Update: What's going on with the 50501 subreddit?

If you haven’t read the first part, I recommend you do so to get background on the situation. In this post, I’m going to document some questions I still have, as well as concerning items that have gone unaddressed. Unless something crazy happens I don’t plan to post about this again.

The new team of moderators re-opened the subreddit today after working with Reddit admins. Because of the ownership struggle with the original founder (EF), they said Reddit admins stepped in and put conditions on them opening the subreddit again. I am still not satisfied with their post which promised transparency and didn’t deliver, and am planning to volunteer more locally with groups not affiliated with 50501.

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The unsatisfactory explanation

The new team promised an explanation after they met the Reddit admins’ requirements, but a significant number of commenters were dissatisfied and did not think the post answered their pressing questions. This is partially because the mods claim that “As per Reddit team reinstatement guidelines, we cannot get into the actions of past moderators.” I have linked the post via Archive.org so you can see for yourself.

The Veterans’ group Zoom call

The 50501 Veterans group, which already expressed concern (Imgur mirror) about the 50501 National leadership, posted another statement (Imgur mirror) describing an incident in which four members of the National team entered what was supposed to be a private Zoom. Only one of the people identified themselves during the meeting, and only two of the four later apologized.

Afterwards, the Veterans group claims that they obtained screenshots showing that these four National members had shared the private link and encouraged others to join, and disturbingly, had started compiling a dossier on the Veterans’ group which documented statements made by people in the call, including their names.

Moderators deny attempted slander of original founder

User greenascanbe, who is part of the current mod team, made and deleted posts a couple days ago accusing the original founder of being a “sexual pervert,” a serious accusation with no evidence, and wanting to profit off of the movement.

In another Reddit thread, they stated “I did not post those accusations calling EF a SP which I don't believe he is…” After another user posted clear evidence, they backtracked and said “maybe I was drunk - or cross posted it but I don't remember creating the post…” and suggested they would have it “investigated by tech people.”

In a thread asking for an explanation on this, mod transcendent167 was accused of “playing dumb” because they claimed the deleted post recovery tool does not show usernames. Another user posted evidence that the tool does show usernames, while transcendent167’s screenshot appears to be from Reddit itself.

The other members of the mod team have not made any comment on this, and someone who posted information about the slander was banned (screenshot) from the subreddit.

Reddit admins are now involved

As stated above, the new team mentioned their involvement with Reddit admins over the weekend to get the new team installed and the subreddit open and running.

I’m not going to elaborate too much on why this is a bad thing as it’s been well-documented elsewhere. Suffice to say, Reddit has been notorious for censoring content for years, and recently has been warning users for upvoting content that purportedly violates their policies. Famously, “Luigi” is now a word that can get comments flagged.

Reddit admins are not unlike other tech company leaders who are participating in suppressing left-leaning activity on their websites. Of course, they would have been aware of a subreddit with a huge jump in popularity, but now we know they are directly involved in the moderation of /r/50501.

The subreddit’s new top moderator is two unknowns

As part of the new moderator restructuring, the top moderator of the subreddit is a new account which two people have access to. However, when someone asked who these people were, greenascanbe said “it’s two people that are in the OpSec team and are highly trusted individuals.” When asked what the OpSec team was, they said, “the lose group of local and sate organizers (National) have teams like Operational Security team, conflict resolution team, etc.” and said they would find out if these people were also mods of the subreddit on other accounts.

As of now, it appears that the two people who have control of the top mod account are not involved with the subreddit at all. Whether they are or aren’t, one of the mod team doesn’t know. It is unclear to me why one of the team members does not know who the other team members are. Edit: One of the mods has confirmed that “two security experts that aren't on the reddit mod team” have access to the account.

Photo by Chris F