This aspect of people writing what they meant again after being challenged and it being different - I'd assert that when there
is malice (or another intent) present, they double down or use other tactics toward a specific end other than improving the forum or relationship they are contributing to. When there is none, you get that different or broader answer, which is really often worth it. However, yes it is intent, as you identify.
I have heard the view that intent is not observable, and I agree with the link examples that the effect of a comment is the best available heuristic. It is also consistent with a lot of other necessary and altruistic principles to say it's not knowable. On detecting malice from data, however, the security business is predicated on detecting intent from network data, so while it's not perfect, there are precedents for (more-) structured data.
I might refine it to say that intent is not passively observable in a reliable way, as if you interrogate the source, we get revealed intent. On the intent taking place in the imagination of the observer, that's a deep question.
I think I have reasonably been called out on some of my views being the artifacts of the logic of underlying ideas that may not have been apparent to me. I've also challenged authors with the same criticism, where I think there are ideas that are sincere, and ones that are artifacts of exogenous intent and the logic of other ideas, and that there is a way of telling the difference by interrogating the idea (via the person.)
I even agree with the principle of not assuming malice, but professionally, my job has been to assess it from indirect structured data (a hawkish, is this an attack?) - whereas I interpret the moderator role as assessing intent directly by its effects, but from unstructured data (is this comment/person causing harm?).
Malice is the example I used because I think it has persisted in roughly its same meaning since the earliest writing, and if that subset of effectively 'evil' intent only existed in the imaginations of its observers, there's a continuity of imagination and false consciousness about their relationship to the world that would be pretty radical. I think it's right to not assume malice, but fatal to deny it.
Perhaps there is a more concrete path to take than my conflating it with the problem of evil, even if on these discussions of global platform rules, it seems like a useful source of prior art?