Reddit is banning any Aimee Challenor mention. UK public figure and Reddit admin | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is banning any Aimee Challenor mention. UK public figure and Reddit admin

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HN is also penalising threads that discuss this. This post has 74 upvotes in 27 minutes and 11 comments at time of writing. Ordinarily it would significantly outrank most of the other posts on the front page, but it doesn't seem to be able to break past #15. Either this is because HN users are flagging it, or because something else is going on. As Reddit is a YC company it'd be really nice to hear an explanation.

This exact same thing happened with the previous threads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556187

There are some awful transphobic comments in those threads, but they appeared _after_ the threads had been penalised.

HN users are flagging it, checkout the previous threads for more comments on why.

HN appears to do some shady stuff too... sometimes it is users flagging post (like a mega-downvote) and sometimes it is the admins controlling the speech.

I'm not sure why HN needs flagging and down-votes... because flagging is being abused all the time (and I think that some users get super-heavy-flagging-powers, a bit like low level admins).

Flagging is the least bad system I’ve seen so far. HN can be configured to show flagged or dead posts as well so it doesn’t really compare.

Does the admin(s) need to do anything to hide a post when a post has been flagged by users or it is automatically hidden?

It's automatically hidden.

It's automatic. If enough users flag a post, it gets "killed" and will only show up (with the tag "[flagged][dead]") if you have the "showdead" option enabled in your profile.

I don't think it's an awful system but I don't think it's exactly right for HN - in normal operations it works fairly well but when combined with some less desirable HN stereotypes it can just involve shutting down discussion one disagrees with (e.g. merely mentioning Donald Trump by name was an insta flag during the election, but you could always get away with worse if you talked about democrats because the average user is further right than most forums)

I think most of us automatically downvote or flag anything political regardless of personal politics. Especially US presidential politics, because that's what the uninteresting parts of the internet are for.

It is completely false that a bias doesn't come into play with political content.

It is not necessarily a bad thing, but some users appear to have been given more power and can shut down those articles more quickly.

The least bad system is far more transparent.

I’ve always wanted to see on HN a public audit trail of all moderator modified, or removed posts and comments. That would give greater transparency and might prevent moderators enforcing their own beliefs and norms. Then again the counter argument, or point, is that HN won’t do that because it could open mods to greater pressure, unless it’s actually corporate policy to control the narrative.

Any other reasons why HN wouldn’t publish a public audit trail?

Without all the information you're still left with a lot of mystery. I might ban an account, for seemingly nothing, because I can see they've created 15 accounts in the last two days to troll and stir shit up. Partial information seems to create as many, if not more, conspiracies than no information.

Moderating large social systems is tricky.

I think any action done can be noted to that effect, but a step towards transparency should be a goal, because over time and interaction that “mystery” cold be solved. Wikipedia records all changes for review, with such an erudite crowd behind HN, it would seem trivial to establish such a system.

Isn't this orthogonal to anything about that persons gender status? It should be possible to have a discuss and ban any comments that would normally be banned around gender status or more specific around this persons gender status?

Are we not capable of having a reasonable discussion around a person and their actions just because of this?

Yeah it's nothing to do with their gender status, but someone reading those threads now might draw the conclusion that the stories were flagged or penalised due to the transphobia, which is not the case - the penalty came before the hate.

HN's moderation system is rather susceptible to brigading. Downvotes will flow like water to certain topics, regardless of the quality of the original post or the discussion therein.

Bots have effective veto power over every story.

> HN is also penalising threads that discuss this.

Yes, HN tends to punish more-heat-than-light topics that overlap with perennial divise political/culture war issues.

I think many people don't care about Reddit at all and perceive these discussions as off topic and uninteresting. There are better spaces to discuss those, such as /r/SubredditDrama/.

If this were a new article on the subject, it might fit. But links to Reddit threads while the drama is happening live? To me, that's gossip.

Edit: Disclaimer because that's how it is on the internet, I am transgender. Yet I have never heard of this person before and only learned their gender identity in the comments here. I don't care about Reddit or UK Politics.

Perhaps, but I'm surprised given the level of influence Reddit has these days. Reddit reaches about 500 million people per month, probably more. It's not "just a silly message board" anymore.

They have a comparatively tiny number of employees and those people have a very real power to control narratives. We're seeing just the tiniest glimpse of that here because the employee in question has done so in an incredibly egregious manner. The question this whole incident should raise is "what else is going on, that we haven't yet seen?". The specifics of this particular example are uninteresting.

Not least, this is a site wide action by the staff without regard to subreddit mods.

And it's been done without any transparency at all. That is telling in a larger sphere, even if the details might not be so interesting.

This is absolutely the case.

> There are better spaces to discuss those, such as /r/SubredditDrama/.

But see, we can't discuss this there.

The Reddit admins have since then issued a statement saying that the auto-moderator was set too broadly. They have since corrected the issue are are investigating the bans.

Looking at the "other conversations" tab on the linked post displays 12 active conversations. The "rules" as presented on the /r/ukpolitics were speculation by its moderators.

As I said elsewhere, it was pretty much gossip at that point. This is Reddit drama and it should stay there (or at least, until another website reports about it). Linking to live threads is just asking for confusion.

Some threads, before I log out of Reddit until the next drama:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/mbeycw/whats_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/mbcls0/ongo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/mbqgx2/a_clarif...

https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque/comments/mbmthf/why...

https://old.reddit.com/r/DeclineIntoCensorship/comments/mbe2...

HN penalises threads that are "too active", as potential flame wars and downranks them automatically. There's also user flagging. I don't think it indicates that HN is specifically taking action against this thread because of who it's about, just the usual automated mechanisms.

This thread has more votes (454 points) than any on the front page apart from number 1 (540 points) with more comments, 205 vs 118 from the top post.

As of now, it seats on the second page at #44.

Now at #93.

Perhaps HN should look into the weight of flagging, judging by #votes, seems like their ranking is not working or perhaps it is and they are happy this is not the top post.

Quite ironical, regardless as Reddit is a YC startup, none the less Paul Graham is the ideator and the post is about paid Reddit staff silencing users.

Edit: Now at 114 on the 4th page...

If you're trying to create a discussion community where the least desirable outcome is controversial discussions/flame wars, high weight on flagging seems to be a good way to do it.

Of course, people flagging it might be thinking all kinds of things like "Why would a topic about what Reddit does be important here?"

