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This part of the theory was always baffling. Why would a known socialite working to pull off a psyop use her real name?
I know at least two people in real life who (were they to use that handle) it would be kind of an “obviously it was them.”
It only seems obvious in retrospect. If true, that is (I’m inclined to believe it’s at least plausible).
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If it wasn't for her getting arrested, would anyone have ever made the connection? Rich powerful people are known for having massive egos and dangling random loose threads for no reason other than their own egotistical enjoyment.
We're dealing with an account that in a very short time period slightly before public knowledge of the arrest decided to go from posting all the time to not posting at all. Why?
And it's not death, the Worldnews moderation team insisted that maxwellhill is still alive and just not posting for ... unexplained reasons.
The mods posted a DM claiming he is active, but why a DM which is super easy to fake and not an actual public post which wouldn't be faked? If maxwellhill doesn't want people to know the account is still active then why do the DM and let fellow mods reveal it, if they don't mind providing proof they're not in prison then why not just post a comment?
They say he's just a random Mayalasian man who lives there too, but he seems to treat Maylasia as a country he just visits normally
Have you ever once talked about the country you live in as something you're "visiting"?
And they have a birthday right around the same time
Maxwell is Dec 25, MaxwellHill is past Dec 21.
So we have an account with a similar name, many similar interests, that just happens to be really busy and stop posting for years right before Maxwell got publically arrested who shares a similar birthday, refers to his home country as a place he visits, doesn't prove his existence for vague and completely irrational reasons.
If it's not Ghislaine Maxwell, it's a person (a long with the rest of the mods) trying really really hard to be as suspicious as possible and likely has insider information about what is happening to her in order to coordinate stopping posts right then. Because again they could just post a comment if the account was actually still active and not have to share easily faked DMs.
If it was Maxwell and the lynchpin of so many online conspiracy theories, why can’t the powers that be (which surely have access to Reddit or - at worst - Ghislaine’s recovery email) just log in as her and post something?
And besides, you again ignore the entire point. In one of the most expensive intelligence operations in modern history, the most banal, easiest, entry level bulk reposting of links (which would have been botted even back then) was supposedly manually done by a middle aged ultra-rich heiress who knew many of the most powerful people in the world and who was moonlighting as a Reddit powermod and farming karma by reposting (in 99.9% of cases) uncontroversial news stories, the kind of thing any third world teen on a gig work site would have done for $3 an hour and which, in the most sensitive cases, would have been done by 22 year old junior intelligence analysts on their first job.
“Sorry, Your Royal Highness, I’m going to have to interrupt our drinks so I can repost an article about an avalanche in Spain on Reddit for 500 karma because the huge intelligence operation I work for values me not for my contacts and charisma but because I can press submit on m.reddit.com several dozen times a day, a skill nobody else you have access to can do”?
The richest man in the world posts constantly. He liked it so much he bought the company so he could post more to his liking! Rich people do like posting. I don't think in a world where Elon and Ackman and Kevin Durant exist we can say "why would anyone shitpost if they had an otherwise busy life?"
Moreover, I've gone into this in more detail in the past, but Ghislaine could have used a powerful Reddit account to recruit teenage girls. In this case having her identity tied directly to the account (Maxwellhill) would have helped her credibility when she reached out.
Which would also explain why Reddit wants to bury the story rather than try to keep the account alive.
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Why'd they care?
Maybe she had an intern do that stuff, but used the account herself too for more important stuff, like influencing stuff as a powermod, no ?
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That's only evidence against her doing it mostly as part of an intelligence operation scheme, not evidence against her owning the account.
If some random Maylasian man is apparently capable of spending all day posting random articles for years and years, why couldn't Maxwell also be the type of person to do that? Rich and famous people are not immune to having normal idiosyncrasies like that.
It could have just been a normal account of hers just like it supposedly is a normal account of random Maylasian guy visiting his own country.
There's a shit ton of weird coincidences and connections, including the major evidence of "they suddenly stopped posting very shortly before public knowledge of Maxwell being arrested even came out" that all fall together to point to it being her account, and is disproven in an incredibly simple way that they refuse to do for no good reason, only resorting to an easy to fake roundabout method that doesn't make any good sense to do unless it's for the purpose of faking, and their official explanation contradicts prior comments by the very account in question.
https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-secret-reddit-account/
Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.
Even most of the time.
This article makes some really terrible arguments
Not relevant, he's supposed to be Malaysian. How many Malaysian men have the name Maxwell? That they're even trying to use American names and not Malaysian names as an argument is silly, does the author themselves not even believe the "actually they're just a random Maylasian guy!" defense?
Yep the posting correlating with "party times" was actually bad evidence, in part because anyone with a brain knows that scrolling social media on their phone is something plenty do at parties and public events anyway.
So one good actual point that doesn't disprove anything, just dismantles a not particularly strong claim.
The Malaysian man never cared about Malaysia, just US politics. Odd.
Donald Trump didn't even enter politics that much until 2015-2016. He was mostly just a rich celebrity business mogul. And if you know anything about elites, even the literal politicians, they tend to get along surprisingly well anyway. Maybe the writer has no concept of being friends with people of different political beliefs, but it's a common thing.
This is exactly the sort of nonsense I'm talking about! If they're perfectly willing to say "Oh my god the account is still active, just look at this private message" then why are they so unwilling to just make a real post?
What kind of person when providing evidence prefers the super easily faked one of a screenshot of an easily edited webpage over hard proof that the account is still active of just making a single post.
You literally have to believe that the moderators are too stupid to realize how ridiculous that is, and trust that none of them would ever lie to cover up their connections to a sex trafficker. It just doesn't make any sense, the entire thing is made even fishier by the hilariously terrible attempt to disprove it.
Yes, pedophiles would prefer to live in a world where they don't have to hide their pedophilia, even if they're rich and powerful and currently getting away with it.
"Large numbers of people" but can only name a single group, the Worldnews moderation team who is directly incentivized to lie, is making suspicious and contradictory claims already (like come on again, who "visits" a place they supposedly live?) and refuses to provide hard evidence that should be extremely easy to do if their claims were true and the account was still active, instead preferring easily faked and completely unable to be verified screenshots.
Ahahahaha, are you not on Twitter at all? There's a notorious guy with this exact gig, and tons of non-Americans are obsessed with our politics.
But he was pretty interested in global politics, not just American. /r/worldnews was his jam.
https://x.com/stillgray?lang=en
But at the end of the day you're approaching this backwards. Coincidences happen all the time. There's no substantial evidence it's her, and even if it were her, it doesn't even matter, right?
The Malaysia placename does check out btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Larut
I don't think you understand the argument here. If this were Ghislaine, what is she doing here saying derogatory stuff about Trump, her friend? About COVID? To what end? Also the posting went on until 2020, so I really do not understand what point you think you're making about Trump's political timeline.
The cited PM says the guy thinks this is all pretty funny. I would too, were I him. Or her.
Uh, you're asserting "can only name" but that's not actually true just because the author didn't provide an exhaustive list.
I trust the market: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7082/ghislaine-maxwell-confirmed-reddit-accout/
Man just skimming https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/comments/ shows it's very unlikely to be an elite socialite woman doing psyops on the internet. It definitely reads as someone who speaks pretty good Bri'ish Engrish as a 2nd language too, with slight verb, definite/indefinite article, and plural errors.
Examples:
So was Ghislaine trying extremely hard to consistently mimic the British English usage of a nonnative speaker spewing out median Reddit libtard views? Why?
I'm sorry if you read the comments from this account and think it's actually Ghislaine Maxwell instead of some Asian dude you have an incurable case of brain weasels. There's nothing but coincidences, tons of counterevidence, and it wouldn't even matter if true.
I'm not even gonna cover the rest of the nonsense, because this is especially interesting to me
This market resolution is not a question of "is the Reddit account Ghislaine Maxwell", it's a question of "Will it be confirmed Ghislaine Maxwell".
No, short of Ghislaine herself or another moderator admitting it, it's unlikely to get confirmed to be her account. That doesn't mean it's not her account, it just means "haha you don't have 100% definitive proof"
This is the best argument you've got and it's still literally not even useful. But it is an interesting way to abuse betting market predictions in a conversation.
I mean the best argument I got is you don't even have an argument.
You have a belief in an absolutely nonsensical theory, that is also pointless.
If the presently available evidence can't disabuse you of this notion, then in all likelihood you're never going to be disabused.
Betting markets have to have time limits or else things would never settle. It's also a tax on BS.
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Is there any indication that the reddit account was trying to bring about such a world?
Why are they incentivized to lie? If maxwellhill were really Ghislaine, they probably wouldn't know this. So what would have happened to the mods if they had not produced the evidence they have produced so far?
it would be impossible for them to produce evidence that the account is still active without making public posts
They could easily know that MaxwellHill is Ghislaine, associating with her wouldn't be seen as a big deal until the late 2010s.
If the account is active then it can make public posts! That's exactly the point, it's a totally active account that just won't post a public comment or thread for unspecified reasons. But rest assured, it's totally still active and doing mod duties.
There would be no reason for Ghislaine to violate opsec like this.
Regardless of the activity of the account, the other mods can't make it post publicly. That's my point.
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Maxwell hill is a location in Malaysia. The posters habits interests and grammar indicate either a British ex pat with connections to Malaysia, or a British educated Malaysian. That could be faked but the name is a Malaysian connection on its own.
Damn he must be really old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Larut
And what connection does he have to this random place anyway with a population of 2 in the country he lives in but also visits? Is he a major head of the local tourism committee or run the place? Weird how someone like that would be so interested in US politics and never anything local to them.
Seems more like they just Google around trying to find some alternative explanation, learn that there's a random place in Malaysia that was once called Maxwell Hill 40 years ago and go "hell yeah let's say the account lives in Malaysia" and that's why there's a weird contradiction with it visiting the place they supposedly live in.
British ex-pats (of which I am one) and some wealthy Malaysian British educated people STILL call it Maxwell Hill to this day. I've been there, which is how I know. I wasn't stationed in Malaysia but it was close enough I've visited (and hung out with said British ex pat community myself). That's not impossible to find out of course, so doesn't prove anything.
But you know him being a retired or semi retired ex-pat of an age close to my own is also not impossible. People born before 1979 do exist here. Indeed to blow your mind. I was born before the moon landing in 1969! I've been on the internet since it was Usenet and Muds.
Its not impossible Maxwell picked maxwell hill as part of her name and the house she grew up in, found out that it was also a place in Malaysia and was still called that by some people based her character on that, dropping hints over time she was Malaysian connected (remember though the Malaysian connection is based in part on posts by maxwellhill), not just a post hoc discovery, so it would probably have to be a deliberate choice by her.
It's not proof. But reading the maxwellhill posts it's either a British educated person with good knowledge of Malaysian ex pat/Brit educated communities or a very good imitation. For me its enough to suggest the Ghislaine connection is less likely. YMMV.
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She made the account in 2006. It has her last name but connecting that would be tenuous without knowing a lot about her. Her name also isn't the meat of the allegations. It's that a weird, politically active and well-connected account had repeated lapses in activity that could be tagged to events in the life of a similarly weird, well-connected woman, the activity halting completely when that woman was arrested.
Also sounds more like a stalker who followed her during periods of activity and went inactive when she was inactive? There's a lot of crazy people out there, someone obsessed with Ghislaine Maxwell who persuaded themselves into a fantasy life version of her (see the movie Single White Female for a fictional version of this) isn't the most implausible thing.
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We are talking about an immensely wealthy and connected woman, who according to this allegation was personally spending hours each day manually reposting links across Reddit to farm karma. This while being a socialite and running an ocean conservation foundation and falling in love (twice) with younger men and staying close to her family and doing various other things - including hanging out with Epstein.
Yes, it is implausible. If it was a Mossad or other intelligence operation she (a socialite who knew many powerful people, the ‘face’) wouldn’t be anywhere near the online cyber-ops people running online influence operations. Many people knew her during the relevant period, has anybody remarked that she was on Reddit every 5 minutes? Would Mossad have her set up her account under her real last name? It’s not tenuous at all, even if it’s so stupid as to be so ridiculous that it wouldn’t arouse suspicion (which of course it did anyway) there would be no reason to do it.
All of which is to say that if she was behind the account (which I consider extremely unlikely but not impossible) it was not an intelligence operation but a weird hobby for a middle aged woman. The linked post discussing the sharing of links about case-related things is also extremely disingenuous given how prolific a poster the account was.
To continue her work in the giant psy-op that is reddit. This isn't a trivial affair. Reddit a bastion of progressivism and a key component in their narrative machine.
For my money, I don't view Epstein as a Mossad op. I view it as a joint operation between multiple countries' intelligence services where they each found benefit.
You continue holding the idea of these people behaving in predefined ways. They don't. You think they wouldn't use an account with their own last name. Yeah, they would. I wouldn't even say it for the tin foil "Triple bluff." No, they just don't actually think about these things. Opsec is often comically bad, it just sort of works out anyway because nobody gives a shit and people are actually really good at keeping their mouths shut. Though for what it's worth, what you are describing is in fact perfect opsec, because you've convinced yourself it couldn't possibly be her.
It was. Your priors are wrong, probability has her dead to rights.
So. The patterns suggestive to internet sleuths that account was hers is due to "comically bad" opsec, which enable the sleuths to make the connection. Whereas simultaneously, all the other contradictory patterns (rest of accounts post history) suggestive of coincidence is "perfect opsec", and can be dismissed.
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Eh, if that post is the meat of the allegations, I would quite strongly lean towards it being a coincidence.
The evidence seems to boil down to:
Alignment of gaps in posting with two big events in Ghislaine Maxwell's life. Just two events? Surely a person this public and active will have had more than two known events during which they could not have been on Reddit. Did the internet sleuths check for that? Why no mention? Seems like the potential for cherry-picking is great.
The reddit user posted pro-pedophilia dogwhistles. Pedophilia absolutely mindkills normies, so it's not surprising they overindex on this (and preferring world models in which your enemies are a small number of individuals with many aliases is a curiously universal tendency: see the standard 4chan argument where all the disagreeing posts in a thread are insinuated to be by the same person, or more recently organised as a raid by some discord), but this in isolation is actually a fairy weak Bayesian signal considering that Reddit powermods are a famously degenerate bunch. Also, wasn't the narrative about Ghislaine Maxwell that she looked more like a case of someone who would (for whatever reason) do anything for Epstein, than like a proactive pedophile?
The username.
The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after the Reddit user started being dogpiled on the suspicion of being Ghislaine Maxwell; it is plausible enough that the Reddit user abandoned their account from the pressure (I imagine they were getting smothered in loads of hatemail, and there were probably some e-bloodhounds on the case who would have gotten to their personal email, phone number, address etc.).
Against this, we have:
The low base probability.
The extra low base probability that an active, put-together socialite would have the time and motivation to be a Reddit powermod. Again, Reddit mods are a famously low-human-capital bunch; is the amount of energy the job takes even compatible with normal functioning?
The Reddit user, per the screenshots in your post, seems to have primarily posted tech and privacy activism news. This alone codes so heavily male that, if I saw it on some aggregator blog being linked from HN with a female name attached, I would pull the "I bet this person is a transwoman" card. (Fun game to play with tech blogs.) Am I supposed to believe that, on top of being a rich socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell also was a one-in-a-million unicorn nerd girl with male self-actualization patterns who is into privacy and free speech rights?
All the other evidence that one would expect to be found under such a level of scrutiny but is conspicuously absent. Did the Reddit user ever insinuate insider knowledge of finance or high society, which Maxwell would have had? Reddit's status economy places a high value on "I have this uncle who has real insider information so let me explain to you plebs". Would the powermod have foregone this opportunity? What about the absolute standard things OSINTers do such as trying to infer time zones from posting patterns? Are we to believe that Maxwell had perfect opsec about this while being so conspicuously trash about other things?
In the end, "Epstein's manic pixie also secretly controlled Reddit and used it to spread hypnotic pedo propaganda" seems too much like the sort of appealing but unrealistic narrative that people with main character syndrome would fall for (like, "everyone's political archenemy once slighted me by deleting my edgy post on /r/offmychest; this is personal"), plus the QAnon tendency of yearning for the legible tropes of cartoon villains, and then confirmation bias would do the rest.
It did not. maxwellhill's last post was June 30, 2020. Maxwell was arrested July 2, 2020. I would wonder if claims of harassment preceding maxwellhill's disappearance were propagated from the mods who claimed they were still active in modmail when, obviously, they weren't.
"Coincidence" has no explanatory power. "Reddit-type" is just wrong. If the account were made in 2014 it might, the account was made in 2006. This indicates a different category of person. It indicates someone very savvy in tech, which Maxwell is. The probability also isn't low. Bayes favors Ghislaine. The name is one bit of information, her lapses in activity is two, or four. It's true these examples could be cherry-picked, but the question isn't only how much the stopping coinciding with her arrest increases her probability, but how much it decreases the probability of it being someone else.
For Ghislaine herself, assuming the number of all users on reddit in 2020, which best I can tell was 600 million, the probability difference ranges from being >5 million times more likely to >150 million times more likely. The lack of probability for the others says enough. But we're not looking at everybody, we're looking at a specific subset of all people who stopped using reddit. For the definition of the power-user, the most probable explanation is an involuntary stop. That means death or incarceration. If it's incarceration, it's Ghislaine. If it's death, then we consider the probable causes for death for a user who posted every single day then abruptly and completely stopped. That's an instant death. Heart attack, blood clot, accident, manslaughter, homicide, suicide. That would narrow it to deaths on June 30 and July 1, but let's say we expand it out to a week, just because. That's 5500 people.
The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero. We can round way up and say it's exactly one person. Ghislaine, or Rando, and with two options, their probability sums to 1. What's the probability Rando would be savvy enough to register an account in 2006? Probably high, given their acumen. What's the probability vs Ghislaine they would name themselves "maxwellhill?" Let's say indeterminate. What's the probability they would show similar interests? Again, probably high. What's the probability they would also have prior lapses in activity that could be tied to specific outings? Very low.
It's not 50/50, but even if it were, it's Ghislaine. It's 90/10 her favor. We rounded up so realistically it's 99/1. Super-realistically it's 100/0, which I know you can't actually say under Bayes. Fortunately in this little area of reality, we can say. It was her.
Ahahahahahahahahahaha.
Bayes doesn't work if you don't accurately evaluate the evidence.
Would mark as "bad."
Everything following "The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero" is charity extended to my interlocutor. With sub-1% chance of death and sub-1% chance of a voluntary stop, the probability of it being Ghislaine Maxwell is already over 90%.What's the probability alone of someone incorporating a bit of personal information into their reddit username? 5%? How's it change when our options for maxwellhill are Ghislaine Maxwell and person who probably doesn't exist?
This is not how evaluating coincidences should work.
https://www.econlib.org/just-a-coincidence
What are the chances that out of 8 billion plus people in the world, it's you and me right now debating this? Astronomical really.
Someone with a massive public profile doing shady shit would have -10000% probability to put their last name as their Reddit handle where they were a power user and top mod.
It's far more plausible it's just a coincidence, unless there is strong evidence to even consider this hypothesis at all. (There isn't, which is why your merely privileging the hypothesis.)
See also: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-secret-reddit-account/
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