Reddit: Elon Musk may be causing Reddit to censor Luigi Mangione posts.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The initial announcement, which had been flooded with skeptical comments, was cross-posted to dozens of other subreddits, occasionally with captions like “Literally 1984” and “Extremely bad news from our admin overlords.” That same moderator shared a PSA in r/FreeLuigi that “the word ‘luigi’ is now flagged by reddit for violence.” They included a screenshot in which a user’s question about whether the community could still discuss the video game Luigi’s Mansion 3 had been flagged by the violence-moderation bot for mentioning the name Luigi. of comments containing direct calls for violence, including images celebrating Thomas Matthew Crooks and content calling to assassinate the president.” They added that “because r/popculture only had one remaining mod, we added Automod filters” to help filter reported posts and to flag “certain keywords”: “This action is specific to this one subreddit, temporary, and the mod can still approve the flagged content if it isn’t violating. It puts pressure on mods to remove content before anyone sees it so that the user base isn’t punished.” The r/popculture moderator recently disclosed that they were “getting a lot of people reporting anything that mentions Luigi as inciting violence.” Related From Slate Why the CEO Shooter Makes the Perfect American Folk Hero To the moderators of r/SecularTalk—a community for fans of the popular progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski—the fact that this change came after a controversy involving pro-Palestinian users clearly sent the message that “they want to warn and then ban people for upvoting Luigi or anything pro Palestine.” “We know all of us are at risk of being banned or having the sub taken away at any time. The r/seculartalk team also pointed out other examples of public discussions and topics that had run afoul of Reddit’s “community safety” filters in recent times, including H-1B visas, health care, and even political town halls.