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ACP has apparently commandeered r/AskSocialists
(old.reddit.com)
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 3: No sectarianism.
Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 5: No bigotry of any kind, including ironic bigotry.
Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 7: Do not individually target other instances' admins or moderators.
Rule 8: Do not post public figures, these should be posted to c/gossip
How does
let you do this? Just one mod gets froggy and suddenly the whole subreddit gets to be Hinkleland? I don't moderate any subreddits so this I actually don't know.
You can appeal to Reddit to take over a community if it "appears" a community is going "unmoderated". I have no idea what they do internally to identify a subreddit that is "unmoderated" but it would appear to be pretty easy to do, since it seems to happen pretty regularly.
They are supposed to look at mod activity, when they were last active, etc. If you mod a community and you haven't logged in for a while and/or there is rule breaking activity that gets to the admins before you get to it, they will give the sub to someone else if someone appeals for it. I was given control of the sub for a music festival in my city (against my wishes lol) when I complained about someone spamming porn and no one doing anything about it to the admins. I just wanted them to deal with it, and they did that by giving me the sub, even though I didn't ask for it.
So, in theory, if those mods weren't active for a few weeks (or they got banned), and someone did a bunch of rule breaking posts/comments, someone could have come in and requested control.
Sounds like something you could easily orchestrate with enough people. Monitor the sub you're interested in, use some burner accounts to fish for inactivity from the mods. Spin up accounts that create posts which break the rules and upvote those posts. Once there are enough posts in the sub, use a primary account to report all the posts to the admins and ping the admin team about the lack of moderation.
It has happened many times. I believe there are even bots for taking subreddits this way, as they rapidly move to remove other mods and add their "friends" (bots/alt accounts) as mods. Not even just political subs, but hobby subs, which is what I use Reddit for.