I guess they don't understand streisand effect. If you explicitly ban people will follow that rule but what happens when people get around by using some made up name different from original. Are admins going to read every comment on the platform to uphold this rule?

I believe they just don't want it to be talked about on their platform. They're not trying for general censorship. In fact, the person's name is already listed in newspapers.

Pretty obviously what happened is they've had incidents in the past where a blogger would publish an article on one of their employees and then redditors would start spamming that article on reddit to dox them -- in a coordinated action so the blog article was written for the purpose of doxxing the employee.

So they have a bot which bans links to article which mention reddit employees by name which hands out auto-bans to prevent that behavior.

What went wrong was that the code didn't have any allowance for newspaper articles, or somehow incorrectly classified that article.

That problem being made more difficult because the definition of what is a "news site" or "journalist" these days is vague.

This sounds like its the same category of problem that Memphis was with twitter.

And its a bit odd that this technology-oriented site is getting caught up in the political outrage and entirely missing the fact that a bot did the bans and that reddit acted to revert those actions. Do we now think that programming and algorithmic bugs never happen and that the outcomes of algorithms are always deliberately premeditated actions and never unintended consequences?

You can’t doxx a public politician by “revealing” their name...

You can doxx a reddit employee that way.

The problem comes up when you've hired a politician as a reddit employee, and you're written an algorithm that only cares about if someone is a reddit employee.

"an algorithm"

one that navigates to a linked article and notices a single sentence mentioning this admin's name, vanishes the post and bans the moderator who approved it?

sounds a lot more like 'reddit admin decided to abuse powers in an attempt to hide any link to how she once hired her paedophile father and was removed from a political party'

What are you talking about?

It's pretty clear now what happened is that a completely innocuous post to an article in The Spectator contained this person's name. They weren't the subject of the article or any of the conversation.

This particular reddit admin then removed it and banned the person who posted it (long standing mod).

I don't think it applies in this case: the rule was already in place and unnoticed until a high-profile incident drew attention to it: they are not trying to suppress mention as a response to newfound notoriety.

the 'no doxing' rule hasn't generally applied to reddit admins and users who are also public figures - the founders, for example

It's almost like the people who thought of the first amendment didn't see 99% of speech going through private companies at some point in the future. My snark isn't pointed at you, just at the people whose talking point is "first amendment is about the government!"

They own(ed) the companies.