In the absence of announcements, my understanding is that it’s highly unlikely that Rooki will be removed for the misconduct.

Firstly, it doesn’t take a team of two admins and seven moderators nearly a week to investigate a matter involving a handful of comments and six users. Secondly, if it were a broader investigation into Rooki’s overall conduct, you’d expect Rooki to at least be asked to pause their moderator activity for the duration, but Rooki continues to ban people and remove comments.

Ironically, one of the users banned by Rooki for trolling today is EndlessApollo, whose comment and subsequent ban by !vegan launched the whole chain of events.

Looking at the modlog, Rooki reinstated the two !vegan moderators and restored one of the mods’ comments about an hour ago. Rooki also edited their own comment referenced in the OP to say the following:

Edit: I am sorry, about my emotional decision i reinstated @Eevoltic and @naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com as mods After researching myself, many sites say its not healthy, one (1) research paper says it is at least NOT unhealthy, but it has few points of data.

Personally, I’m not fully satisfied if that is the end of it. The changes look like Rooki admitting that the issue is not clear-cut, but Rooki’s conduct as a moderator has to reflect the rules, not something as arbitrary as Rooki’s level of disagreement with someone’s views at the given time.

Nobody should have to convince Rooki that something is not misinformation. Rooki (or any other instance moderator) must not even think of interfering on that basis. The word “misinformation” is not in the rules in any shape or form, and the only thing remotely close to it is Lemmy.World accepting that “The content provided on Lemmy.World is not necessarily factually true”. If anything, the rules side more with the community moderators’ judgement by saying “Your participation in individual communities will only be acceptable on the condition that you abide by their rules.”

Edit: Added more to the sentence on Lemmy.World’s rule related to misinformation.

This link allows to see all comments removed specifically by Rooki.

Going by this Lemmy.World chart, Rooki is an instance moderator standing below @ruud@lemmy.world and @jelloeater85@lemmy.world, so I’m appealing to them in the form of a public post so that the issue can’t be swept under the rug.

If users or communities don’t like it, they could, and SHOULD move to another instance.

!vegan are already going for that option, but the problem is that if your written rules do not reflect your actual practices, it’s a lot like backstabbing because you invite people to build communities over time only to go back on your rules and force the users to migrate, which leads to fragmentation and a lot of members lost in the process.

What’s inconsistent about that? Communities have their own rules, which often are and should be much stricter than the sitewide rules. For example, a pro-Harris community may decide to ban pro-Trump posts (or vice versa) to keep it on-topic, but that wouldn’t justify a site admin removing the mods and their comments for that. Some communities exist specifically for debates, while others choose to be more of a safe space type.

For me, the purpose of the post is exactly what it asks for. I don’t think I’ve ever posted to !vegan except for today, to cross-post the OP, but my own fate as an active lemmy.world user likely rests on the outcome of this request. I run a tiny community that has no relation to animal rights or ethics but I feel it is absolutely threatened when there are moderators like Rooki that act based on their views rather than the rules.

For one, I don’t see the moderators “denying any risks”. The very first one seen at the archived link and in the mod log says “There are some scammy and not nutritionally complete vegan cat foods or there, so it’s important to do a bit of extra research”.

Regardless of any of that, the job of an instance moderator isn’t to fight what they believe is misinformation, as that view leads to total censorship, as I already explained. What if you believe that abortion kills? Would you then go and remove moderators that say otherwise? The same question stands for the other examples provided in my OP.

When it comes to disagreements of that nature (and again, even if we assume that the science were on Rooki’s side), the right course of action in my view is to make an opposing comment and make your case, then if that’s unfairly removed by the community mods, create your own community (it could be another version of vegan or “anti-vegan” depending on where you stand) and use that to express the opposing views. Resorting to your admin power is completely unacceptable for a case of disagreement that is not related to a rules violation.

That is my understanding based on Rooki’s own post, the post of the demoted vegan mod, and the modlog containing the removed comments.