Aimee Challenor - The Streisand Effect on >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk

[BobbyTrivia]

Hello, fellow Agora Road travelers!

I've been looking for an opportunity to do a little write-up on some sort of topic here on Agora Road. Unfortunately, that day is not today! I'm going to post a few links and maybe write a few words, but overall I just feel that I don't have enough time to dedicate to an "original write-up" on this topic. But, hey, people on >reddit are pissed and they're writing plenty themselves right now. Currently playing - Dream Catalogue's DREAM_31 compilation album (listen here)

A simple summary from >reddit:

>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.

And Wikipedia:

In 2018, Challenor's father, who had been serving as her election agent, was convicted and jailed for raping and torturing a 10-year-old girl. Challenor's recruitment of her father, despite her knowledge of the charges for 22 sexual offences, led to an investigation and Challenor's suspension from the Green Party. She later resigned and joined the Liberal Democrats, but was suspended in 2019 over paedophilic tweets apparently posted by her partner. Challenor resigned from Stonewall UK at around the same time, leaving the United Kingdom for the United States.

Relevant >reddit quote:

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.

Relevant quote from another Redditor (this one really gets me, and I find it very difficult to believe that Aimee didn't know this was going on. But, no one can say for sure)

Yeah, often when someone gets called a pedo online, it's an over the top insult.
In this case, just calling the dude a pedophile seems to really undersell just how fucked up he was. He tortured a 10 year old in his attic via whipping and electric shocks, raped her, and took pictures of it, all while himself dressed as a baby girl complete with diapers. The guy is really fucked up.

Here are the tweets that Aimee's husband posted. It's tough to say if this is actually a hack or not, like Aimee's husband claims, but it's an extremely elaborate "hit job" if it is: https://archive.is/lC5Kb (I'm not going to copy/paste these into this thread)

Once word starts spreading about this, >reddit admins do what you would imagine they would do and they (apparently) ban anyone using Aimee's name. I can't exactly confirm this since none of >reddit's handling of this situation was exactly transparent. (quoted from here again)

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

>reddit response #1

We've heard various concerns about a recent action taken and wanted to provide clarity.
Earlier this month, a >reddit employee was the target of harassment and doxxing (sharing of personal or confidential information). >reddit activated standard processes to protect the employee from such harassment, including initiating an automated moderation rule to prevent personal information from being shared. The moderation rule was too broad, and this week it incorrectly suspended a moderator who posted content that included personal information. After investigating the situation, we reinstated the moderator the same day. We are continuing to review all the details of the situation to ensure that we protect users and employees from doxxing -- including those who may have a public profile -- without mistakenly taking action on non-violating content.
Content that mentions an employee does not violate our rules and is not subject to removal a priori. However, posts or comments that break Rule 1 or Rule 3 or link to content that does will be removed. This is no different from how our policies have been enforced to date, but we understand how the mistake highlighted above caused confusion.
We are continuing to review all the details of the situation.
ETA: Please note that, as indicated in the sidebar, this subreddit is for a discussion between mods and admins. User comments are automatically removed from all threads.

>reddit response #2 (Aimee no longer works for >reddit)

We would like to give you all an update on the recent issues that have transpired concerning a specific >reddit employee, as well as provide you with context into actions that we took to prevent doxxing and harassment.
As of today, the employee in question is no longer employed by reddit. We built a relationship with her first as a mod and then through her contractor work on RPAN. We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her.
We've put significant effort into improving how we handle doxxing and harassment, and this employee was the subject of both. In this case, we over-indexed on protection, which had serious consequences in terms of enforcement actions.

• On March 9th, we added extra protections for this employee, including actioning content that mentioned the employee's name or shared personal information on third-party sites, which we reserve for serious cases of harassment and doxxing.
• On March 22nd, a news article about this employee was posted by a mod of r/ukpolitics. The article was removed and the submitter banned by the aforementioned rules. When contacted by the moderators of r/ukpolitics, we reviewed the actions, and reversed the ban on the moderator, and we informed the r/ukpolitics moderation team that we had restored the mod.
• We updated our rules to flag potential harassment for human review.

Debate and criticism have always been and always will be central to conversation on >reddit—including discussion about public figures and >reddit itself—as long as they are not used as vehicles for harassment. Mentioning a public figure's name should not get you banned.
We care deeply for >reddit and appreciate that you do too. We understand the anger and confusion about these issues and their bigger implications. The employee is no longer with >reddit, and we'll be evolving a number of relevant internal policies.
We did not operate to our own standards here. We will do our best to do better for you.

During this entire ordeal, several subreddits went private and linked to the above >reddit thread in protest of the censorship. Here is a list of every subreddit that participated in the "blackout."

There's more to the story, of course. Click around some of the links I posted above and give it a read if you're interested, and do be sure to reply below with anything that you find interesting!

Oh, and what's with the title of this post? From Wikipedia...

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, often via the Internet. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project's photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew further attention to it in 2003.

 

[crendulus]

ITT: man who finds it all so tiresome learns it's even more tiresome than he possibly imagined

 

[Vaporweeb]

Well, looks like she got fired. That was actually much faster than I was expecting, honestly

 

[IlluminatiPirate]

Yea I find it extremely unlikely that >reddit didn't know about this before hiring her on. Especially considering the former ceo knew about Ghislane Maxwell.

 

[BobbyTrivia]

Yea I find it extremely unlikely that >reddit didn't know about this before hiring her on. Especially considering the former ceo knew about Ghislane Maxwell. View attachment 2330

Why she would ever admit to that is beyond me. I'm not a total conspiracy nut or anything, but if this is the kind of thing that the CEO of the 7th largest website in the US can publicly tweet, what's going on that we don't know about?

Yeah, I definitely sound like a conspiracy nut now, but I promise I'm not!

 

[IlluminatiPirate]

Why she would ever admit to that is beyond me. I'm not a total conspiracy nut or anything, but if this is the kind of thing that the CEO of the 7th largest website in the US can publicly tweet, what's going on that we don't know about?

Yeah, I definitely sound like a conspiracy nut now, but I promise I'm not!

Yea that's a rabbit hole that will take you to the deep end

 

[Deleted member 2040]

Corruption stinks, but this ones too rancid to keep swept under the rug. What were the higher ups thinking when hiring her?