Moderators are amongst the most influential people in the world. Being able to control the content that users can view on a platform is a huge responsibility. The purpose of moderators is to restrict and remove content that is considered inappropriate for everyone to see. In addition, they also help remove trolls in a community. With this responsibility, you would hope that they are acting in good faith, but how would you know? The answer is that you don’t, and probably never will. That is the problem. Moderators control and curate the content you see on a platform, and users cannot confirm that these actions are good or bad.
The Solution
A band-aid is to give a log where everyone can see all the actions the moderator made, as well as see the comments that the mods have removed. It is just a band-aid because it just makes people more aware of how moderators process their content instead of solving the problem of how moderators treat their content. A real solution inspired by my previous writing is to let users flag content, and let moderators respond to these flags. This makes the moderator reactive instead of proactive, which can have its own pros and cons like content being removed at a slower pace. More importantly, this balances the power between the moderators and users.