Reddit CEO’s Steve Huffman Admits Editing Donald Trump Supporters’ Comments

By Vins - 25 Nov '16 11:03AM
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Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, finally put an end to all the talks. In a statement that he recently released, he admitted that he modified some comments of Donald Trump's supporters.

The CEO, however, would like to clarify that although he created some modifications, the actual messages were not affected. He simply changed some of those with mentions of him.

"Yep. I messed with the "fuck u/spez" comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour,"

The issue all boils down to the #pizzagate buzz, which is a fake news about a pizza restaurant in Washington that is said to be the center of a child trafficking operation for which Hilary Clinton run. The said story was obviously fabricated but several social media users believed it. In fact, several actually believed it to be true that even the New York Times had to write about it.

Reddit has to close the Pizzagate subreddit due to violations of their terms and conditions, particularly when it comes to posting one's private information. Hence, the CEO decided to make the necessary changes on some abusive and false statements. 

Despite his public admission, Huffman still ended his statement with an apology: "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." And he added "This was a case of me trolling the trolls for a bit"

In 2010, Steve Huffman left Reddit to form his own travel site that he called Hipmunk. Last year, he returned to Reddit to replace Ellen Pao. Pao had to leave Reddit because of certain controversies like the closure of some popular threads and the firing of Victoria Taylor, the company's community manager.

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