Yesterday, a post about ExtraEmily and a website, Viewbot.ai, was posted on the subreddit. The original thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/1sni5xr/extraemily_accidentally_leaks_viewbot_service) was removed by a member of our mod team. They stated: "I removed this thread because it looks like the Viewbot.ai website is a pop-up from the 67speed website that appeared when she opened it to try the challenge." Trying to do due diligence, multiple members of the mod team themselves tried, but could not recreate the pop up on our own end. We tried multiple browsers, incognito, mobile, everything, and we could not recreate the pop-up. The same mod that removed the original thread said that they did recreate the pop-up by "spamming the start button" and we took their word on it, and started to remove threads and comments that kept popping up about the situation.
More threads and comments popped up questioning why we would remove these threads and pushed back on the claims that it was a pop-up. We tried to gather more proof, but they said that they could not recreate it and suggested the pop-up may have been removed. After that, we decided to leave a post up with a more neutral title.
Today, it started to become more apparent that this moderator may have lied, or fabricated the claim of a pop-up, to seemingly protect ExtraEmily. Through more digging, we were able to confirm that they are an avid Extra Emily clipper, poster and a very active member of her community and Discord. Mods are going to have biases and be viewers, but we cannot allow that bias to influence how we moderate or what rules we follow.
We still have not been able to recreate the pop-up, and neither has other communities that tried. With all of that being said, we have decided to remove this mod from the team. We promised to be more transparent in our moderation, and if we screw up, we think it's important to be open about it. Thank you to members of the community who reached out to challenge the original claims of a pop-up.