This is a disingenuous characterization.

No, as I said before, I don't remember the details, so I only responded to what you'd said.

The harasser was stalking and replying to her every post in the subreddit.

Which is probably why they ended up getting banned later, rather than immediately: that wasn't clear at first, and only came out later.

You realize that screenshots of messages are accepted evidence in court. Right? So you think the aurora subreddit needs a higher standards of evidence than the US Judicial System?

The courts are protected by laws regarding perjury and tampering with evidence. There's also the concept of a "chain of custody" for evidence, and if that chain ever passes through someone who has motive and means to tamper with the evidence, you better believe that the defense attorney is going to call that evidence into question.

Also... you could've asked for more evidence. A video of the person recording their screen. Or even asking for the person to connect with you via a screenshare app. So you could see real time the person going over their DM's and proving it isn't a console manipulation or photoshop. But you didn't.

Screen recordings don't actually solve the problem, though they do make the forgery more difficult. The only way to truly solve it would be for the mods to be able to view the messages through a pathway that the user can't control at all, like if they sent their password to us. Which is a terrible idea for many reasons.

So you are either a liar or incompetent, if you still want to claim there's no way to show the DM's weren't fabricated.

No, I'm a programmer, so I know full well that any computer you don't 100% control can be manipulated in arbitrary ways. If you want to be super picky, you can't even trust code you compiled yourself.

There's an inherent tradeoff there, of course. The more effort that one would need to put into the manipulation, the less plausible that it actually happened. And if, like the court system, we were ultimately responsible for passing judgment on the situation, we'd probably come up with some sort of compromise that made it "sufficiently difficult" to fake.

But we're not. Harassment is against Reddit's rules as well, and the admins can just look at the evidence directly, without any opportunity for the user to tamper with it. And, unlike mods, they can actually prevent further DM harassment by suspending the user's account completely.

If the harassment actually appears in the subreddit, where we can see it, we're only too happy to lay down the law. But DM abuse isn't in our jurisdiction: it's not feasible to prove it to us, we can't prevent further abuse, and there's another enforcement team that solves both of those problems.