esja

Sure, but even if true, that doesn’t indicate who the audience is affecting more: the home players, the away players, or the referee.

Absolutely. These people actively seek out access to children, and many of them are extremely clever in the way they do this, and the way they manipulate good-natured people around them.

The only part that astonishes me is that Reddit hired the person. It suggests they are either not performing proper background checking (terrible), or they are and decided to overlook what they found (even worse).

Aimee was already a moderator on quite a few subs. I believe the husband (or perhaps the other boyfriend) is also.

Is lying to protect pedophiles not despicable?

There is really no excuse for what he did and most other businesses would have fired him immediately. Reddit simply has a very immature corporate culture. Post-IPO (if they get that far) I would expect a massive clean-out.

The account wasn't hacked. Aimee lied about that, along with many other things, in order to protect a pedophile (again).

I agree, but a minor nitpick: Aimee was forced out not just for being connected to pedophiles, but also for lying about and/or endorsing them (among other issues). A massive failure of safeguarding from the Greens and Lib Dems, and now from Reddit.

It's astonishing to me that a person like this can become an admin on a website used by millions of teenagers. We already know that admins can access private messages and other personal information.

Telling lies to protect a horrifically abusive pedophile father and a pedophile husband, just for starters.

Thanks very much for the detailed reply. That all sounds very sensible!

I'm sure most of us would agree that the quality of the moderation here is the reason this site has been so great for so long - thanks again for all your efforts.

Firstly, thank you for doing such a great job here.

A couple of questions, as I worry that "flagging" can be abused by small groups of motivated people who are not representative of the broader user base.

Do you have ways to prevent "flagging abuse"? e.g. Do you review why things were flagged, and reinstate them if for example the thread has a lot of upvotes and isn't a total flamewar, or if the flaggers weren't particularly good citizens?

I'm talking about someone I know who has been in precisely this situation.

You don't know anything about me, or that situation, but you are happy to accuse me of:

- Claiming to speak for lesbians - Spreading propaganda from bigots - Using "abuser tactics" - Having unexamined prejudices - Making prejudicial assumptions - Having no respect for trans people - Not engaging in good faith

I'd actually be really happy to discuss this topic in good faith, as it's important to someone I care about, and you clearly have a very different opinion. But I'd want you to read the HN guidelines first and make an effort to follow them.

Of course. And being accused of hate or shamed for not wanting to change your sexual preference is deeply regressive.

You might have been downvoted for conflating gay and trans concerns as though they are the same. From what I've observed there are genuine conflicts between those communities and discussion is necessary to resolve them - it's not automatically "criticism".

For example quite a few of the "gender critical" people being referred to here are actually lesbians, and they've been accused of hate or transphobia because they loudly refuse to adjust their sexual preferences to include males who identify as women. It's impossible to satisfy both gay and trans people on this specific topic.

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

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.

I agree the Wuhan lab leak remains the most likely explanation. I think these additional details support that theory, as they verify that this activity was indeed taking place in Wuhan, while also helping explain the unusual behaviour of all the people who should be investigating but seem instead to be constantly deflecting.

It certainly looks that way.

Another overview here (there are plenty of these):

https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...

Sure.

Part 1, from 2014-2019, for 3.7M:

https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8674931

Part 2, from 2019 until it was cancelled in April 2020:

https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9819304

Both led by Peter Daszak who is now also the lead WHO investigator. The same person who decided the WHO didn’t need to see the deleted virus databases, and the same person who co-ordinated the Lancet statement which minimised the lab leak theory early on (and let to it being considered a conspiracy theory).

Here he is on This Week In Virology, describing this sort of work. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but gets most interesting from minute 27 onward:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w

For example he confirms it’s easy to modify these viruses in the lab, and mentions collaborating with Ralph Baric at UNC. Baric invented Remdesivir (with Gilead) - the “cure” that turned out not to work very well. His lab was doing gain of function experiments before the ban. Shi Zhengli (“bat woman” from Wuhan) worked very closely with Baric and Daszak.

I agree. In this context “bad at safety” basically means less than perfect.

Several doctors were discussing it in a WeChat group in December 2019 and were basically arrested and forced to apologise for spreading “misinformation”. The main person who became famous for sounding the alarm (Li Wenjiang, an ophthalmologist) later died of the disease.

They also sent a Major General from the PLA to take over the lab. She since led the team which developed the Chinese vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Wei_(medical_scientist)

Many European countries have better health insurance and higher deaths per capita than the USA. They also had severe lockdowns, and are now entering a third wave while being way behind the USA on the vaccine rollout.

The mainstream press were all conflating accidental leaks with bioweapons engineering. It went on for months.

For some reason though it's okay to refer to the "British variant", or the "South African variant", or the "Brazilian variant".

Viruses may be formed in nature, but we've been dealing with that for all of our evolutionary history. Gain of function experiments are new and introduce much greater dangers.

In general labs are not both a) bad at safety, and also b) doing gain of function research to make dangerous viruses more infectious to humans. The latter has been banned a few times due to the risk (see below). Both A and B were happening in Wuhan.

"In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced that it would stop funding gain-of-function research into certain viruses — including influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) — that have the potential to unleash a pandemic or epidemic if they escaped from the lab. Some researchers said the broad ban threatened necessary flu-surveillance and vaccine research."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00210-5

p.s. The US NIH did ultimately stop funding that research locally, but continued funding it in Wuhan. Including the exact type of virus we're dealing with now.

What sort of defence in depth can work against a virus that's been engineered to infect humans very easily, and which can only be stopped by shutting down the world economy and waiting months or years for vaccination? I think the last year has proven comprehensively that we simply cannot implement any sort of defence in depth and need to try very hard to eliminate these problems at source. Just like we do with chemical and nuclear weapons. We don't wait to clean up the damage afterward, because the damage is so horrendous.

If it is shown that this occurred because scientists took a virus and made it much more infectious to humans, banning that sort of research would mitigate a lot of the risk.

The way China responded to the leak, I don't think they felt it was a crackpot idea. Quite the reverse.