Reddit goes on Censorship Frenzy after Hiring Pedophile Supporter Aimee Challenor as Admin

If you haven't heard this story, check this out. A prime example of why social media needs to be decentralized.

tl;dr: After sharing an article mentioning Aimee Challenor, a moderator of r/UKPolitics was banned by Reddit. It turned out that the reason for it was that posts mentioning Aimee Challenor, who has multiple connections to pedophiles and child rapers, were getting deleted and sometimes users were banned. This is probably happening because of the upcoming Reddit IPO. If you go to the trending page, you can still see that posts and comments are getting deleted.

Reddit is known for their censorship but this is a new level. Spread the news and fuck Reddit. Come to Hive instead.

Here's an article about the story:

https://metro.co.uk/2021/03/24/chaos-at-reddit-as-dozens-of-subreddits-made-private-in-protest-at-site-2-14297612/

And here's a comment explaining the situation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mbzggv/why_has_r_gone_private/gs0yu2e

Copy paste of the comment:

Answer: For those who don't want to visit the links:

Reddit recently hired a new admin, Aimee Challenor, who had previously been a politician in the UK. Aimee is publicly tied to two different instances of supporting pedophiles.

The first, her father raped and abused a child, in the house Aimee was living in. After being arrested and charged for the crime, but before being tried and sentenced, Aimee hired her father to be her campaign manager for elections with the Green party, and gave a false name to the party on the paperwork. When this was found out, she claimed ignorance of the extent of his crimes, and was removed from the party for safeguarding failures.

The second, her husband is an open pedophile, who posts erotic fiction about children. Aimee had joined the Lib Dem party, and was removed when her husband tweeted that he "Fantasized about children having sex,sometimes with adults, sometimes kidnapped and forced in to bad situations". Both Aimee and her husband claim that the twitter account was hacked at that time.

The fact that she is trans has meant that she is a prime target for harassment or as a demonstration by TERF/hard right groups of how "terrible" trans people can be. This lead to Reddit (per their claims) secretly enabling protections, that all posts on Reddit would be automatically scanned, and if it was detected to be doxxing Aimee, it would result in an automatic ban. After however long of running undetected by the userbase, the automatic doxxing protection proceeded to ban a moderator of r/UKPolitics who posted a news article, as Aimee Challenor was mentioned by name in the article. r/UKPolitics went private and shut down to figure out what was happening, and the admins reinstated the mod's account. r/UKPolitics then re-opened and posted a statement, that the shutdown was due to a ban, the ban was caused by an article including a line that referenced a specific person who now worked for Reddit, and that they were specifically requesting people not post the person's name or try to find out who the person was, as site admins would issue bans for that.

Word of getting banned for saying "Aimee Challenor" spread quickly, and other OOTL posts show some of the results of that - many people repeating her name and associations and support for pedophiles, and a small few (notably significantly less) removed comments. The admins put out a statement on r/ModSupport, stating that the post had "included personal information", that the ban was automated, not manual, and that the moderation rule had been too broad and was being fixed. People who can post on r/ModSupport (you must be a moderator, or your comments are automatically removed) immediately took issue with every part of the statement, as:

-There had been a number of manual removals and direct edits of comments by reddit staff as the incident escalated (The second being something u/Spez was previously guilty of, and said he would lock down to prevent abuse of during the T_D issues)
-The ban and post deletion on r/UKPolitics had been hours after the post, not immediate (which would be expected of an automated process)
-Nobody believed that Reddit was automatically scanning the contents of every link to check for blacklisted words (Edit, striking this part out, looks like the text of the article was copied in to a comment which is what was scanned.)
-The definition of "personal information" had just changed so much that posting the name "Joe Biden" could be considered doxxing
-Reddit had not commented at all on the "open support for pedophiles" part

Many moderators also raised complaints in the post about their personal issues with being doxxed, and that they had been reaching out to Reddit staff about consistent harassment and doxxing of their mod teams with no help given by Reddit, or wondering why these protections weren't enabled for them. One notable post states that inaction from Reddit staff with regards to doxxing resulted in a situation so bad that they were forced to contact the FBI in the USA and the RCMP in Canada to resolve the situation.

This continued to rapidly escalate, and a group of mods started pushing for a temporary blackout of their subreddits, something that has forced Reddit's hand with regards to responding to issues before. The list has been changing through the night, as different subreddits join in or leave the blackout, either protesting the censorship, protesting Reddit's perceived proxy-support for pedophiles, or (in many cases) both.