i mean maybe but there's no real way to know unless one of the other mods specifically says they were sitting there deliberately silencing people talking about it. i've moderated a lot of different memes and online spaces in my life and in my experience clusterfucks like this are almost never just one person deliberately being malicious and more often the result of multiple people with different perceptions of the comments' intent

at this point, what incentive does the mod(s) who did delete those comments have to admit to it? all that will do is put a target on their backs instead

i think a more productive thing to do would be to admit that regardless of who deleted those comments, legitimate criticisms of racism were deleted and we are all responsible for making sure that doesn't happen again. which is why ip logging is necessary imo. someone willing to have their comments linked together is way more likely to be genuine than trolling and that allows us to read things in good faith