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Notes -
Did anything come of /u/MaxwellHill?
For those unfamiliar, /u/MaxwellHill is a Reddit account that moderated a bunch of big subreddits and posted a lot, many of their posts being highly upvoted and widely seen. In short, it was very influential on Reddit. When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, the account suddenly stopped posting (and it hasn't posted since). Some people noticed this, and, speculating that Maxwell herself was behind the account, started looking through its posts. They found some more circumstantial evidence, like a mix of British and American English (Maxwell moved between the two countries), and breaks in posting lasting a few days at a time that lined up with major events in Maxwell's life, during which she would have been distracted or busy. There's much more to it than this; you can read a summary here.
The little media coverage it received at the time was of course entirely dismissive; see for example the article in Vice.
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories – I think Epstein may well have killed himself, for example – but this one aroused my suspicion at the time, and it's strange how it suddenly fizzled out. The Vice article above mentions private messages exchanged between /u/MaxwellHill and some other moderators (there are screenshots out there, but those are trivial to fake), but if the person behind the account was still there, why did they stop posting, and why haven't they started again after over two years?
If it was Maxwell, why didn't she give the password to someone to make a post and remove any suspicion? "Hi, I'm still here and I'm not Ghislaine Maxwell, but I'm going to abandon this account because of all the harassment I've been receiving." (Whether there was any harassment is irrelevant.) Would she have been prevented from doing this? I assume she was able to communicate with her lawyer, at least.
At the time, it was speculated that Reddit wanted to cover this up, as it would be embarrassing if it was revealed that one of their most influential users was an international child trafficker. Why didn't they just take control of the account and post something? Surely the admins can do this. Or just edit the database manually, as /u/spez infamously did. To me it seems like they wanted to sweep it under the carpet, and they thought any activity would just bring more attention. If this was their strategy, it appears to have worked.
I think it was her too. Too many coincidences.
This talk of councidences reminds me of my second-most favorite niche conspiracy theory: “Ghislaine Maxwell killed Aaron Swartz.”
Ms. Maxwell’s dad Robert made a huge part of his significant wealth by monetizing academic publishing. “Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.” Her Lichtensteinian trust fund is probably partly funded by remaining interests in those businesses even after they changed hands before Bob’s death.
Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz famously committed suicide when facing criminal charges for trying to free academic publishing from the profit motive through piracy. “On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.”
Trying to destroy someone’s family legacy and powerbase is a pretty classic motive for murder. Both /u/AaronSW and /u/MaxwellHill are pretty thoroughly archived, so it would be trivial to see what public interactions they had, if any… or any pattern of MH removing replies to AS. Unfortunately, I don’t have the programming experience to code something up to compare their post histories and where they intersected.
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