The July 10 resignation of Ellen Pao, the beleaguered interim CEO of the social networking site Reddit, has a troubling subset of the site’s community cheering. It’s the group of users that has engaged in #RedditRevolt, a vitriolic harassment campaign to oust Pao that has been marked by sexist language and racist imagery — treatment that Reddit board member Sam Altman described as “sickening.” The validation of this harassment campaign is a blow for those seeking to increase inclusive democratic participation in virtual spaces.

Pao’s resignation came about following the uproar over the abrupt firing of Victoria Taylor, a well-liked Reddit administrator. The coordinator for the site’s popular “Ask Me Anything” (or AMA) feature, in which people of all sorts — from Channing Tatum to Barack Obama to the man with two functioning penises — answer questions from the community, Taylor was a vital staff liaison for volunteer community moderators, whose labor keeps thousands of subreddits with millions of views each week afloat. Her sudden departure left the moderators scrambling and feeling betrayed.

In protest, the moderators of the AMA subreddit decided to set the page to private and make it inaccessible to regular users. Other subreddits followed suit, beginning with large communities that regularly ran AMAs with Taylor’s help (r/Books, r/Music, r/Science). In a matter of hours, hundreds of subreddits had gone dark.

The response — quickly dubbed #TheDarkening or #AMAgeddon — was in one sense a widespread user revolution around issues of corporate transparency and customer appreciation. However, under the banner of #RedditRevolt, a group of users has attempted to use the controversy to push an aggressively reactionary agenda that has its roots in ongoing battles about the inclusivity of the web. (For more on why #RedditRevolt is harassment dressed up as free speech, see my earlier piece.)

Neither Taylor nor the Reddit team disclosed the reasons for her firing. But opponents of Pao, who has been targeted by users hostile to new anti-harassment rules instituted under her watch, nevertheless began to grumble that Taylor was let go for allowing Redditors to ask combative questions to civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson in one of her final AMAs.

Conservative commentators were quick to draw conclusions. “The influence of radical identity politics over Silicon Valley executives like the ones who run Reddit should not be underestimated — Ellen Pao is notorious for her opportunistic use of discrimination law,” Breitbart.com author and high-profile #GamerGate supporter Allum Bokhari speculated, referring to Pao’s much publicized discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “In Silicon Valley, someone like Jesse Jackson is akin to a deity.” The implication was that Taylor was fired for not kowtowing to the will of the PC police, symbolized by Pao.

But Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson, who was present for the AMA, wrote that “by Reddit standards” the hostility Jackson faced during the proceedings wasn’t particularly noteworthy. It appeared to be business as usual for the reverend, too. A Jackson rep who helped to coordinate the AMA told Harkinson, “We get that same Fox News/Hannity/Colmes/O'Reilly stuff almost every time.”

Meanwhile, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is quoted in the piece saying that Taylor’s firing had “nothing to do with the reverend’s AMA.”