Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, confessed to editing posts on the pro-Donald Trump subreddit r/The_Donald. Huffman, who posts under the username u/spez, edited posts that insulted him and replaced his name with the moderators of r/The_Donald. Huffman promised that this would never happen again.
Huffman said that he was frustrated by the "r/pizzagate" scandal on Reddit that alleged that the Clintons were involved in child trafficking, and edited the posts in retaliation. The original posts have now been restored.
Huffman's admission, with expletives deleted:
"Hey Everyone,
Yep. I messed with the “f**k u/spez ” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour. It’s been a long week here trying to unwind the r/pizzagate stuff. As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly. As the CEO, I shouldn’t play such games, and it’s all fixed now. Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again.
F**k u/spez."
It goes without saying that this is definitely not okay. Reddit purports itself as a place of free expression, and it's not a good thing for administrators to be messing with the users of the site. While it's not exactly kind of people to insult the admins, they don't deserve to have their posts modified without their consent. Reddit is a community, and it's not smart to betray the trust of users. Reddit was created to be a place for everyone to carve out a niche--not just for people who believe in a certain ideology. It would be smart to return to these roots.
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