There's ANOTHER abusive male at Reddit

The tale of Bardfinn the Creep

It has emerged that another moderator at Reddit who identifies as transgender, and uses his power to shut down discussion on the platform about transgender issues, has a history of abuse against women and children, and links with paedophilia.

The tale of ‘Bardfinn’, a 46-year-old trans-identified male with a collection of aliases that would put Rachel McKinnon to shame, has emerged from the background of the Aimee Challenor / Reddit story. 

Bardfinn is infamous on Reddit, Twitter and Kiwifarms for being confrontational and shutting down freedom of speech as a ‘powermoderator’ on Reddit. He would flood subreddits which offended him—such as those discussing women’s rights and experiences—with images of child abuse and thereby have them shut down. While his assessment of his achievements is probably exaggerated, he undoubtedly wields considerable power on Reddit.

Bardfinn, AKA Steven Joel Akins, a communist ‘lesbian’, probably currently known as Penny Oaken in ‘real’ life, uses an AI avatar on Twitter that looks nothing like the creepy, middle-aged man he is in reality. 

As a Reddit powermod Bardfinn moderates over 60 subreddits including r/AgainstHateSubreddits, which he and other powermods use to orchestrate ‘raids’ on subreddits they don’t like in an attempt to get them banned or in order to remove and replace the existing moderators. Bardfinn was openly involved in the permanent banning of gender-critical subreddits such as R/GenderCritical and the temporary banning, restricting and attempted takeover of r/Detrans, a place for people to discuss detransitioning and the damage done to them by the transgender movement.

Bardfinn sees the infiltration of these groups in order to shut down free speech as a duty in order to ‘deplatform the hatred’, and the posting of rule-breaking or even illegal content in order to achieve this aim as necessary. While he usually uses, or encourages others to use, throwaway accounts for ‘brigading’ purposes, he has been suspended at least twice by Reddit for severe breaches of their terms of service, before quickly being reinstated.

While Bardfinn is offended by anything less than 100 per cent enthusiasm for transgenderism and/or communism, he also believes incest is acceptable in some circumstances. In this context, the news that he appears to be a father to one biological and one step child is even more disturbing.

Pre-transition, he was also charged with assault causing ‘family injury’ in 2010. A record of the charges reveals he was arrested for assaulting his wife when, during an argument, she reminded him that he had hit her five-year-old child two months earlier, causing bruising. During the assault on his (now ex) wife he also held their distressed 14-month-old child out of her reach.

Further back, the list of charges includes aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, drug possession and unlawful possession of a weapon. There is also a charge for ‘Failed ID Fugitive’, which seems to mean he hid his identity from a law enforcement officer. As one Kiwifarms poster pointed out, transitioning gender means he can now do this legally.

Once again the man behind an account with unwarranted power over discourse on Reddit is revealed to be an abusive, paedophile-adjacent trans rights activist with a past he is desperate to evade. How and why are powermods such as Aimee Challenor (who briefly became a paid Reddit administrator), Nekosune (Aimee Challenor’s partner Peter ‘Katrina’ Swales), Feefers (Swales’s partner Charles ‘Fiona’ Brown) able to acquire this power and protection from social media giants? Are these really the people Reddit, which is currently being sued over its failure to control the posting of child abuse images on the site, wants to represent their website?