This is one of these things that demonstrate how some people become wrapped up in their very small world and forget that most of us don’t know the ins and outs.
Can you summarise what all this hullabaloo is about?
For context, in case you know nothing at all about reddit: a subreddit is like a subforum here (say, "Social Issues & Current Events"), except that rather everything being under the same management, anybody can start a sub about anything, and can appoint whoever they want as moderators. Subreddits are known by the name r/[whatever]. Above the moderators are the admins, who are employed by reddit and who have site-wide powers. Threads on reddit are similar to threads on a forum like this, expect that the OP is often a link to an external source, like a picture or an article, rather than text.
A mod of r/UKPolitics was banned for posting an article which referred, in passing in a single sentence, to a woman named Aimee Challenor, who had been a politician for both the Green Party and the Lib Dems. She had been hired by reddit as an admin, and reddit has anti-doxxing policies, although the article made no mention of her in relation to reddit or to the scandals that I'll outline below. According to reddit, they had apparently set up an algorithm to ban people who doxxed their admins, and it had been made too over-zealous - especially WRT to this particular admin who had been on the receiving end of harassment. This was deemed suspicious because it took several hours between the posting of the article and the ban (although apparently this is because the algorithm didn't search the article itself, but the text of the article when it was posted in a comment later), and because many comments mentioning the article had been edited by hand by admins.
In response, UKPolitics set itself to private (which disallows anybody without specific permission from viewing the sub, and everybody other than mods from posting in the sub) with a short notice saying that a mod had been banned by the admins, that because of the nature of what they'd been banned for they couldn't give details without themselves being banned, and that they were working out how to proceed.
The sub r/OutOfTheLoop is for people to explain some trend or situation to whoever starts a thread. A thread was started with a title along the lines of "why is r/UKPolitics private?" Replies at first were being careful to talk around the situation, but it wasn't long before the Streisand Effect kicked in and people took on a "can't ban everybody" kind of attitude. Her name started to be posted everywhere, and copycat threads cropped up everywhere, some trying to be a little bit coy (for example, one thread in r/AskReddit was "What is the Streisand Effect?"), some posting her name and her picture and calling for her firing. In amongst all of this, details of *why* she should be fired were also being spread.
So why the calls for her to be fired? She has a history of supporting, enabling, and associating with paedophiles. The most egregious example is her father. He is currently serving 22 years in prison for raping and torturing a 10 year old girl. He tied her up in their attic, whipped her, attached clamps to her in order to electrocute her, and raped her repeatedly. When he had been arrested and charged but not yet convicted, Challenor hired him as her campaign manager for the Green Party, falsifying his name on official documents. When this was discovered, the party kicked her out. She claimed a) that she hadn't known the extent of her father's crimes (although she hasn't said what she thought he had done), and b) that it was her choice to leave because of transphobia within the party.
She joined the Lib Dems, but was again kicked out when her husband made a series of tweets in which he talked about how he fantasised about having sex with children, or watching children have sex - either with each other or with adults. Challenor claimed that his account had been hacked (although there are similar posts from him on fetish forums they both frequent) and, again, that it was her choice to leave the party because of the transphobia she had experienced.
It all gets rather messy with how people reacted to this information. Some people did indeed use it as a platform for transphobia. In amongst all this there was considerable data about the fetishes that she has (adult diaper play, furry, etc.). Some people reacted by painting such fetishes as inherently wrong, some were more accepting, and some even saw her as a victim - at least some of her fetishes are the same as her father's (he was wearing a nappy and dressed as a little girl when raping the little girl), which seems unlikely to be a coincidence - leading some to see her in a more favourable light as a victim of her circumstances. WRT that latter it was also noted that her much older husband had been involved with her, and sexualising her since she was 14. There were also unsubstantiated and likely untrue allegations around Challenor, such as that when her father was arrested she made a Facebook post calling the victim a "lying whore". It's also been alleged that there's no way that Challenor could have been unaware of her father's crimes, as she lived with him at the time, and the house in question was small, with the crimes taking place directly above her bedroom. It's certainly true that she lived with him at the time, but I've seen nothing to substantiate that she was home at the time. It's perhaps also relevant to note that her mother, while seemingly not involved in the actual acts in question, did cover for her father during the police investigation.
But, whatever anybody's reaction to the details was, basically everybody agreed - this person should not be an admin at reddit, particularly because there are subs aimed at young and vulnerable people which, being an admin, she would have a degree of power over.
The main response was the moderators of various subs setting them to private in protest. This is something that has happened on reddit before, and has been effective before. If the largest subs go private, then site-wide traffic slows, and reddit doesn't get as much advertising money. Furthermore, such a protest inevitably gets negative press attention of a kind that reddit has traditionally reacted to in the past.
Challenor was fired and reddit boss spez issued a statement that she hadn't been vetted properly - an excuse that seems implausible since the scandals surrounding Challenor are the first hits to come up when putting her name into google, and are featured prominently on her Wikipedia page. It's worth bearing in mind that reddit has traditionally had a paedophile problem - r/jailbait was once the second biggest sub on the site, and it was only banned after a slew of negative press. In addition, a single admin was singled out as being the source of the problem and just that one admin being fired. There is a semi-credible rumour that Ghislaine Maxwell was a powermod (i.e. someone with a lot of power who moderates lots of subs). And so on. So reddit doesn't really get the benefit of the doubt on this one, and has only added to its reputation as being a safehaven for paedophiles.
The situation continued with the mod nekosune who, it transpired, was in a polyamorous relationship with Challenor's husband. People were particularly concerned about her, because she was the moderator of a lot of subreddits aimed at young and vulnerable people which, obviously, would give a predator opportunities to groom people. She deleted her account, but there are credible reports that she simply switched to an alt, even transferring mod powers to herself in some subs.
And that's it in a very large nutshell.
To me it seems more like industrial action than anything else. Reddit generates money from its subreddits. Those subreddits, when finding something they disagreed with, came together and withdrew their "labour" in order to financially impact reddit. Reddit responded. It doesn't quite match up because the mods are not employees, but in all other respects it resembles a strike.
