I agree somewhat and I disagree somewhat. At one point, I helped to moderate a religious discussion community, several hundred listed members. The Community Founders had set up a bunch of odd rules which sort of made sense given the history. For example, when you mix religion and Internet, civility becomes an issue. But after some situations where both of the insult-flingers were telling the mods "hey, cut it out, we're having fun here!" they had decided that we would only get involved when someone complained. That worked until people started trolling other members and then tried to complain when they were abused in return, as if they hadn't been trying to pick a fight in the first place. So they had also decreed that we might issue warnings for wasting our time, to get rid of these new trolls. But then people became afraid of complaining, because this process was difficult to make honest and transparent.
The "lower level" mods among us mostly tried to keep the peace without disciplinary actions, then: we would just say, "hey, this discussion is getting too heated: cool down, come back tomorrow, we're all humans here." This wasn't too bad, but some of our mods had these sorts of "itching-for-a-showdown" personalities, and I guess people always were a little worried about the powers we technically held. In the end it was gaining a reputation for being too abrasive, which meant good-hearted religious people didn't come by anymore. It reminded me of nothing so much as Sartre's statement, "we have the war we deserve."
I guess the lesson that I'm trying to articulate is that, especially in Internet communities, transparency is necessary to alleviate fear, but inaction can lead to your community passively falling astray from its goals, discouraging the members who you want.
When community is at stake, as it is in Facebook and Google, there is a higher-order priority. You have to decrease worldsuck and foster awesome[1]. That is a somewhat arbitrary priority, and creating rules and transparency around it can seem like an impossible task.
[1] Cheers, nerdfighters.