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Comment by UncleSlacky | Hacker News Reader

(In)famously, the account widely believed to belong to Ghislaine Maxwell is a moderator of several major subs:

https://www.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill

(moderator of r/worldnews, r/environment, r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut, r/cyberlaws, r/enviroaction and r/greed)

Somehow I doubt a 60 year old woman with the job title of “socialite” accumulated 15 million karma on Reddit. Call me crazy.

Would you have guessed a 60 year old woman with the job title of “socialite” would be involved in sex trafficking?

No matter who it is, I'd like to know what reason someone might have to abandon 15 million karma.

Actually, yeah. The wealthy have always been blamed for pedophile rings, and in places like England, they've gone out of their way to propagate them. People with the job title of "socialite" absolutely do a lot of sex trafficking. Not all of them, but as a whole the group is tremendously guilty.

...and that sort of thing is why I block reddit.com. For any one accurate fact that a redditor learns, there's at least one other that is wrong. The site is like a game of telephone, and what's more half the participants are teenagers, propagandists, attention-seekers, crackpots or pathological liars.

> the participants are teenagers, propagandists, attention-seekers, crackpots or pathological liars.

I quit using reddit regularly about two years ago, but I still checked up on it maybe once a month until a couple of months ago.

What's really telling is opening the site without being logged in to my old account. I never have to scroll more than 5-10 posts down to find an obvious astroturfing political post, or a screenshot of a 15-word tweet being hailed as some masterstroke of political discourse.

Reddit's primary societal function these days seems to be serving interest groups and providing a testing ground for psyops.

Is there any actual evidence of this? Sharing a similar name is, of course, not proof of anything.

not really, but the account did become inactive right around the time she was imprisoned

I wish reddit and others would archive and preserve accounts of people convicted of various crimes.

It would be extremely enlightening to follow radicalisation and communication of, say, an incel terrorist.

Radicalisation is actually very interesting and I (ashamedly) nearly succumbed to the same thing myself.

There's a really good youtuber called "Contrapoints" that attempts to deconstruct with low judgement the kind of environment an Incel lives in and what the worldview is.

Empathy is always at the root of deradicalisation, so I always plug her videos when I can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPhrTOg1RUk

I'm glad you enjoyed Contrapoints, but I'm going to have to deflate your recommendation somewhat.

She's a good performer, but most of the time she just beats around the bush and doesn't offer any solid conclusions about anything, which can leave you feeling unsatisfied.

She had some interesting insights into Incels because of her gender dysphoria, but those insights never led to any real sympathy for them, and she still essentially blamed them for all of their problems, and shrugged her shoulders about it by the end of the video.

Also, she's made some pretty fallacious claims, like when she said that denying being a fascist was evidence that you were a fascist. Or when you tried citing Christopher Hitchens argument in favor of protecting controversial speech to argue in favor of censorship. (I can reply with specific timestamps if you want to see).

I'm not convinced that she has deradicalized anyone, outside of a handful of teenagers that only ever posted edgy memes on 4chan that the never understood them the first place. None of the people who claim she deraticalized them can actually give concrete examples of what new information Contrapoints provided them that persuaded them to change their opinions about anything. I am certainly willing to listen when someone can. Instead, it is just vague platitudes about feelings and emotions, with zero substance or validation of facts.

She also did better when she included herself in her critiques. But over the last year or so, especially on Twitter, she has degenerated into a less ironic and more self-righteous direction, which is pretty cringe.

If you have a username, content is pretty much permanently archived on the pushshift.io API

https://pushshift.io/api-parameters/

A weakness for the specific application you are interested in is that I don't think it works with banned or quarantined subreddits - the archived dumps probably have that, but not the main API feed

I didn't recognize the name, so I looked it up (so you don't have to).

"Ghislaine Maxwell...known for her association with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein."

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

Astonishing that you didn't know, unless you live under a rock. I applaud you if you manage to escape the news cycle that long.

I’m under a rock more than most but I’ve heard the name!

Curious about surname I checked and yes she is Robert Maxwell’s daughter, who killed himself in the 80s or 90s was all over the news

He fell off a Yacht.

> It has been speculated that Maxwell was urinating into the ocean nude at the time, as he often did. He was presumed to have fallen overboard from the vessel, which was cruising off the Canary Islands, southwest Spain.

Let's not turn a perfectly reasonable night time piss into suicide. A person like that doesn't kill themselves over a few bad debts.

It's not considered likely that he killed himself; he died mysteriously on his boat. The inquest ruled that it was probably an accidental drowning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Death

Just checked, she's hardly ever mentioned in Dutch news articles, and if she is, almost never in the headline. In other words, easy to miss.

Maybe they're one of today's lucky 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/

Interesting. They supposedly shared content previously that indicated they were not a woman:

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditoroftheday/comments/bdl3o/max...

Maybe, maybe not. What is the proof of the connection? Just the time of disappearance and the username? That is pretty circumstantial, but maybe. Not conclusive though.

EDIT: This article seems to have more evidence and is at least interesting: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/is-ghislaine-maxwell-secret... I think there is definitely a chance it is her. Strange.

I put very little trust in self-reported information online. Someone like Ghislaine would probably recognize the value and zero cost of sowing nuggets of false information in public posts. (However, this expectation also makes me doubt that Ghislaine Maxwell would choose a username with "maxwell" in it...)

Maxwellhill is an old account. I think online user anonymity is a biggest deal and people realize the value of that. Sort of like op security. So I could see her registering that 14 years ago. But over time she should have realized she need better security. Why she would continue to use it 14 years later is more of a question?

Maybe. The account stopped posting 2 days before she was arrested. And hasn't posted since.

Why is it even suspected to be her? Just because of the account name?

That's way more than Reddit needs to run with the idea.

And the timing of the last post coincides with her arrest.

This post collects some "evidence":

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hnfx0r/not_conf...

If you were to run covert intelligence operations, you would want to embed yourself in the all forms of the media so you can suppress any stories before they come out.

Bit strange to do it under your actual name though.

Well the entire Epstein thing was laughably poorly run.

Sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain sight.

Yes, hiding in plain sight worked masterfully in this case. Nobody suspects anything about socialite Maxwell's secret reddit-moderating account that she named after herself. It's never even come up as a daft conspiracy theory.

but it's not under her own name, it is a name that is close to her name. The account is suspected of being hers but as I understand it not proven to be hers.

So that seems a good practice to me - use a name that could be arguably yours so that you are not hiding anything if caught out but enough not yours so there is plausible deniability. Then make a bunch of deeper cover names that you run that are harder to pin on you, if anyone is looking they are looking at the one that is close to your name.

but then maybe I've just read too many books.

> but it's not under her own name, it is a name that is close to her name.

Bit strange to do it under a name that is close to your name

but that's what my argument in the second paragraph was about?

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