“We never checked their background.” Odd stance from an employer.
A Reddit employee whose hiring sparked a wave of communities to go private this week is no longer at the company, CEO Steve Huffman has confirmed.
Hundreds of communities went private this week in protest at the employment of a former U.K. politician called Aimee Knight, previously known under the surname Challenor, who was recently hired as an administrator by the popular messageboard platform.
“The employee in question is no longer employed by Reddit,” Huffman said in a post on Wednesday explaining Reddit’s perspective on the situation.
Many of the subreddits that went dark had over one million members, including r/apple, r/Music, r/HistoryMemes, r/pokemongo, r/PrequelMemes and r/Cringetopia.
Knight, 23, was suspended by the U.K Green Party in 2018 after it emerged her father, David Challenor, was appointed as Knight’s election agent despite him previously being charged with multiple serious sexual offenses, including taking indecent photographs, false imprisonment, rape and sexual assault of a child in November 2016.
An investigation found that Knight appointed David Challenor as her election agent in both April 2017 and mid-2018. In August 2018, David Challenor was convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison, and was formally expelled from the party.
In 2019, Knight was suspended by another political party, the Liberal Democrats, after her partner, Nathaniel Knight, allegedly shared child sex fantasies online. Knight has maintained the Twitter account used to share the posts had been hacked.
The controversies spilled over onto Reddit this week after a moderator of the popular community r/ukpolitics shared an article that mentioned Aimee Challenor by name, seemingly triggering the website’s anti-doxxing protection for its employee.
