I've heard this rumor before that Ghislaine Maxwell had a reddit super account. But I had not previously connected it with LLM training data, nor seen it presented in this light.

The recent releases from the FBI's Epstein files have now provided concrete evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's convicted accomplice, operated as a power moderator on Reddit under the account /u/maxwellhill for over a decade.

Through my recent research tracing these influences, it's clear that Maxwell's curated content has been magnified exponentially in models, including those from OpenAI, confirming my long-held thesis: our AIs are drowning in more sewage than anyone knew, leading to outputs that erode human empathy and progress.

The account, active from 2006 onward, became Reddit's first to reach a million karma points, a milestone that highlighted its outsized role in the platform's ecosystem.

Over time, it amassed over 14 million karma, primarily through posting news links that garnered massive upvotes and engagement. This karma mechanism is central to Reddit's design: higher karma elevates a user's visibility, credibility, and influence, creating a feedback loop where popular content (and users) dominate feeds, searches, and recommendations.

For /u/maxwellhill, this translated into unparalleled sway, as karma not only boosted its own posts but also amplified the subreddits it moderated, indirectly influencing derivative discussions across the site.

As one of Reddit's earliest "power mods"—users who control multiple high-traffic communities—/u/maxwellhill directly moderated several major subreddits, including r/worldnews (with over 30 million subscribers today), r/technology, r/bad_cop_no_donut, and others like r/environment and r/futurology. This direct control allowed curation of front-page content: approving or removing posts, enforcing rules, and steering narratives on global news, tech trends, and social critiques.

FBI notes, emails, and evidentiary documents explicitly tie the account to Maxwell through IP addresses, writing styles, and content alignments with her known activities. The files detail how this moderation was used to curate narratives, promoting certain topics while burying others, potentially as part of broader influence efforts. The account's activity halted abruptly around key events in Maxwell's timeline, like Epstein's 2019 death and her 2021 conviction.

I wished Roemmele had linked to some of these. I don't plan on digging into the matter, but it is curious.