Hello folks,

Thank you for your nominations and voting over the past few days to assist us in determining our new moderators. We're happy to announce that we have called an end to the vote, which has resulted in the addition of three new mods.

Please note that vote totals from the nomination thread shift upon each reload of the page (and that only users with at least one mod vouch were included in vote tallying-this excluded /u/not_jtrig, who did not have any mod vouches. /u/sovereignman was also excluded as he, sadly, turned down his nomination.) As such, the following results were the most stable that the mod team was able to determine at the close of voting. We will now take the thread out of contest mode such that users can see the voting results for themselves (although, please note, that vote totals may continue to fluctuate as a result of voting continuing to occur subsequent to this announcement).

Our three new mods are;

/u/orangutan with 20 points

/u/Ambiguously_Ironic with 11 points

/u/creq with 11 points

The mod team is pleased to welcome these new additions, which will hopefully allow us to more promptly respond to modmails and arrange future AMA's; we also feel that they will all be able to successfully uphold the free flow of information as the core maxim of their modship. As always, other mods will keep an eye on the modlog and review the actions of the new mods over the first few months.

Now to more unfortunate news regarding the conspiracy to impersonate Mr. Gage during his AMA;

We were approached by a user who directed us to an ama in /r/911truth by the founder of Pilots for 9/11 truth, Rob Balsamo. Mr. Balsamo was asked about certain statements made during the supposed AMA by Richard Gage, and informed the users of that subreddit that he had spoken to Richard Gage, who declined ever having participated in an AMA on reddit

Upon hearing this information; the moderators of this subreddit immediately began to look into the situation.

The back story is thus;

One of our moderators spent a few weeks setting up an ama with Richard Gage (Head of AE911truth), via user /u/ae911truth (now deleted) who was, for months, misrepresenting himself as a representative of the organization.

The AMA was conducted under the username /u/Richard_Gage . Both accounts were deleted simultaneously when other users began to unravel the conspiracy after the statements by Rob Balsamo.

The user /u/ae911truth went so far as to provide members of our mod team with fake verification tweets and other email documentation; and while we feel terrible about falling victim to this impersonator, it is not our main concern.

Whoever was behind these two accounts engaged in behavior that was clearly designed not simply to mislead this subreddit (nearly six months ago they attempted to setup an ama on /r/911truth), but rather to attack and slander the reputation of Mr. Gage.

This is very disconcerting and the lengths to which /u/ae911truth went to provide false verification has also forced us to raise our standards for what will be considered acceptable proof for AMA's in the future; which only complicates further the process of setting up these interviews for the community.

We want to be clear that this was not a short con; the user had been impersonating the organization for months and this is something we are taking quite seriously; which is to say, this reaches beyond normal reddit meta drama and directly impacts the reputation of an actual person.

We have held off commenting formally on this matter until the admins were given an opportunity to look into the situation; unfortunately they are not able to divulge any information surrounding this conspiracy.

We have reached out to Mr. Gage and expressed our deepest sympathies for falling victim to this conspiracy. We also apologize profusely to you, the users, for this slanderous impersonation. Although we have just begun recruiting AMA's, we have now substantially raised the standards of proof for future interviews to prevent any further forgeries.

We extend a thank you to Mr. Balsamo for uncovering this conspiracy, and also to /u/NAM007 who alerted us to the statements by Mr. Balsamo.