#128 for me now

It's currently flagged and not visible at all

And interestingly, people still upvote this thread, it’s at 563 now.

I mean, just look at how emotionally charged the top comment threads have become after this got posted. It isn't exactly a topic that can be discussed when so many people can't hold themselves to the basic rules (be nice and polite, attack the idea not the person, etc.) and things devolve to "you're a bigot! / no, I'm not a bigot!".

This thread has now been disappeared from the frontpage as well.

5th page now.

Oh wow, and now it’s flagged.

If there are Reddit employees on HN that, for example, would cause threads like this to get buried, that should be looked into.

What do you think is the probability of dang not being aware of this third post today on this issue?

He certainly can unflag it and lock it that way if he wished.

Users are flagging them. The only thing moderators have done is decline to turn off the flags. We turn off flags sometimes when (a) the article contains significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) and (b) it can support a substantive HN discussion. Neither of those seems true here so I don't think it's a hard call.

There have been countless threads on the generic topic here (free speech online, let's call it) and the details of this particular story seem very specific to Reddit drama, indeed (not that I've looked closely) to some specific subreddit. If so, that's neither an interesting new phenomenon nor gratifying of intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so it's not on topic for HN and users have been right to flag these.

if there's an interesting conversation to be had it's about governance and transparency in how online spaces are moderated, given the depth of their influence, the broadness of their reach and the relative power wielded by those who control the platform (hello there!). Unfortunately that conversation is mostly absent from these threads.

That conversation in general has been and continues to be had over and over again on HN, so even if this is a good occasion for substantive discussion (which I doubt), it's not as if there won't be countless opportunities in the future.

The fact that this is being done to cover up the past of a specific person who's an employee of reddit strikes me as novel, weren't the previous examples about much more general topics like covid denial?

It may be novel but I don't see that it's interesting in HN's sense of the word (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). There's a difference between the intensely-interesting quality of sensational, exciting stories, and the intellectually-interesting quality of deeper, more substantive stories. The latter are what HN is supposed to be for.

When I looked in on the discussions that were going on about this last night, they were shockingly bad flamewars about all the expected generic issues, so precisely the kind of thing we don't want here. Everything I've seen so far confirms that this story is an intense drama involving specific individuals (not just the one who shall or shall not be named, but whoever made the decisions that stirred up the outrage) that doesn't have much to teach us in general. Its primary value to HN seems to me as a good example for calibrating where to draw the ontopicness line. A teachable moment, as they used to say.

The irony is that I almost certainly would have zero idea who this person was or the existence of this controversy were it not for this crackdown.

On one hand I can empathize with people seeing someone they know have negative press about them shared on a site they run and wanting to do something. But I thought the point of professionalism was refraining from this kind of behavior and applying rules consistently even when there is a personal connection. This kind of special-case behavior in favor of people with ties to the site is likely counter productive.

> The Streisand effect is a social phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Edit: added quote.

I wonder if her name will be remembered for the effect longer than for her celebrity.

Barbara who?

Edit: seriously, I couldn't tell you what she's done. Sing? Movies? Both?

Cool. I feel vindicated and very old at the same time.

Oh dear... I assume you're being sincere, so no shade or anything like that. I just realized exactly how old I am relative to you and the other person who posted the same sentiment. ;)

Both. She was a big big name of my parent's generation (think Rhianna version 2, Rhianna is version 3 or 4 or 5... if you go back to Maria Callas or Josephine Baker being version 1)

I guess Rihanna better do something worth her namesake soon, then!

And no "shade" or anything... am I using that right?... but those latter two names are more foreign than B.S.

There's a whole bunch of people who think (for good reason) that George Foreman is famous for inventing and marketing a counter-top grill.

It's already happened, I had no idea Barbara Streisand was a person, but I have heard of the Streisand effect

If you're like me, you may also be interested in https://rejected.substack.com/ *

* No affiliation, just stumbled across it today

I've said many times on here, people seem to not believe it. Banning literally achieves the opposite of what it intends to do... hell, if I was a marketer I would use banning and censorship as a kind of promotion/campaign tool. But nooo, people think with feelings, and the word that needs banning just sounds so horrible and is so offensive, so lets iron fist everyone into forgetting it... lol.

I think you're seeing a bit of survivorship bias here. When you see something that has been banned you can say "ah huh! the ban didn't work, I still saw this". But you're not seeing the banned things you're not seeing.

no one will on here or reddit will remember this situation in a week.the only part of the internet that will care past a week is most likely the sites like gab, and we all know what they think of lgbtq+

banning definitely works, its not like reddit's reputation for mod abuse isn't unknown [1]

1. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

You're not wrong. But the person concerned is notoriously litigious, and their employer has a legal duty to protect them from harassment. (Because, AFAIK, they are British and employed in the UK by reddit.) So reddit has no good choice here.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I was fairly certain she left the UK sometimes in 2019 and was employed by Reddit in the US. (But is still a UK citizen and presumably has substantial British interests, so both the UKs notoriously intense libel liability and the USs [and some US state’s] workplace environment laws would both potentially be in play.)

The ELI5 context for those (like me) that were very confused:

Aimee Challenor is a trans (MTF) woman who was very active in UK green party politics. She appointed her father as an official in her election campaign after he had been arrested for rape and torture of a 10yo girl. For which he would subsequently be convicted and sentenced to 22 years.

Adding additional color to the narrative: Aimee Challenor is very active in the furry and infantilism communities. And her farther committed his crimes while wearing wearing baby-doll dresses and nappies.

Aimee Challenor left the green party (accusing it of transphobia) and apparently now works in some capacity for Reddit.

Go figure, what a nice person

Reddit only hires the best. Did anybody prove out the u/maxwellhill hypothesis yet?

can you provide some (good)links so I can read more about each of these points? Thanks!

Some covered here https://metro.co.uk/2021/03/24/chaos-at-reddit-as-dozens-of-...

I think the unwelcome article is probably this one, since it is easily found with a Google search suggestion: "Aimee Challenor G[raham Linehan]".

NB the final picture is Challenor dressed as an infant (dress + teddy bear). Most other images are cartoon drawings from fetish/furry sites.

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/ashton-challenor-the-bo...

(I'm posting this link as it seems important to the discussion. I'll check in about 30 minutes and delete it if it is significantly downvoted.)

