Reddit CEO admits to stealth editing other user’s posts

It looks like Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, has been messing with users of the site over the last few days as today he admitted that he has been editing the content of posts and comments directed at himself. Huffman co-founded Reddit alongside Alexis Ohanian back in 2005 and goes by the username ‘spez' on the site, this week, he began changing negative posts directed his way, changing mentions of ‘spez' to moderators of pro-Trump subreddit ‘r/the_donald'.

According to Huffman's admission post, these edits were only made over the course of an hour in an attempt to try and ‘unwind' following the r/PizzaGate subreddit shutdown and the criticism that has followed. PizzaGate is a whole other can of worms but from what I understand, this subreddit was dedicated to sifting through WikiLeaks emails and investigating the connection between politicians and some key pizza restaurants in Washington, where they believed a paedophile ring was operating. This subreddit caught a lot of traction and was ultimately closed down, apparently due to the spreading of personal information. Honestly, I can't really do this story justice, so I won't be getting into it any further here but feel free to look it up and draw your own conclusion.

Anyway, back to Huffman. Given that Reddit shut down this investigation, there has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding the site and its leadership. In retaliation, Huffman “messed with the ‘fuck u/spez' comments, replacing ‘spez' with r/the_donald mods for about an hour”. He went on to say “as the CEO, I shouldn't play such games and it's all fixed now”.

Huffman also added that community staff members aren't particularly pleased with what he did so he “most assuredly won't do this again”.

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KitGuru Says: This election cycle over in the US seems to have really riled people up, so I'm not too surprised to hear about the crazy things that are currently happening. Still, though, shadow-editing comments isn't really the right way to express disappointment in the outcome of an election.

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