Drama! Men’s Rights Reddit threatened with shutdown after two of its mods are caught helping doxers

Earlier this week, as you may recall, Men’s Rights Redditors pretended they were shocked – shocked! – that anyone might think that MRAs had anything to do with the doxing and harassment of that red-haired Canadian activist we’ve been discussing. Couldn’t be them! Had to be … trolls!

Then on Wednesday the Men’s Rights Redditors found a blog post by a woman claiming to be a “conservative feminist” with a recently minted doctorate who was working in her alma mater’s admissions office — and, she claimed, rejecting out of hand all the applications that she thought were “dripping with white male privilege.”

If true, this would be an incredibly shitty and obviously discriminatory thing to do. Trouble is, it smells like a hoax.

But Men’s Rights Redditors were pig-biting mad nonetheless. Commenters attacked the possibly imaginary blogger as a “bitch,” a “twat,” a “skag,” and (yes) a “cunt.” “Can we just agree some people deserve to be put down?” a Redditor with the lovely name Blow-it-out-your-ass helpfully added.

And calls went up to … dig up all her personal information and try to get her fired. In other words, to dox the hell out of her.

Other Men’s Rights Redditors argued against doxing, but it was too late: A Men’s Rights Redditor by the name of HarlequinzEg0 had already gone a-doxing, digging up what he said was her personal information and posting some of it to the subreddit.

But there were a couple of little problems with this – blatant hypocricy, the fact that the blog might be fake, and the fact that HarlequinzEg0 was IDing the wrong woman. (See my post here for proof.)

Oh, there was one other problem: that Reddit has rules against doxing; the mods of the site’s assorted subreddits are supposed to report and ban doxers.

That’s not exactly what happened here. Yes, Men’s Rights mods did remove some posts with personal information in them.

But then a couple of the  mods, instead of  banning HarlequinzEg0, instead offered him and any other potential doxers advice on how to skirt the doxing ban – and still make sure that Men’s Rights Redditors could get  hold of all the juicy info the doxers were able to dig up.

Some of the incriminating comments are now gone, but happily for everyone I happened to screencap them when I first saw them appear. These aren’t formatted properly for this blog, but if you click on the image you’ll get a bigger version, and I suggest that you do read it. You’ll see both handsomemod and sillymod chiming in with advice on skirting the doxing ban in such a transparent manner that it would be obvious to anyone that it violates Reddit’s rules.

What happened next was kind of amazing. A site admin actually stepped in and banned both handsomemod and HarlequinzEg0, and issued a stern warning to sillymod that if this behavior continued the whole subreddit could be shut down.

The threat to ban the whole subreddit is almost certainly a hollow one, and intortus said nothing about the link to the doxing-obsessed site A Voice for Men in the Men’s Rights subreddit sidebar, but, hey, having Reddit call them on even a small fraction of their bullshit is something lovely to behold.  Head over to Reddit to watch this controversy as it continues to unfold.

There are several relevant threads in Againstmensrights, SRSMeta, and of course SubredditDrama. I’m sure there are many appalling things to be found within them.

As I finished this up, I saw that A Voice for Men has run a post identifying someone they think is the blogger. As I mentioned above, they’ve got the wrong person. More on A Voice for Men’s massive doxing incompetence here.