Online interaction and power abuse

Moderation

The Internet is vast and mostly open. Its userbase is comprised of extremely different people in almost every way – and it shows. Massive flame wars, disagreements, propaganda, trolls and other similar issues plague most online communities. This is why moderation is almost always present in every such community – it's a must, and doubly so in communities dealing with relevant/serious topics. For this purpose, communities use the fittingly-named moderators to keep the discussion at least somewhat civil.

As moderators are people themselves, they are vulnerable to being biased or unfair. They are usually known members of the community, chosen for their integrity and overall contribution to the community, so the moderator is somewhat of an honorary position in these communities. Still, not every person in this position is always fit for it.

Power abuse

The job of a moderator is to stay objective. When one of them does not agree with what is said in the community they're supposed to be protecting, what should they do? The answer is obviously simple but often does not match up with reality. A moderator abusing their power is a dangerous thing – and will warp the perception of their community's userbase substantially if not caught. 

For example, in 2016, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, known on Reddit as u/spez admitted to using his engineer-level access for editing comments that criticized him, replacing his name/username with the usernames of a pro-Donald Trump subreddit, r/the_donald. He was met with severe criticism from both the community of his website and his own community team.

Why?

Being a moderator is essentially an unpaid job. In all communities except the largest like huge social media networks, moderators are simply respected members of the community and spend some of their free time on this work. This poses some potential problems:

• If the moderator does not have much free time due to being an overall active person, the quality of moderation will suffer because the moderator is simply not available.
• If the moderator does have a lot of free time to work for the community, where does this free time come from? Can we be sure they are fit for the job of controlling what the members of the community see, and more importantly, what they don't?

These problems are very nuanced and there is no straight answer. Most of the time, it has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Conclusion

Moderating is an important job in online communities, but it is almost always a hobby. Extreme care must be taken when selecting moderators because a power-abusing one is a dangerous thing.