The original link was to this story in the Spectator https://archive.is/OqCr0

That's such an incredibly vile article, it pretty much amounts to cyberstalking. It's pretty disgusting how he morally grandstands after digging out the fetish content of a really troubled 15 year old:

> Whilst we might recognise that Aimee Challenor is a tragic victim in this mess, we must remember the positions of power and influence he held and how quickly and easily he reached them.

The Spectator is equally vile too. It's the best example of how the British class system gives the most mediocre fringe twats a platform to deliver their vitriol with a public school veneer.

It seems to me that the author is trying to highlight the person in question's extreme privilege. Were it not for Challenor's father, it seems like this person may not have had the opportunities that they do.

Given that the author is Glinner, a notorious transphobe (who has been banned from pretty much every even somewhat sensible platform for that), I very much doubt he cares at all about anything except that the person in question is a trans woman.

Glinner is awful, and no one should ever read anything by him.

> It's pretty disgusting how he morally grandstands after digging out the fetish content of a really troubled 15 year old

Not sure if linking profile archives here would count as doxxing, but the troubling content continues into at least 2018, when she would have been in her 20s.

There's a lot going on in this article. The introduction alone provides everything you need to know about the tone used throughout the text.

Instead of listing everything, I prefer to refer to this piece that provides helpful references on how to cover stories about transgender people while remaining neutral on the subject: https://www.glaad.org/reference/covering-trans-community.

You will quickly notice that the text goes out of its way to deliberately break GLAAD's Media Reference Guide and others like it.

Safe assumption that this is intentional on Graham’s part. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/27/twitter-clos...

"Media reference guides" are not absolute in any sense, however. They're simply another sort of social advocacy.

To put it bluntly, calling a transgender woman a "trans-identified male" and a "young and deeply troubled boy" is very poor taste.

It is. I found it hard to wade through the article.

That said, the accusations, which appear to be substantiated and in some cases legally proven, are truly nauseating.

Aren't like 10% of all sysadmins furries? People controlling internet spaces liking weird (legal) porn seems unsurprising and not something anyone should care about.

Is there anything more damning against Aimee besides "she seems to have some unusual sexual preferences"? I find the idea that "this person likes cartoon animals in diapers" leads to the conclusion "and thus is a danger to children" seems like a stretch.

Hiring her dad seems like bad judgement, but she was 21 and it doesn't seem like there is evidence she was procuring victims or anything like that.

Graham Linehan is like the UK Tucker Carlson of hating trans people (note all the confusing misgendering in this article). Accusations from him should be taken with a large grain of salt.

The only thing I would probably say is that this person was in charge of subreddits like /r/teenagers

If you had even some suspicion that this person could be compromised or maybe not be a great option for the ADMINISTRATOR of certain groups that could be easily influenced, wouldn't it be better to just decline them as not a great fit for that role?

This just seems like bad judgement given the fact that she was thrown out of two parties and just the association with her father at 21 (very much an adult mind you) seems like it would immediately disqualify her from working with children (note: nothing against them working for reddit, but in the capacity they were employed it seems incredibly irresponsible of Reddit)

Identity politics has become a shield and weapon for bad behavior - how dare you question me you must be a bigot. Whoever can gain the public’s attention first controls the narrative.

Yes, it's absurd. I can say nasty things about you because of my Identity, which also shields me from anything you say in response/defense.

This beavior is super emphasized on reddit nowadays. Every subreddit is vertical, either you agree with what the collective mind thinks or you are out or downvoted to oblivion.

There's no discussion anymore.

Occasionally you'll see someone step up to question the narrative, and they almost always preface their comments with a bit of moral signaling. It's like a bizarre ritual. They'll disavow, insult, or otherwise distance themselves from whichever 'other' is the target of the mob's ire, and only then will they offer up a contrary opinion.

I suppose they're responding rationally to the 'karmic' incentive.

Identity, status and standing has always been a shield or weapon for bad behaviour, just look at the kind of abuse scandals the church got and still gets away with. It's more like we've just expanded the grifting privileges to more groups

What is the connection to identity politics here? I am missing it.

The person in question is trans

the person in question is trans, consequently, criticism of them is weaponised through the discourse as transphobic

Ironically, with the blanket ban they've enacted, nobody can come to her defense either.

Because after she was thrown out of the green party she said ‘transphobia’ was the reason she was being thrown out, presumably in an attempt to deflect from the real reason.

The real reason was that she recruited her father as a campaign manager while knowing he was being charged for sexual offences, and he would eventually be convicted of raping and torturing a 10 year old child which was held captive in the attic of the house she was living in at the time.

My jaw just hit the floor. Wow. Reddit should be ashamed if this is true.

That's true, but what does this have to do with Reddit?

they hired her and are now trying to shield her from criticism by banning discussion or mentions of her

rumor is reddit hired her

So I would love to know how Reddit's owner's justify her hiring.

Probably the didn't do a background check?

So where’s the outrage? Did people believe her? It doesn’t seem like it.

Is this new? Didn’t OJ get off partly by painting the police as racist (accurately or not)? But still didn’t work with the public that believes he’s guilty?

Isn’t there a long history of insulting your oponents using all sorts of reasons? Is the fact that guilty/bad people have always tried to avoid and shift blame mean the shields they try and use are bad things?

It seems like this is just another attempt to hijack the discussion with conservative outrage hobby horses.

I read this on Twitter recently:

"The reason why so many extremely woke people turn out to have been bigoted in the past is because bigotry used to be the best way to bully and intimidate people, but now performative anti-bigotry is the best way to bully and intimidate people. An evolving toolset for sociopaths." https://twitter.com/shantmm/status/1364992332064378880

To me, that's one of the best explanation of what we are witnessing at large.

Performative anti-bigotry is just bigotry afterall.

Justify your statement, which is basically A & !A

Please note that bias against bigots is not, actually, bigotry.

Indeed it is contradictory, but we never expected the social justice crowd to be able to put together coherent logical ideas, most of their ideas are founded in contradictions, and so the entire social justice movement is a mess of contradictions.

This is not doxing in any way is it? The person is using their own name, is a public figure, posted about their activities on twitter and can be easily Googled.

Would reddit ban anything about this if the person in question was not an employee?

I understand the concern about harassment, but should anyone be able to get off reddit if they want to? Let's say Roger Stone wants no mention of himself on reddit, should he be able to say please ban anyone that mentions me?

