They justified it with insults to these people, saying even that the users were idiots for not knowing every detail of every piece of reddit. It made me sick. I had become the PR manager of the subreddit out of necessity. Nobody else could do the job because their idea of diplomacy was an insult and a shadowban. Not that it mattered, as many in the industry I spoke to came to me before the position ever got brought up in the first place. I'm happy the other mods didn't get put in that position, as these industry folks were the very people those mods insulted. Those people didn't deserve to be ridiculed by my colleagues any more than anyone else.
I wasn't okay with censoring information out of personal bias, vendetta, and outright fabrications. I will never be okay with that. However, I wasn't in a position to fight it. GamerGate was a very small thing back then, and I thought it would blow over in a week. The moderators of /r/Gaming[5] put wind in its sails by nuking and censoring a thread dedicated to a quite neutral opinion on the topic, and further banning users involved in pro-GamerGate comments (as well as the submitter, to my understanding). After that is where things get a bit murky.
There's some saltyness in that post. After reading the full post it seems like he's really angry that two fairly large subs didn't dedicate themselves to allowing the kind of toxic wave of bullshit Gamergate started immediately on their subs. Which hunting is horrendous, but imagine both /r/gaming and /r/games went unrestricted and didn't lay down ground rules about how it would go about something like Gamergate the entire saga would have been absolutely worse. Reddit's system is flawed because while he may believe in free speech it's user base is still primarily ungoverned. Give an inch and they'll take the whole thing. Methinks we're not getting the whole story here and he's writing himself a redemption thread.