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Who is Aimee Challenor? Reddit cuts ties with UK politician after subreddits go private in protest

Hundreds of Reddit groups have gone private in protest of censorship and hiring an employee

Reddit has cut ties with former UK politician Aimee Challenor, an admin who became the center of protests on the internet forum. The company released a statement, saying it has cut ties with Challenor. Many popular subreddits had gone private to protest Reddit employing controversial politician Aimee Challenor. Hundreds of subreddits, including r/music, r/historymemes, r/iphone, and more, have set their status to private in protest against ‘censorship’.

CEO Steve Huffman confirmed that “the employee in question is no longer employed by Reddit”. The statement also noted that the company failed to “vet” the employee’s background before “formally hiring her.” “We care deeply for Reddit and appreciate that you do too. We understand the anger and confusion about these issues and their bigger implications. The employee is no longer with Reddit, and we’ll be evolving a number of relevant internal policies,” Huffman added. Following the Reddit action against Challenor, many subreddits set their status back to 'public'.

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Read the full statement here: 

“We would like to give you all an update on the recent issues that have transpired concerning a specific Reddit employee, as well as provide you with context into actions that we took to prevent doxxing and harassment. As of today, the employee in question is no longer employed by Reddit. We built a relationship with her first as a mod and then through her contractor work on [Reddit Public Access Network]. We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her,” wrote Huffman. “Debate and criticism have always been and always will be central to conversation on Reddit—including discussion about public figures and Reddit itself—as long as they are not used as vehicles for harassment. Mentioning a public figure’s name should not get you banned.”

The controversy erupted when a moderator from r/UKPolitics was banned from the platform for sharing an article that briefly discussed Aimee Challenor, who was hired by the company recently. After facing a lot of backlash from a plethora of social media users, Reddit reversed the ban and released a statement, saying it “activated standard processes to protect the employee from harassment.”

Before going into specifics, let’s take a look at why Reddit moderators wanted Aimee out of the company.

Who is Aimee Challenor and why Reddit moderators want her out? 

Born on October 1, 1997, Aimee Challenor is a British transgender activist and former spokesperson and electoral candidate for the Green Party. She joined the Green Party in November 2014 and was the chair of LGBTIQA+ Greens (LGBT, plus intersex, queer, asexual, and other) between 2015 and 2017. However, her political career started to go downhill when her father, David Challenor, was sentenced was convicted and jailed for raping and torturing a 10-year-old girl.

According to an independent investigation, it was found that Challenor committed a “serious error of judgment” and posed a “major safeguarding risk” for two years while her father was working with the party. The report also suggested that Challenor only alerted two people from the party by sending a “brief and informal” message on Facebook in 2016. Shockingly, she did not ask them to take action on her father.

Meanwhile, Redditors have always been vocal about a variety of topics. As soon as they got to know about the ban, they quickly took a stand and made their groups private. Whenever a user tries to click on one of these subreddits, they receive a message from u/blank-cheque outlining why the group has been made private.

The moderators claim that they decided to go private because “one of Reddit’s new employees (Aimee) is a close associate of child rapists & pedophiles” and the moderators believe that it is a “bad thing” for Reddit to be censoring any mention of this across the site, including banning the name. This claim was shared by Reddit users and is not based on any facts or evidence.

The message read, “If you've been linked to this page, you likely tried to view a subreddit that's been made private. You may be asking yourself "Why can't I look at teh memes and teh cat gifs??" I'll tell you why, young redditor: It's because one of reddit's new employees is a close associate of child rapists & pedophiles, and the mods of the subreddit you're attempting to view think that's bad. They also think it's bad for reddit to be censoring any mention of this across the site, including banning people just for saying the name of said admin in a completely unrelated context..”

It should be noted that Aimee has never been charged with any legal wrongdoing. 

Internet ‘confused’ by groups going private

A lot of people did not know why their favorite groups went private on Reddit and took to Twitter for finding a proper answer to their queries. One of the users wrote, “WTF is happening on Reddit? A bunch of communities I was following are suddenly private and I can’t rejoin them? Is it a bug or something happened.”

Meanwhile, one of the users slammed the company for not doing a background check on her. The user wrote, “If Reddit was willing to go to the extent they did to protect this person, then imagine the slew of pedophiles that went in under the radar.” Another user shared, “Who thought it was a good idea to hire this dude in the first place?” “What is worst… is they were fine with it UNTIL the shit storm blew in,” another user added.

EDITOR'S NOTE AND CLARIFICATION: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the Reddit quote. We have verified the statement on Reddit and it has been corrected. We deeply regret any inconvenience caused.