It could be that some discussion of this person was linking to a Substack article with investigative reporting into this person’s kinks and polyamory, using their forum history over the last decade in a way that Reddit might see as doxxing.

That's rather unpleasant. Graham Linehan is an extremist, make no mistake.

It's not doxxing. It's Reddit employees abusing their power to try to protect "one of their own". It's pretty bad if it's true.

And apparently HN is allowing it to happen here to because all the threads related to this keep getting flagged into oblivion.

Some HN users claim that it's because many HN users are tired of reddit this, reddit that...

I and many others are tired of twitter and facebook, and yet no one down votes stories about them. Why should reddit be different?

This sounds a bit like an extreme form of the EU's "right to be forgotten" law.

The post made it sound like there was a consensus of Reddit admins who were behind the decision, but to me it sounds like this person was hired as an admin and immediately searched their name and banned anyone who appeared in the results.

The worst part is that this may have gone unnoticed except that one of the people was a moderator of a major subreddit. Now it's blown up and gone pure Streisand Effect.

This degree of censorship used to be noteworthy enough to find the front page of the site. The people who know about this censorship on reddit will be in the minority.

You can request/demand to be forgotten by services, but a reasonable person can’t expect other people to forget them just because they asked services to do the same. Stored data and human memories are not the same thing lol

I've got to assume that the bannings are being done by Aimee as the new admin, because I can't imagine that anyone else at reddit would be so unfamiliar with Reddit that they would think this is a good idea. Look how much shit Ellen Pao got, and she was basically doing a decent job. I can't imagine this is going to go much better.

Ellen Pao was the beginning of the large scale decline of reddit. She might've done a decent job according to the owners, but I can't imagine much users agreeing with that assessment.

A lot of the things that Pao got blamed for publicly were decisions made by Ohanian and the board. In fact, her predecessor said that she was opposed to most of the controversial changes but was forced to implement them.

> shit Ellen Pao got, and she was basically doing a decent job.

Those were different times, were the Ellen Pao situation to happen right now again I don't think things would go the same way as they did the first time. This reddit admin person also has the advantage of being a trans, and trans people are the new token individuals (have been for one year and half - two, I guess), I can't see Reddit the company not taking her part 100% (even though she's in the wrong in many instances).

> and trans people are the new token individuals

You have to be totally detached from reality to actually believe this. Have you not paid any attention at all to the number of anti-trans laws being brought in a number of US states? There's been over 100 in 2021.

I cannot find any other rational explanation for why a top 10 internet website (in terms of traffic) would take the back of a person who had enabled a baby rapist, I just can’t.

Wow, 100 anti-trans laws in 3 months? Have a link?

https://www.aclu.org/legislation-affecting-lgbt-rights-acros...

Thanks!

Two sides of the same thing. Vilified and sanctified, depending on the group/context.

Reminds me of the time the CEO (spez) was caught editing people's posts[0].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

To add to that, late editing your posts on patriots.win is now called spez-ing.

This is happening now, so the title of the post explains the events and links to r/ukpolitics where the crisis has started.

Apologies if this breaks HN title rules but the original title is not descriptive.

Discussion developing on Twitter due to Reddit site wide bans.

https://twitter.com/search?q=Aimee%20Challenor&src=typed_que...

Reddit must have been desperate to fill a diversity role. That's the only reason I can think of for employing Challenor given their past actions.

Reddit will never be profitable in the fiscal sense. They are trading in other forms of capital at this point.

They deplatformed a president and a company overnight... don't tell me the banning of a bunch of users of some site is something that is going to surprise you? Enjoy distributed censorship.

There're reports that Reddit is editing user comments before deleting them

https: //www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/mbd6q1/the_green_partys_woman_problem_the_spectator/grxxbzx/

As far as I know Reddit doesn't maintain previous edits, so this is also a cover up, and it prevents any recourse.

It would be interesting to know what sort of background checking Reddit did when hiring this person. Just the public information has loads of red flags.

As much as I resent the control-weenies flagging stuff they disagree with, I don't like the title editorialising here which could be read as an attempt to shame and punish rather than discuss.

Please can we merge with the original threads and consider keeping the source titles.

Another example here with a clear and explanatory title:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/mb1vpb/rukp...

I posted this and I disagree, a drama subreddit is the least place this should be discussed, this is about silencing Redditors and abuse from admins who are paid Reddit staff.

As per title change, please see my comment at the time of posting.

I saw your comment before posting and see no need for the editorialising for the reason given.

The link I've given also explains what's going on, yours does not (and the sub disappeared previously), people have to trust your interpretation in the title.

Previous discussion on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554697 has been flagged.

It sounds like the flagging was done by users, not HN admin...so that’s good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26558198

It seems that the name is mentioned on /r/europe though[0], but all comments have been deleted and the thread has been locked.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/mbbb56/aimee_challe...

This thread is 2 hours old, 476 points, 240 comments and is 125 spot on the main page. Something is not right

"Please do not name this individual" But we won't tell you who the individual that shall not be name is.

The individual is named in the two linked articles: Aimee Challenor

The Monty Python's stoning scene in Life of Brian comes to mind.

If you click the articles linked within the post, you’ll see that there’s a bit of malicious compliance going on on the admin’s part with regards to not naming the individual.

My interaction with reddit is now nearly zero. I turned on ad block some time ago. I will visit /r/todayilearned in the early morning while laying in bed, and I will use subreddits to research purchases.

It is much more satisfying to remove /r/all from the reddit equation. I can't even visit my local subreddit anymore because the amount of censorship by moderators is staggering. The dark marketing, once you can see it, is everywhere. And their comment ranking algorithm is suffocating.

I know it sounds trite, but most small-ish subreddit communities are still sane. Avoid the main ones like the plague though.

It depends. I have had interactions with some small community moderators that border on the insane. I was banned from AskHistorians for explaining the historical utility of nomadic herding of livestock. The moderator who banned me was also the moderator of a vegan/vegetarian subreddit.

I don't log into the site any longer.

Ah, AskHistorians can be rough. Maybe it's a more technical thing, but on some sports and some computer niche subreddits I feel okay and there's a nice discussion.

But I understand your position and find myself using the site less and less.

What's the alternative? As a Digg v4 refugee, I've always wondered.

