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Is Ghislaine Maxwell secretly one of the most powerful Redditors of all time? (inputmag.com)
76 points by chris_overseas on July 9, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments



There are about 10^10 Internet users, so if we think it's very unlikely that it's her (10^-6 chance compared to anyone), that gives a 10^-16 prior chance of being her.

Assuming that they post almost every day and miss a day every few months, the probability of missing a single day for a random user is probably around 10^-2, so if the account didn't post during her public activities for around 13 times, that gives a 10^26 Bayes factor and thus we can conclude it's her or someone intentionally trying to frame her with 1 - 10^-10 > 6 sigma equivalent certainty.

Obviously a more precise analysis is possible.


> her or someone intentionally trying to frame her

Or someone in her orbit/employ who has a radical change of lifestyle and priorities as a direct consequence of the arrest, or...

(Neither endorsing not challenging the basic analysis, just suggesting that one must enlarge the scope of “noncoincidental possibilities” besides Maxwell personally or a frame attempt.)



The entire sidebar of that is "Inciteful Link" awards. Is Reddit really rewarding users when they "incite"?


https://www.reddit.com/wiki/trophies

> Inciteful Link - Submit something worthwhile but provocative

I think it's a pun on "insightful". Reddit likes puns.


I'm kinda shocked the evidence lines up, but it still seems so incredibly improbable. Like why the hell would she have any motive at all to do this? And if it's really her, what difference would it make?


I can think of a trivial motive: Pastime.

Bill Gates loves to play Bridge, Warren Buffett enjoys playing Ukulele and Maxwell likes to spend time on Reddit.

But I agree, it makes no difference.


Certainly the dominating topic these days in certain parts of the net. My personal pro and con for this theory:

pro: The timings are conspicuous. This absence right now as well as that during an earlier known event (the chans found that). Also the aggressive way Reddit admins react to this aligns with similar happenings in the past that turned out true.

con: I just can't imagine her using an account so similar to he real name, and just browsing Reddit all day. Also the content isn't quite as suspicious as one might expect from such a person.


I read through the r/conspiracy threads yesterday and some people broke down the posts and they're basically your run of the mill left leaning redditor. Other than the couple 7yr old posts about the child porn and pedo stuff everything looked like a normal internet obsessed person. hard to explain that pedo stuff away tho, but also 7years ago and only a couple posts doesn't sound like the pattern of a mastermind pedo ring organizer that Maxwell is.

This just feels like a reaching for grapes moment especially so when the person's account has been active in the last 24hrs


Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This evidence seems weak at best.

I want to be charitable, but hard to imagine this is anything other than an incredible stretching to make a topic to generate lots of clicks/views.


the following comment is besides your point. I apologize in advance for this.

In my opinion, that first statement is very bad. What classifies an either claim or evidence as extraordinary?

The claim "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." itself is extraordinary and would be in dire need of something backing it up. Not extraordinary perhaps, but still.


Makes me curious what stylometric analysis would say.


She is British and this redditor doesn't write or spell like a Brit, not that this qualifies as analysis.


I meant take a corpus of her known writings and compare them to the redditor to see if they matched up.


Please tell me it's GallowBoob


it's a r/tech and r/worldnews mod named MaxwellHill.

the proof is paper thin IMO.


Yeah the articles states as much. I dont see this as newsworthy though? Would people be surprised if she also had a FB account? There are plenty of rich sleezy powerful/influential people with social media accounts.


The newsworthy part is the user in question has been a prolific submitter and moderator for a decade, not simply the existence of an account but the influence they've had over many subreddits for many years. The evidence is not conclusive that the reddit user is that person.


The newsworthiness is not that she would have a reddit account. It's that she would have one of the 10 most prolific reddit accounts.


Haha! My thoughts exactly


If I was /u/Maxwellhill, I'd just stop posting to troll all these people


> The conspiracy theory that Ghislaine Maxwell is an elite user of Reddit

Supposing the woman does have a reddit account, what makes that a "conspiracy"? Between whom is any conspiring happening? Is it also a conspiracy that I have a HN account?




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