Reddit Power User Suspected Of Being Ghislane Maxwell

Reddit power user maxwellhill has become the center of platform's attention yesterday when a thread on 4chan's /pol/ suggested that the account might have been run by none other than the recently arrested Jeffrey Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

On Reddit, there are so-called "power users" – accounts that have millions of karma and often are moderators of multiple subreddits. Redditor maxwellhill is one such power user: the account, created in March 2006, has nearly 15 million karma and is a moderator of several frontpage-tier subreddits such as /r/worldnews, /r/travel and /r/health. But the account hasn't been posting since June 30th, which – among other things – led some people on 4chan and Reddit to believe that the account is run by Ghislaine Maxwell, who was arrested by the FBI in early July.

Besides the obvious "maxwell" in the nickname the user, there is a whole list of things that made Reddit suspect that maxwellhill is Maxwell. Here are some of the things on the list of supposed evidence collected in a thread on 4chan's /pol/ and by Redditor nafka:

• the account has been posting on a nearly daily basis since its creation and until June 30th, 2020, with posting gaps around the time of Maxwell's mother's death and the Kleiner Perkins party, where Reddit's then-CEO Ellen Pao saw her;
• posts in which /r/maxwellhill corrected the age of consent in various countries
• posts linking articles about why child pornography should be legalized
• posts about child protection laws
• the user is British

The post submitted to /r/Epstein quickly exploded on the platform, quickly gathering over 20,700 upvotes and 2,900 comments. Another thread in /r/subredditdrama received over 17,900 upvotes and 1,600 comments.

However, despite multiple Reddit users quickly jumping in on the investigation event to the point of conducting a stylometric analysis, it appears that maxwellhill isn't actually Maxwell. Already on the same day as the thread went viral, /r/worldnews moderator hasharin posted screenshots of maxwellhill commenting in the subreddit's backroom and a chat between them.

In early March, The Daily Dot posted an article about maxwellhill, describing the story of the moderator who in the recent months became "the most reviled person on Reddit,"who many accused of being responsible for the decline of the /r/technology and /r/politics subreddits.