Trouble is that deep knowledge of niche communities has taken 15 years - a not-insignificant portion of a lifetime - to accumulate. If the site dies, so much specialised discussion is scattered where it'll be far harder to find.

There isn't one right now.

Seattle subreddit is unbelievably awful and it's not just the mods, it's virtually every person participating.

And this post has been flagged too, presumably by some group that is sharing the link internally, targeting the spread of this information as if it was a threat to them.

There has to be some sociological phenomenon that explains these kinds of events, and the strange group-think hivemind warfare type behavior that is now commonplace on all social media, across the entire political spectrum.

Does anyone have reading recommendations? This kind of thing fascinates me.

Reached out last week by a recruiter from reddit, guess I'll never work there. I refuse to work for a company where this kind of stuff is going on. Vote with your feet, and choose not to work at places like this. Vote with your hands and choose not to browse and be a user of sites like this.

Good idea! Just removed the app.

For some reason, there is a fanatical subset of trans people, almost all of them biological men who identify as women, who are extremely prominent on the Internet, and particularly on Reddit. They wield an influence that is out of all proportion to their numbers.

Edit: for this story in particular, there is a pressure of cancel culture on both sides. On one side, a person's husband got doxxed after having admitted online to having pedophilic fantasies. On the other side, there is mass Reddit censorship together with attempts to cancel people for supposedly being "transphobic". The cancelation and doxxing seem unwarranted and unpleasant to me regardless of which side is doing it.

I don't get it - why are people angry with her over her father's actions?

they're angry with her over her actions, it's separate from her father's crimes.

Also their fiance has has written some erotic fiction that is almost as disturbing as what their father did

People weren't angry with her until she began banning users posting articles in the mainstream press that happen to mention her name.

> People weren't angry with her until she...

certainly not accurate. In the sub and nearby subs involved, it was not known that they worked for reddit. The posting of the article was incidental. The person who posted it had no idea why it was removed and they were permabanned

She is not at fault for her fathers actions, but when she continues to surround herself with such people, including her husband, this may indicate a bad pattern of behavior

Or something deep in her psychology, e.g. she was raised by a pedophile and surely there were some dysfunctional family dynamics... That will color your entire life.

Which is no excuse, of course.

They are angry that she hired her father as an election agent/campaign manager AFTER his actions came to light.

Whilst he was about to go on trial for 22 sexual offenses against children as young as 10 years old.

So the gist of it is that when she was running for election, she hired her father as an election agent while he was being investigated for his crimes, and also she lived in the house he performed his crimes in at the same time.

I think that this is worthy of criticism, but the problem here is that the few journalistic pieces that investigate this also push a strong anti-trans theme while also criticizing her at the same time, and at least one of them (the Graham Linehan one) is most definitely against Reddit's hate speech policy. I would not be surprised if this is the source of most of the bans, which is causing more of an uproar amongst the people who align with Graham Linehan's thinking.

There are quite a few critical pieces that I see on Reddit that are remaining up, even her name being mentioned in comments and not being banned, so I don't think this is worth the uproar that is being generated.

> So the gist of it is that when she was running for election, she hired her father as an election agent while he was being investigated for his crimes, and also she lived in the house he performed his crimes in at the same time.

That's where it started, but it seems to have intensified (based on my brief research, I think I've come across some of the earlier stories about Knight/Challenor previously, but it's not too of the mind stuff) because her current spouse is apparently an open (not active, at least openly) pedophile who has publicly posted about (among other things) fantasizing about children being forcibly kidnapped, tortured, and raped.

This, combined with the issues that arose around how much she may have been aware of, involved in, or defensive of her father's crimes would probably bring a firestorm of negative attention to her if she wasn't trans, and the fact that it's natural fit with the anti-LGBTQ propaganda angle that everything that deviates from pure cisgender heterosexuality is barely a step removed from bestiality, child rape, and the general collapse of society makes it the perfect magnet for the absolute worst that the culture wars have to offer.

It's not about what the father did, it's about what Aimee did.

What did Aimee do?

Employed her father on her political campaign and then banned people who were talking about it.

Her father is a convicted child rapist, this is what is causing the uproad.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-45...

AFAICT, this is a synopsis along with article link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/mbbb56/aimee_challe...

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/aimee-challenor-and-the-...

There appears to be some heavy editing/removal of information going on with the Wikipedia page relating to her.

reddit is designed for censorship. It has been a dumpster-fire of group-think since 2018. Anything against the collective is quarantined and then banned. I stopped going there when they banned every decent meme subreddit bc of 'offensive jokes'

Streisand effect is going to be really stong with that one... If someone needs copy pastes : 𝒜𝒾𝓂𝑒𝑒 𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓁𝓁𝑒𝓃𝑜𝓇 𝕬𝖎𝖒𝖊𝖊 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖓𝖔𝖗

any idea what AC's reddit account is? I heard that she had already been moderating multiple subs

Hopefully it's not against the rules here or anything, but it was identified[0] as /u/bpwpb[1], so Challenor changed[2] profiles to /u/isnottheimposter[3].

[0] https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/ashton-challenor-the-bo...

[1] https://reddit.com/u/bpwpb

[2] https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/something-rotten-at-the...

[3] https://reddit.com/u/isnottheimposter

Every time I see a topic where one point of view is banned I can't stop thinking of the 1930's Soviet Union when arguing with theory of communism could lead one into a deep trouble.

Despite all the vitriol, I have a degree of sympathy for the Reddit admin in question. I can't imagine how distressing it must be to be turned into a worldwide hate figure overnight; that has to be extremely psychologically damaging. Among the mob will be genuinely hateful and equally vile people who'll probably send a tsunami of death threats.

Reddit is in a bit of a difficult place; perhaps because of the legal duty of care Reddit has to their employee (particularly to someone who can legitimately claim to be marginalised) they can't just toss her to an incensed mob. Especially if that incensed mob was created by the actions of Reddit making clumsy choices.

Maybe don't hire a known child rapist/torturer if you don't want to be hated.

We're in agreement that knowingly associating oneself with pedophiles deserves a degree of opprobrium. However that does raise the question, how much opprobrium?

The person in question probably suffers psychologically a great deal. Who wouldn't if they were dealt with the double-hand of gender-dysphoria and a pedophile father? I think it is safe to conclude this person is not well. Does the world really stand to gain much exposing a fringe activist to the opprobrium of the entire world?

