Get your snarky comments and letters of complaint at the ready, Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman, has admitted he modified a number of posts on the site without users’ permission. Oh dear.
The posts, which were submitted to the popular Donald Trump-supporting subreddit ‘r/The_Donald’, were spotted on Wednesday, with users noticing their posts had been changed without their consent.
It turns out that Huffman, also known as Reddit user ‘/spez’ removed references which criticising him for helping take down the r/Pizzagate subreddit.
The r/Pizzagate saga had been running for a number of days, and had been set up around ridiculous, falsified claims a pizza restaurant was used as the centre of a child-abuse ring run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta.
In their place, he redirected users’ anger at the moderators of the page, but as you might expect, his unapproved meddling has not gone down well with the Reddit community.
Facing a serious backlash from users – many of whom have called for his job and cried foul over moderation and censorship on the site – Huffman has issued a formal apology, according to Business Insider.
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Taking to, yep, you guessed it, Reddit to apologise, he wrote:
“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.”
With users accusing Huffman of destroying Reddit’s credibility, it is unclear if his apology will be enough to see him keep his job.
Huffman only took the mantle as Reddit CEO last year in the wake of Ellen Pao who was essentially pushed out by users as part of a “Reddit Revolt” that protested the firing of a well-liked member of the Reddit team.
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Was Huffman wrong to meddle with user’s comments? Let us know in the comments.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
