Sir Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit after sharing pictures of a concert in the r/PaulMcCartney subreddit. Over the weekend, Paul McCartney’s Reddit account attempted to share pictures from a show at Fonda Theatre to the site via a Dropbox link. Shortly afterwards the account was banned.
Why did this happen? That’s in dispute. At first it appeared that the mods of r/PaulMcCartney had kicked Sir Paul from the subreddit dedicated to him. But moderators insist that’s not what happened and pointed to a Reddit admin comment explaining that Paul was banned site-wide, not at the subreddit level. “Ask yourself, why would we ban the account of the man we're all passionate about? Moderators also have no power over [whose] account is deleted from this website. Only admins do, which again has already been addressed by them,” r/PaulMcCartney moderator RoastBeefDisease said in a stickied post on the subreddit.
In a different thread, an admin explained that McCartney was never banned and that his account was booted from the site due to a glitch. “Just for clarity, that account was never banned from the site (or the subreddit) there was a technical error that made it appear to be banned from the site,” the admin said. “This has now been resolved. Sorry for any confusion this caused or issue for the mod team here!”
Reddit confirmed the glitch in an email to 404 Media, but did not elaborate on its nature. “There was a technical bug that made the account look banned, but no one would ban one of The Beatles,” Reddit said.
As of this writing, McCartney’s account is active on the site but the thread of the Fonda Theatre pictures is gone. “Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it,” the thread said.
“Either Paul's team deleted it or Reddit did. If mods removed it it'd be visible from his page and say ‘sorry the moderators have removed this post’ when you click it,” RoastBeefDisease explained.
An early theory said McCartney’s concert pics were removed from Reddit because they violated Reddit’s rules about self promotion. Reddit is unique in the world of social media. It has well established, complicated, and labyrinthine rules and teams of moderators that enforce those rules. Bots deliver justice in the form of suspensions and bans for the smallest infraction. The self-promotion rules are about 1,200 words long and it can be hard for outsiders to break into Reddit and understand its mores.
On sites like Instagram and Facebook, Paul McCartney’s PR team can dump whatever photo or video it wants without consequence. There is friction to Reddit that does not exist in other social spaces online. That’s by design and it gives the place a unique feeling that’s kept it successful for two decades.