I might sound radical in saying this, but I really don't think they do, and I think that societal shame needs to be regulated in proportion with how useful it is.

Q1: Should a psychologically suffering person be able to run for public office?

I would say yes.

Q2: If so, should a public figure that is psychologically suffering be safeguarded from any criticism

I would say no since being a public figure was a conscious choice.

> The person in question probably suffers psychologically a great deal. Who wouldn't if they were dealt with the double-hand of gender-dysphoria and a pedophile father?

You don't get a pass on hiring your dad while he is being charged for sex crimes just because you are trans.

That's not what I'm trying to address. I said that I agree that deserves opprobrium!

What I have trouble with, is the idea that it's somehow okay for the whole world to deliver it in the form of an ungoverned internet mob.

Societies have limits to how much opprobrium you can receive. The reality is that she's probably getting tens of thousands of death threats. In most places you have an inalienable legal right to protection from such things.

What i mean is, your post seemed to imply that the opprobrium should be less because she is trans. I think it should be equal regardless of your gender identity.

I think it's fairly clear that she's receiving far more opprobrium because she is trans.

I would say, if you are more than one level removed from the issue then you should be given consideration. If you are two or more levels removed then it should be not even on the RADAR

However given she is directly connected to the person at hand by willful association after knowing the issue she pretty much deserves no exception.

Frankly I could care less about her and more about how Reddit justifies hiring her knowing what they know about her.

Maybe Reddit can sell dispensations in the form of hiring people.

No, but you get a pass because he was not yet convicted.

that is what a conviction means -- we should not punish people before it, nor should we punish people that associate with them

> That is what a conviction means -- we should not punish people before it, nor should we punish people that associate with them

It’s still bad judgement to hire someone who you are aware is being investigated for kidnapping and raping a 10 year old child when you are in a political party trying to get elected.

I mean it’s not a good look for a political party to play the “I knew he was being investigated for child rape, but we hired him anyway because innocent until proven guilty, even though he was actually guilty in the end” card.

Technically most Reddit staff would have to say that they were associating with pedophiles if they were around while Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the biggest and most active admins on the site.

> Does the world really stand to gain much exposing a fringe activist to the opprobrium of the entire world?

In this case, the person being shamed for endorsing pedophilia was hired to manage a communities of children. She hired a child rapist, married an admitted pedophile, and now (as demonstrated by this incident) has the power to control what media many children are exposed to.

I’ve no problem with her getting a job that doesn’t involve kids.

> Maybe don't hire a known child rapist/torturer if you don't want to be hated.

To manage her political campaign, that's the important part. Being a candidate for a public office _is_ justified reason for discussing a person's employees/employers/companies/taxes/PRs/whatever.

I had no frakking idea on who she was until this, anyway.

+1 the Linehan article is explicitly hateful.

I think this is an attempt to defend her from that contravention of the hate speech policy, and is more cock-up than conspiracy IMO.

Conspiracy to hide a negative article? Could just be a cocked-up conspiracy.

Is this Reddit as a whole or specifically /r/UKPolitics?

This seems like it could also be a "Right to be forgotten" situation? Especially with how the post is worded where it could be a legal team forcing them to comply.

Nope, she is a public figure.

Wouldn't ppl simply use an alternative like "one who cannot be mentioned

And to add insult to injury, this post is flagged on HN. Why?

is this being done by Reddit employees or Reddit volunteers?

Employees

Can we get /u/maxwellhill to weigh in on this?

i just made r/aimeechannelor - come and hopefully we'll get a little bit of time for discussion pre-ban due to the spelling!

So this is how you stop the social justice mob.

I don't have any context on this, but my 10 seconds of research indicates I'm going to hate everybody on both sides. Gonna stop here and do some actual work.

This is for /r/ukpolitics only?

No, it's being patchily enforced sitewide.

Canary post: https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/mbdg8o/a_senior_...

I am completely lost here. I feel like a Boomer on Snapchat.

Can someone please give a 5 sentence tl;dr of (a) who this person is, (b) what the original controversy was about, and (c) why the Reddit admins care so much?

This is one of those stories that keeps popping up in front of me but I really do not have the will nor the time to engage with it, so I'd really appreciate a concise and unbiased summary if anyone can offer it.

(a) She is a reddit admin that was previously a public figure in both the green party and the liberal democrats.

(b) While in the green party, she recruited her father as a campaign manager while knowing he was being charged for sexual offences, and he would eventually be convicted of raping and torturing a 10 year old child which was held captive in the attic of the house she was living in at the time. This brought disrepute to the party and she was removed. After this she got a position within the liberal democrats, and got suspended from the party after her boyfriend's twitter account was found to have posts admitting to having sexual fantasies involving sex with children.

(c) Reddit admins presumably care because they have now employed her as an admin, but don't want any criticism of her past as referenced in (b). This is presumably to protect her as an employee, but is problematic as they act as a news sharing site to some extent, and she is/was a public figure.

Can someone please give a 5 sentence tl;dr of (a) who this person is, (b) what the original controversy was about, and (c) why the Reddit admins care so much?

This person is a former British political candidate (Green/LibDem) who allegedly concealed from electoral officials the heinous crimes committed by their campaign manager. This person is now employed by Reddit and is abusing their newfound admin access.

(a) Former UK Green Party equality spokesperson and candidate, current Reddit administrator (read: employee not volunteer).

(b) While a candidate for the UK Green Party, she employed her father as campaign manager ("election agent"). Her mother, who lived with the father, also ran as a candidate and also employed the father as campaign manager. In 2018, her father was charged and convicted of raping and torturing a child in his home.

(c) This person currently works for Reddit, and is allegedly enforcing a line of censorship in order to protect herself from online harassment.

I made a subreddit

r/aimeechannelor - hopefully the name lets us get a bit of chatting in before the ban hammer drops :)

Banning FatPeopleHate might have worked only too well.

Not dystopian sounding at all:

    Please do not name this individual, at all. Doing so may result in your account being banned by the admins.

    Please do not ask further questions about this, as doing so may result in your account being banned by the admins.

    Please do not discuss this incident on Reddit publicly or privately (e.g. on private subreddits and/or in private messages, chat etc.), as doing so may result in your account being banned by the admins.

I fully understand and agree that the platform is privately owned, etc. etc., but this is getting strange(r) -- and quite normalized.

