I'm going to write this for anyone who doesn't know about the Anti-Evil Operations. I've written about it before but there's not always a context where other people are going to give a shit.
In my perspective trying to understand it as a moderator, it's some of the most underhanded bullshit ever, and was absolutely designed to create a chilling effect, not directly on users but through the site's army of volunteer subreddit moderators not wanting their subreddits to get in trouble.
This particular story –
/r/ModeratePolitics putting an explicit moratorium on the entire trans topic – is just the tip of the iceberg, because more restrictions like this are happening across the website that nobody bothers to openly tell you about in this way. Be thankful their mods did this courtesy.
So, if you don't know how moderating on this site works, whenever a subreddit mod does anything, it shows up in your sub's "moderation log" page. It notes things like "Hheaut removed this post at this time," or "Hheaut stickied this post at this time," etc.
At some point recently — maybe, like, a year ago? — everybody started noticing logs credited not to a user, but just to the term "Anti-Evil Operations." I don't remember any kind of notification to us indicating they were starting a program like this, what it means, or how it works. It just started showing up in the log one day. There's also no indication of what it means on the log page itself. I had to google "reddit what is anti-evil operations," and what I found wasn't any kind of official explanation, but forum posts made by other moderators asking the same question and having other mods explain it. The admins didn't do shit. I also didn't even notice this was happening until months after it started, because I wasn't frequently looking through our modlogs (why would I be?).
When reddit's own content moderation team makes a removal, they push the notification to your team's logs to let you know that it happened, i.e. to let you know you're not doing a good enough job picking up your users' shit in the most unclear and passive-aggressive way they could think of (why not send an automated message saying "Our team removed
this post from your community, this is a problem, here are the implications of this"?). A significant number of AEO removals in your log is thus a bad look for you, because it implies you're not moderating properly and therefore justifies action being taken against you or your community for that exact reason.
How many AEO removals is too many? I don't know. How do you know which things to remove, in order to not accidentally leave something the AEO team will later deem worthy of removal? No fucking idea. I've tried to find some kind of clear policy. I'm yet unaware of one. The AEO removals don't even contain any kind of information, so you have to look at the content it removed and make your best guess about what rule was broken. I don't know what we're supposed to do in the case where the user deletes their comment afterwards, meaning we get an AEO strike for something I can't even see.
In one case we got an AEO removal for a user whose comment was mostly normal arguing about stuff but then at the end called another user "you inferior dog." I assume that was the issue, because I couldn't see anything else remotely off-colour. I saw another comment removed seemingly for saying "go shove a broomstick up your ass." In a few cases, it looked like a comment was removed just for calling another user a retard. What can I do other than assume this means all of these things break the reddit site rules? That must be what it means, right? Because they were apparently significant enough offenses to trigger the Anti-Evil Operations team, and thus give our subreddit an implicit AEO-removal strike.
And the subreddit mods don't want to mess around, because they're afraid of punishment, because of how reddit has acted in the past about these issues. They go 0 to 100, and they're list-takers. Last year, they dropped a huge ban-wave that removed literally thousands of subreddits in an instant. There's no warning, no second chances, in most cases they don't even bother offering any specific reason, because why would they have to? Just slap a default "broke our rules" sticker on it and you're good. There were a lot of confused mods asking why their subs were removed, but good luck getting anyone to care about your story when you aren't being singled out, but are just one subreddit in a story about thousands of subreddits being deleted.
So what happens? There's a huge lack of communication and clarity, yet we're threatened with scorched-earth deletion. All content on your subreddit is gone if they ban it. So as could be expected, mods err on the side of caution, because not doing so
could, maybe, potentially, mean their community will be part of the next ban-wave. You don't want to be on reddit's list of places they plan on removing in the next wave, do you? But we don't know what to remove, so we remove everything that could, maybe, somehow be a problem.
The reddit automoderator tool can be given a list of words to filter. We started jamming it with every word we could think of that might be a problem. What words are problematic? I found myself googling lists of things people consider slurs, and sometimes it's not clear. There's a handful that are obvious, but some are uncommon and people disagree about their slur status. I didn't think "mulatto" is a slur, but some people have argued it is, and back in 2019 multiple news outlets called IBM racist for the term being used on one of their internal forms (as an option for people to self-identify as). So who knows? I also learned about slurs I'd never even heard of before while doing this
(As an aside, given every definition of "slur" I can find
anywhere, it's not clear to me why "Karen" does not qualify, but there's literally a hate-sub called
/r/FuckYouKaren that's big enough to hit
/r/all and the admins don't seem intent on doing anything about, so apparently that gets a pass, and we didn't end up including it.)
We added a message that tells the user something they wrote triggered a removal, but by default there's no indication this is happening, and since the automod configuration is private there's no way to know how many filters there are across reddit that the mods didn't create a notification for.
This is an extension of a more general problem on this website, which is how much of its censorship is invisible. There is no indication to you that your comments are removed if a mod removes them. They just stop being visible to other users; from your side, it looks the same. And your comments are still visible
on your user page, meaning if you log out to check if your comments are visible, you have to manually click each comment to see if it's visible inside the subreddit; there's no easy way (without using an outside tool or website) to just scroll through your own content and see how much of it has been removed. How many people are ever going to bother?
The only time you get a notification is if you're given an explicit ban, but it's easy to shadowban people by writing an automod rule "if post is by [username], remove the comment," which is effectively the same as a ban, except the person is given no indication it's happening, and you can put as many names on the list as you want.
By the way, it's possible for reddit to delete your account and not give any indication if somebody tries to go to your user page. It won't say "account was banned" or whatever. It will display as though your username simply doesn't exist. In general what I've learned is you can never assume the company is consistent in any way.
I don't know how to wrap this up, but there you go. This whole situation sucks for both mods and users.
