Paul McCartney Banned From His Own Subreddit for Sharing Photos of Concert

Overzealous Reddit moderators are back at it again: Paul McCartney has been booted out of the subreddit that’s dedicated to him.

Update 3/31: A Reddit mod at r/PaulMcCartney claims that McCartney was not banned, but that there was a “technical error that made [the account] appear to be banned from the site. This has now been resolved. Sorry for any confusion this caused or issue for the mod team here!”

The mod continued on a separate post: “Heya folks! Me again — to give a little more context, the account in question was temporarily restricted due to a routine security step that requires the account holder to reset their password (this can happen if it’s been a while since a user last logged on, among other reasons). Because of a bug, the account was incorrectly shown as “banned” (even though it wasn’t). We’re working on fixing this bug so these issues don’t happen in the future. Just to be really clear again, the mods here had nothing to do with this and never banned Sir Paul.”

The ex-Beatle was sharing photos from his triumphant shows at the Fonda Theatre in L.A. last week.

“Hope you enjoyed the show at Fonda Theatre last night,” the post said. “As last night was a phone-free experience, we wanted to make sure that you had some memories from the show to share with friends, family and loved ones.”

The post shared a Dropbox link, which contained photos of the concert for fans to enjoy.

Dexerto reports that the decision to remove the thread and then subsequently ban McCartney’s entire Reddit account was greeted with indignation online. The account, u/paulmccartney, has since been reinstated.

But the recent post remains gone, and the last posts on the account are from 2020 when McCartney participated in an AMA session with fans to promote his album, McCartney III.

It’s far from the first time that Reddit moderators have been criticized for being far too quick to remove posts or ban accounts. Just last month, legendary astronaut Don Pettit had his post removed from r/aviation after his photo of a commercial airliner was deemed “low quality” and “blurry.”

McCartney’s decision to ban phones from his concert was partly because of the A-listers in the audience, which reportedly included Harrison Ford, Taylor Swift, Sir Elton John, John Hamm, Reese Witherspoon and Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis. The Fonda Theatre has just 1,200 seats.

Fellow British pop star Harry Styles also banned phones from his Netflix special live concert, One Night in Manchester. Instead, the former member of One Direction gave out 20,000 analog disposable cameras.

“Fans were told their phones had to be secured in a special bag as it was a camera-free event — but the bags turned out to be plastic, so people made the most of it,” the Daily Mirror reported.