I’ve defended lemmy.ml in the past when people have blamed the entire instance for the actions of a solitary, overzealous moderator, but this genuinely concerns me:

This must have been action taken at the instance admin level, considering all those communities have different moderators.

Is there any way to probe the modlog to see which account it was?

r/moderatepolitics was the worst for that.

Their moderation policy basically allowed any abhorrent view as long as it was expressed in a “civil” manner.

Trolls and racists could say things like “well, in my humble opinion, black people are just inherently violent and unintelligent” and anyone who got irate and called them out would get a warning and/or banned.