he is. Literally the number two story at the time of posting was reporting on some of Israel’s crimes, which happens every day in worldnews.

It’s possible that that’s just Lemmy reading comprehension and virtue-signaling at work, and they’re ignoring the facts and trying to create alternative facts just because that’s a fun thing to do on the internet. My personal belief is that it is more malicious than that.