https://v.redd.it/komiw3hmv5r81

Not my original words but can’t find original source:

A reddit admin was caught abusing her position to set her tile cooldown to zero (note: cooldown is 5 minutes and 20 minutes for email verified and unverified users respectively) in order to erase an Orange Cat that was previously posted by Reddit on twitter.

This cartoon cat was the creation of Anton Dimitriev, a Ukrainian artist who is currently living in Kharkiv that is besieged by the Russian military as we speak.

His art station: https://www.artstation.com/mine_flood

His deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/anton-d/gallery

In addition, reddit permanently banned everyone who placed a tile in that area or tried to change her tiles to repair the Orange Cat. Merely placing pixels near the cat resulted in a personal ban, resulting in the bannings of users from /r/AnarchyChess as their subreddit logo bordered the Orange Cat.

People who tried asking about their bans had their posts removed as well

https://old.reddit.com/r/place/comments/tukjit/why_was_my_account_shadowbanned_after_placing_a/

Reddit went a step further and manually deleted the accounts so that whenever you try to visit an account banned for placing a tile - you get this page.

Example of an account manually deleted - they last posted yesterday proving it is a real account. As you can see, this was an active and real account that was not only banned, but deleted.

2nd example - proof

Other people caught on, resulting in posts calling it out that reached the front page. Initially the admins tried to do damage control by setting a filter on /r/place to automatically remove any post that mentions the cheating or the Orange Cat that was overwritten. Now they seem to be going back and forth on the issue after the public outcry grew too big to suppress.

Impressively bad. Why create a pixel board with limited space if the admins will literally ban people for placing pixels over the area they want?