His criticism of a biotech CEO provoked a Reddit thread with two thousand comments, and the CEO showing up to write responses. And controversially the whole thing was removed by moderators, and Dr. Lowe briefly banned from the site.
Would you mind linking to the thread? I know it's been removed, but I'm curious which subreddit that happened in.
Also, did anyone ever explain why he was shadowbanned? Only Reddit admins can shadowban someone, and I thought they only issued bans for vote manipulation, not for causing controversy.
I'm a mod of a default subreddit. We can't shadowban people from the entire site, but we can use AutoModerator to moderate comments and shadowban users in a specific subreddit based on certain criteria (e.g. one day old account with negative comment karma or if account mentions certain keywords) or by manually adding a user to a shadowban list. This is separate from reddit's built-in subreddit ban, which is much more obvious.
It's possible (and sounds a lot like) he got banned/shadowbanned in /r/news and the mods there thought his self-promotion went too far and got reported for spam to maybe be banned outright from reddit. That seems excessive though. I usually just tell people to do a better job contributing to reddit if they're being spammy, and I only report people when they're creating new accounts to harass others.
I don't mod a default, but in my experience it's historically been really easy to get someone shadowbanned for self-promotion by submitting to r/spam. I don't know if it's run by a script or just overworked interns, but anyone technically breaking the 20% rule over any period of time has tended to get the axe without consideration of mitigating factors (celebrity, posting to subs that encourage self-promotion, etc).
I don't know if that's changing with the drama over r/gamedeals company reps being repeatedly shadowbanned for trolls submitting them to r/spam, but not optimistic.
Someone might want to message the mods of whatever subreddit he was banned from. I don't know enough about the situation to feel justified in doing so. But I checked /r/spam, and found this:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/09/12/thiola_retro...
His criticism of a biotech CEO provoked a Reddit thread with two thousand comments, and the CEO showing up to write responses. And controversially the whole thing was removed by moderators, and Dr. Lowe briefly banned from the site.