I briefly mentioned this in the OP, but it seems like this is a good time to bring this story up. I managed to archive the HTML of most of this thread before it was deleted by mods, so I'll provide pictures of it in lieu of a link.
A couple months ago, a mod on Genius named Daktar had a strange thread made about him on the forums titled, "There is a racist moderator." The incorrectly formatted Instagram URL linked to an image on his personal instagram where he either posted or reposted a meme that contained the word "kung-flu," in reference to COVID-19. Unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight to archive the meme, but it was the template with the girl screaming and pointing her finger on the left side and a cat on the right side (
this one).
The first thing that stands out about this is
the user who posted the thread. They have only
just enough IQ to post in the forums (300), and their only activity (even to this day) is creating two song pages and editing some metadata. This suggests that this account was actually an alt of another user who had beef with Daktar and wanted him demoted, obtaining just enough IQ to create the thread and then dropping the account. Daktar - I should mention - is conservative, but from what I can tell he kept most of his political opinions off the website, possibly out of concern for something like this to happen. Many Genius users follow each other on instagram and his insta apparently had a lot of pro-Trump stuff on it, so someone probably took offense to it.
The resulting shitstorm was swift and imminent. There were a handful of people who had a reaction along the lines of, "well, it's offensive, but since it's on his personal insta it shouldn't matter," but you can tell by the upvotes/downvotes what the prevailing opinion was.
One of my favorites. Remember, if you support Trump in any capacity, you're a dirty no-good RACIST
In the end, Daktar wasn't demodded, but staff publicly reprimanded him and updated their rules to basically say, "if you do anything that we don't like as a mod, we'll demote you immediately." The actual statement was made on this thread after it was locked, which means it has (unfortunately) been lost since the thread was deleted due to
another shitstorm that began after he wasn't demoted and the rule change. Daktar became largely inactive after this blew over.
The PMs that staff had with the mod that I posted earlier are (at least in some part) fallout from this incident, because now Genius staff can demote you for pretty much anything they want.