And these employees are deleting subreddits (e.g. gender critical), suppress media they don't like..it's really surprising reddit has not found attention the same way twitter or facebook have. Maybe because of their political leanings.

People have been complaining about reddit's moderation for years, but I think due to the anonymity it's not being looked at the same way as twitter or Facebook. It's closer to a tabloid than a newspaper

>It's closer to a tabloid than a newspaper

Except it's owned by one of the larger media companies out there and has ties to most of them through their connections to the associated press.

They're closer to actual publishers than twitter or Facebook are to be honest.

It definitely has it's issues but it's not on the level of facebook or twitter just yet. I can kind of see them circling their wagons to protect a staff member given past reddit overreactions that end up with the staff member getting doxed and death threats all over the internet. Mostly because of the pile on mentality of a lot of redditors.

https://retalk.com is waiting with open arms.

Alright lets go through the Reddit Alternative checklist.

   [x] Link to David Duke's article and positive discussion of it.
    [x] Bonus points for whites are the real victim of displacing native Americans narrative.    
   [x] Multiple posts about pissing off the lefties.
   [x] Weird anti Bill Gates articles
   [x] Multiple GatewayPundit articles on the front page.
   [x] Calls for Trump social media.
   [x] Random LockdownSceptics.org AMA.

... So just like every other one then?

Thanks for talking it up, wouldn't have noticed the link otherwise.

Aimee Challenor is apparently a Reddit employee. This is why Reddit is banning her mention.

Seems extremely sus to me and why we can't rely on private companies to protect things like free speech and equal access to information.

It's almost like the people who thought of the first amendment didn't see 99% of speech going through private companies at some point in the future. My snark isn't pointed at you, just at the people whose talking point is "first amendment is about the government!"

They own(ed) the companies.

I guess they don't understand streisand effect. If you explicitly ban people will follow that rule but what happens when people get around by using some made up name different from original. Are admins going to read every comment on the platform to uphold this rule?

I believe they just don't want it to be talked about on their platform. They're not trying for general censorship. In fact, the person's name is already listed in newspapers.

Pretty obviously what happened is they've had incidents in the past where a blogger would publish an article on one of their employees and then redditors would start spamming that article on reddit to dox them -- in a coordinated action so the blog article was written for the purpose of doxxing the employee.

So they have a bot which bans links to article which mention reddit employees by name which hands out auto-bans to prevent that behavior.

What went wrong was that the code didn't have any allowance for newspaper articles, or somehow incorrectly classified that article.

That problem being made more difficult because the definition of what is a "news site" or "journalist" these days is vague.

This sounds like its the same category of problem that Memphis was with twitter.

And its a bit odd that this technology-oriented site is getting caught up in the political outrage and entirely missing the fact that a bot did the bans and that reddit acted to revert those actions. Do we now think that programming and algorithmic bugs never happen and that the outcomes of algorithms are always deliberately premeditated actions and never unintended consequences?

You can’t doxx a public politician by “revealing” their name...

You can doxx a reddit employee that way.

The problem comes up when you've hired a politician as a reddit employee, and you're written an algorithm that only cares about if someone is a reddit employee.

"an algorithm"

one that navigates to a linked article and notices a single sentence mentioning this admin's name, vanishes the post and bans the moderator who approved it?

sounds a lot more like 'reddit admin decided to abuse powers in an attempt to hide any link to how she once hired her paedophile father and was removed from a political party'

What are you talking about?

It's pretty clear now what happened is that a completely innocuous post to an article in The Spectator contained this person's name. They weren't the subject of the article or any of the conversation.

This particular reddit admin then removed it and banned the person who posted it (long standing mod).

I don't think it applies in this case: the rule was already in place and unnoticed until a high-profile incident drew attention to it: they are not trying to suppress mention as a response to newfound notoriety.

the 'no doxing' rule hasn't generally applied to reddit admins and users who are also public figures - the founders, for example

> or in private messages

We do know that there's nothing 'private' about any social media platforms, but some people still believe that to be the case.

Now they are blatantly publicizing that private chats are being read.

Anyone remembers the outrage when gmail was analyzing emails to provide ads? What happened to that?

>Now they are blatantly publicizing that private chats are being read.

Who is publicizing it? This is purely speculation by moderators who are not reddit employess.

If private message content is being moderated, it is not private.

Moderators cannot see private message content.

Moderators cannot see private message content.

Maybe ordinary mods but Reddit employees?

Yes, that's right.

Some Reddit employees certainly can see message content. This shows up in /r/redditrequest . Some times the system will flag a request for manual review. In that case, the following message is in the request:

> Thanks for submitting this request! It’s been flagged for manual review (not a bad thing!). This might delay a decision by a couple weeks. In the meantime, please politely message the moderators of r/whatever and reply to this comment with a link to that message. Only you, the mods of r/whatever, and some admins will be able to view the message content. Including a link to this message will help speed the process along.

I believe that's why some platforms have started using "Direct Message" (i.e. "DM me") instead of the older Private Message terminology.

Yes of course the platform can read them. Everyone knows that. It's obvious from context that when people talk about private messages they mean messages that other users on the platform cannot see.

It's one thing to prevent people from saying something on a part of your platform anyone can see it but if they want to talk about it one on one with someone else (someone who presumably has a block button at their disposal) then that shouldn't be censored.

It's the difference between a billboard and a letter. Of course a 3rd party can snoop on a letter. But a billboard is content that is intentionally put in public view.

Also, private letters and parcels are frequently checked for contraband.

> Anyone remembers the outrage when gmail was analyzing emails to provide ads? What happened to that?

Google's PR seem to stay on top of that one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484883

> Now they are blatantly publicizing that private chats are being read.

no, they aren't: banning the item from private messages doesn't mean that they are enforcing it by reading private messages. It could mean, for instance, that if somebody complains about you including the item in a private message, you would be in contravention of the rules.

also, a robot daemon scanning private messages for the text string would not mean that your private messages were being read in any meaningful way.

Voldemort!

r/europe removed all of the comments on a related thread supposedly to protect people from getting baited into losing their accounts:

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/mbbb56/aimee_challe...

This is why I don't & never will have a reddit account. I have heard the mods are very quick to ban people & even whole subreddits for ridiculous reasons. That & security reasons. It's astonishing how much personal information becomes available from being on reddit. See www.redective.com.

Reddit is an Orwellian shitshow. When you are an IRL public figure you lose your expectation of privacy when you are engaged in public controversy that is discussed in the press.

