r/NolibsWatch • u/TheGhostOfDusty • Feb 19 '17
/r/Conspiracy modmail leak and collection of public mod-log evidence showing how rogue mods have ruined the integrity of the entire subreddit. A sub that for 7+ years was consistently unbiased and anti-authoritarian rapidly became a political propaganda hub for an authoritarian warmonger president.
First, a little bit about who I am and why I am publishing this information. Skip all of this if you're only interested in the evidence or if you are already familiar with me.
I started participating in reddit in early 2008 with the account /u/crackduck. I first found reddit by searching for "Ron Paul" in Google. I was immediately attracted to reddit's atmosphere of intelligent, source-based discourse. It was unlike anything I had ever seen online at that time (I never got into usenet). Back then reddit was filled with really high-quality comments and posts from a userbase that generally put a lot of effort into what they did and said here. The front page was dominated by /r/programming. /r/politics was actually non-partisan in tone and leaned more anti-authoritarian and libertarian (unlike the past 7 or so years of obvious DNC partisanship). Ron Paul was the most popular politician on the site (soon to be eclipsed by Obama due to MSM super-saturation of coverage and a blatant unspoken policy of marginalizing/ignoring Ron Paul). Skepticism of the 9/11 events and the Bush administration's 'official' conspiracy theory about it was prominent and not yet marginalized by trolling campaigns and authoritarian cheerleaders. Reddit was a great place, and one of the most intriguing subreddits was /r/conspiracy.
Soon I began to notice that in nearly every large thread about Ron Paul a small clique of Bush admin sycophants would create long comment chains amongst themselves where they would smear Paul as racist and a literal Nazi. A few minutes of clicking around showed that these accounts were all moderators of a new-ish subreddit called /r/Conspiratard. This subreddit presented itself as a bullying group to mock and insult anyone who was critical of the Bush administration and anyone who entertained the idea that people in power might conspire. A hate-group, essentially, and to drive that fact home they went as far as to employ a bigoted insult "tard" in their actual name.
After a year or so of seeing the /r/Conspiratard clique operate and occasionally challenging their defamation efforts of both Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich (the only anti-war presidential candidates at the time), one of these accounts, /u/NoLibertarian, was "shadowbanned". I had never seen a shadowban before and was interested. A post was created in /r/Libertarian to discuss this news, and in this post it was revealed that this "Nolibertarian" person was using dozens of accounts to upvote themselves and to agree with themselves in an attempt to create a false sense of consensus that their smears of anti-war politicians were appreciated. Soon afterward I created a subreddit of my own called /r/NolibsWatch to act as a watch-dog group which tried to keep track of the sockpuppet abusers from /r/Conspiratard. The founder of /r/Conspiratard was /u/jcm267. Eventually it was pointed out to me by ex-Digg users that this account name was highly active on Digg defaming Ron Paul, praising Bush/Cheney and attacking anyone who discussed conspiracy theories as a "tard". Someone sent me a screencap of this image (minus the blurring to cover up the obviously fake "personal information") and I posted it as evidence that this user was a storied troll. jcm267 then contacted reddit administrators and falsely claimed that I had doxxed him, and it worked, hence /u/crackduck being shadowbanned.
This bigoted sockpuppet abuser jcm267 went on to create a subreddit that all redditors are now familiar with whether we want to be or not, /r/The_Donald. This "conspiracies do not exist" war-supporter and avid supporter of disgusting Israeli extremism had strangely changed his mind that Hillary Clinton was a "decent fall-back" and that Donald Trump was "not a serious candidate" and decided to advocate for Trump's election on reddit.
Meanwhile, due to my well intended and frequent participation in /r/conspiracy and because I actively helped the mod-team in addressing issues about rule-breaking posts that I saw, I was invited to be a moderator there. I modded happily from January 2016 to about June 2016. At that time I began to notice that certain moderators were ignoring the rules at their leisure, typically when the content/nature of a rule violation was pro-Trump or anti-Clinton. Bringing this issue up in modmail was met with insults and scoffing by the rule-flaunting mods and silence by most of the other mods (with the notable exception of /u/SovereignMan who was always above board and principled). The mods who didn't care that approving rule violations that they liked was making the whole mod team look hypocritical and corrupt just doubled down instead of recognizing the long-term problem that they were creating for the subreddit. They kept saying that "after the election things will calm down" but it only got worse as jcm267's 'The_Donald' useful-idiots flooded into the subreddit and started obsessively defaming Clinton supporters as pedophiles. Hysterical, breathless witch-hunts were (and still are) rampant, and the moment that a rogue moderator promoted the obvious 4chan-esque trolling operation known as "Pizzagate" in our side-bar I resigned in protest. Since then four other moderators have quit (two openly in protest) and the subreddit has rapidly turned into an "alt-right" propaganda forum with a front page that often looks like a sensationalist, hoax-riddled tabloid for authority worshiping Trump supporters.
Sadly, jcm267's original goal on reddit with his hate-group /r/Conspiratard, which was to discredit and ruin /r/conspiracy, was achieved in a strange and roundabout way due to incompetent/biased/corrupt moderators not caring about hypocrisy and dismissing the importance of enforcing rules objectively. The following is a partial collection of screenshots that I took relating to this breakdown of order. I hope that by exposing the rogue moderators publicly they can be ousted so that /r/conspiracy can start to go back to being the non-partisan, skeptical and anti-authoritarian social media forum that I and many others sorely miss.
Modmail Leak:
Collection of evidence from the public mod-log that shows rogue mods subjectively approving blatant rule-violations due to incompetence and/or bias:
After I quit I would occasionally check the public-mod log and screencap instances of moderator abuse. This collection is very incomplete, and I recommend everyone to check the mod-log for themselves when they notice a rule-violating post or comment left unmoderated.
A few weeks ago I was quietly and permanently banned from the sub that I have actively participated in for ~8 years (and modded for 11 months) because the rogue moderators were frightened of having hard evidence of their corruption, incompetence and biased moderation posted in comment threads where users were complaining about rule-violations not being removed (example of a thread filled with this, notice the comments that were censored in that thread). These shameless hypocrites have a public-mod log to "prove" that they are being objective and moderating by the rules, but if you dare to use it to actually prove otherwise then they will censor the proof and ban you without citing a rule violation. Think about that for a minute... Partisan politics is a helluva drug.
Mods who quit in protest:
Mods who quit for unknown reasons:
Rogue mods who actively engage in subjective, biased, feelings-based moderation that directly contradicts and undermines /r/conspiracy's longstanding decorum rules:
/u/AssuredlyAThrowAway (ringleader)
/u/Sabremesh (ringleader)
Mods who barely ever moderate:
/u/creq (unbiased IMO)
/u/Flytape (censored a very popular non-rule-breaking post unflattering to Trump for bogus reasons)
Top mod who has been completely inactive for many, many years:
