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I don't buy this. Sure this might be part of the censorship of obscene topics, but it doesn't really have anything to do with their political activism. You have to remember that the original and still-CEO of Reddit is a deranged trump hater, went on a personal crusade to smear conservatives, and even went as far as editing other people's posts.
I don't think that's too inconsistent, I think the strain of techno-libertarianism that defined the internet of the '00s was adjacent enough to progressivism for most of those people to end up with rabid TDS in the late '10s to '20s. Seems like very very few of the old school techies did not fall into this... ESR, DHH, a few others. Notably, the people who run nearlyfreespeech.net, a web host who pride themselves on their willingness to host anything that is legal to host in the United States (a very '00s internet attitude), including literal swastika-wielding nazis, now have a blog full of various progressivisms that give me the feeling that the only reason they continue to have a permissive content policy is because they understand that changing it would utterly destroy the value of their service.
Total side note that has nothing to do with this but I used to moderate a subreddit (I know, boo, hiss) and one year, Reddit hosted some events for moderators to get together and meet various Reddit employees, and Spez showed up to the one that I went to. I'm not sure how wealthy he was at the time but going by current net worth he would be the wealthiest person, and only billionaire, I have ever been face to face with. I think this would have been before the scandal where he was hand-editing comments.
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