What did you expect? People fostered this environment, did you really think it was going to just stop at some arbitrary point? Now that there's a child abuse coverup involved now we all care about censorship? Give me a break.

The sjw mob created this situation. Reddit is a known hive of ideological extremism.

What i don't get is giving this job to a person i wouldn't hire to wash my car... let alone judge other people's speech and have access to their private DMs and IP addrs. Absolutely questionable behaviour.

If reddit were to become as "regulated" as say facebook (an identical platform from a philosophical perspective) it would be in very deep water right now

I just mentioned her name and linked to a few news article on Reddit on a few different subs and haven't been banned yet.

Edit: It took 22 minutes to have one of my posts locked ...

You might have to check if you are shadowbanned.

I can see my comments from another account and one of my comment that I made since then have been upvoted... so I appear to not be shadowbanned (shadow banning is another very shady practice).

This discussion, like the others, has mysteriously dropped off the front page of HN.

"Mysteriously" indeed. Who had the influence to make that happen, I wonder?

The person who several years ago and unrelated to this incident wrote the code that penalised threads with too high a comment:vote ratio?

It's not that. The current number two (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26555873) has a similar ratio.

527:291 vs 412:293

I don't like where the world is going...

Oh look! Spooks -- stratfor spooks in this case -- think they're aristocrats who get to use censorship for self-preservation. What a shocking, brand new development.

Reddit is crazy when it comes to anything trans related. Any comment mildly oppositional to the dominant trans agenda and belief system results in a ban. This is what happens when you hire ideological extremists with victim complexes to try to prove you're inclusive.

Reddit can't go bankrupt soon enough.

the way /r/wsb is buying rewards for other users, maybe never.

Could this be related to GDPR?

Reddit should not be censoring criticism of Challenor. It’s called “consequences.”

Reddit has a real and serious potential liability if they didn't take action on this (now, there is a very good argument that hiring the individual in question in the role in question showed epically poor judgement, but, while a part of the chain of events that got the situation to this point, that's a different issue.)

Which liability? In which juridiction? From what I read in another other website, the affair seems pretty serious: hired murderer pedophile dad and met husband on a furry forum on which that guy wrote about raping children. Since that individual is a political figure (thus public figure) it’s legitimate the people discuss about those facts.

> Which liability? In which juridiction?

Both workplace environment (and, yes, not protecting from hostile environment on protected characteristics created by customers, suppliers, or other business contacts can be a source of liability) liability where she is currently employed by Reddit (which is in the US; I’m not sure which state, but that’s not super important since gender identity is federally protected within statutory protection of sex under the Bostock v. Clayton County decision), and, as far as anything potentially falls into the realm of defamatory fact claims, libel liability in any jurisdiction in which Knight/Challenor has defensible reputation interests; notably, this includes the UK, which has neither a NY Times v. Sullivan-style high bar for defamation liability when the subject is a public figure nor CDA Section 230-style protection of online platforms from being treated as a publisher of libels submitted by users.

Someone was banned from Reddit for linking to an article dead naming a trans woman. Did I get this right? If I did, what's the problem here, really?

they have also been told that can't live-name her

also, she was the one who banned people for it (sketch)

also, I'm not sure that's why they were banned

It's not just that, they have banned any mention of her name. You literally cannot even type her name in private messages without the message at least getting deleted, if you aren't banned.

That's some Chinese Communist Party level censoring.

Its called left for a reason

I seriously doubt that. This is a claim I've seen in many places (unsubstantiated) but I find it hard to believe that her name is triggering bans. Dead name? Sure, I can believe that and, again, I have no problem with this.

They released a post saying they had a script set up to autoremove any mention of her current name, which often came with a ban.

I'm not sure if you are trolling, but the article wasn't "dead naming a trans woman". It was an article in a mainstream uk magazine about a uk political party where her preferred name was mentioned

"Deadnaming" is explicitly using the birth/non-current name of a trans person. The article does that, and also uses "he" throughout. Both of those things are typically seen as quite offensive by trans people.

I don't think a site-wide ban of the person who posted the link is reasonable, but it is a shitty article.

I skimmed both articles and have found no proof of this. Both say "she", "Ms", and the correct name.

That's true of the articles directly linked in the reddit post, but not the Spectator article (that was not linked to) - https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/aimee-challenor-and-the-... - that one. (Which is the link that apparently led to the banning of the person who posted it)

Considering related threads are getting nuked all across Reddit I'm going to guess the article wasn't really the issue.

This article was not involved, it was not linked to from reddit. I'm not sure how it's relevant to the situation

Mainstream UK press has serious problem with TERFs, so my question was genuine: is my understanding correct, that the issue stems from someone linking to misgendering, dead naming article?

No. That is not correct.

Someone posted an article discussing some issues around women's issues specifically apropos The Green party. Actually a good article.

The article mentioned Aimee Challenor's name and the scandal around their deputy leadership bid.

This happened to be posted to reddit. It was removed by admin and the poster (a mod) banned. No one knew why.

Only when reddit made a statement to mods did it become clear that was the reason.

If I write an article today about someone who transitions next year, am I (and all articles) supposed to spend time updating it? Wikipedia is a different story

You could but you, obviously, don't have to. The problem is not about the content though, it's about linking to it. So someone linking to this old article if there are recent, better sources could very well be doing it maliciously.

Think of it this way: if someone linked to an old article that used some slurs that used to be mainstream-acceptable at some point but aren't any more, would you feel uncomfortable? I hope you would. The reason people don't have this visceral reaction when it comes to trans people has a lot to do with broader lack of understanding of non-cis minorities.

There's an obvious problem with figuring out what the intentions of someone writing are. And we absolutely can't tell if e.g. someone dead naming is doing it on purpose or not. Not knowing and willing to learn is absolutely fine. But since you can't tell oblivious from malicious, you have two options: ignore assuming innocence or ban assuming malice.

Internet discourse is not courtroom, you don't have to assume innocence and it's absolutely fine to have a higher standard for communication on Reddit. Not that I think Reddit does, but it could. ;) So, again, what should you do with misgendering or dead naming? Since I sympathize with minorities and the oppressed, I would ban. But I'm absolutely sure many, many people would find a way to label what I'd considered hate speech "a freedom of speech issue" so I'm not at all surprised that this is causing a stir over on Reddit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com