Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has admitted he changed comments about him that were left on the site from Donald Trump supporters.
Huffman, in a post on the site, said he changed remarks that mentioned him in some of the messages inside the popular site’s largest forum for the president-elect. He said he didn't change the actual messages, however.
"Yep. I messed with the "[expletive]u/spez” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour," wrote Huffman, who co-founded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian in 2005.
According to Tech Crunch, Huffman's move brought up past complaints that Reddit can't work with its community of posters.
Tech Crunch explained the furor involves #pizzagate – a fake news story about a Washington-based pizza restaurant said to be the center point of a child trafficking operation run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta. The story was made up, but still got so much attention that the New York Times wrote about it.
Reddit closed the Pizzagate subreddit for violating its terms and conditions because it posted an individual's private information.
"We don't want witch hunts on our site," the announcement stated.
Huffman went public with his admission of modifying comments, but didn't apologize.
"As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly," he wrote on his confession post. "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."
Then in another post in reply to another user, he added: "This was a case of me trolling the trolls for a bit."
According to Tech Crunch, former head Ellen Pao left Reddit under a cloud last year after closing popular threads and firing community manager Victoria Taylor – sparking outrage from users.
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