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The mod banning these users is the same mod who made the posts they downvoted. This is mod abuse, turning the downvote button into an auto-self-ban button.
The message is "If you disagree with me, you will be banned"
Monitoring and banning users for using lemmy as intended to signal boost your opinion should be grounds to have all mod privileges removed. This behaviour undermines the integrity of the server and the wider fediverse.
I'm not talking about blocking users from seeing votes - the nature of federation requires, at the very least, that admins are able to see the data flowing into their instance, which includes voting records. All it takes at that point is a purpose-made instance to be spun up that will catalogue all the votes that it federates with and publish them. In fact I'm pretty sure this already exists.