Admin Aggro - Reddit CEO Edits Comments Criticising Him
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is in a bit of hot water after recently admitting that he edited comments made by Trump supporters on the platform.
Huffman confessed to changing abusive posts that mentioned his username, making them instead refer to the moderators of the largest pro-Trump subreddit on the site, /r/the_donald. As you can imagine, this didn't go down too well, with downvoters flooding in in the hundreds:
“Yep. I messed with the “fuck u/spez” comments, replacing “spez” with r/the_donald mods for about an hour,” Huffman said in response to a post decrying exactly that on the pro-Trump subreddit.
"As the CEO, I shouldn’t play such games, and it’s all fixed now," he said. "Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again." Huffman's apology probably reflects his community team's ire, rather than true contrition. Which is kind of understandable, given the level of abuse he receives. As he justified, "it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly," also blaming the high tension after #pizzagate for his actions.
#pizzagate refers to a fake news story that had been doing the rounds alleging that Hillary Clinton had been kidnapping and molesting children in the back of a pizza restaurant in New York. A fairly unlikely and unsubstantiated claim, you would think, but the story gained lots of traction online in pro-Trump arenas, eventually leading to death threats towards the owner of the restaurant. So you can see why things got a little hectic.
Still, it's problematic when one of a site's higher-ups decides to start editing users' posts, regardless of content or motive. It brings to mind censorship or news manipulation, akin to that of China or Russia rather than the neckbeard homeworld of Reddit. User comments should be sacrosanct, not subject to change at the whim of an admin. If the content of those comments is abusive enough to warrant deletion, then fair enough, but that should be under strict criteria, not down to admin opinion.
On that note, thanks for that comment on my last article Anonymous356, love that you thought it was "
With a master’s in Literature, Sam inhales books and anything readable, spending his working hours reformulating the info he gathers into digestible articles. When not reading or writing, he likes to put his camera to work around the world, snapping street photography from Stockholm to Tokyo. Too much of this time spent in Japan teaching English has nurtured a weakness for sashimi, Japanese whisky, and robot cafés. Follow him @SamF_Songbird
Admin Aggro - Reddit CEO Edits Comments Criticising Him
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Friday, November 25, 2016
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Reviewed by Unknown
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Friday, November 25, 2016
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