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?
