Reddit CEO Admits To Editing User Comments Amid Pizzagate Malarkey (cnet.com)

Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, today admitted to editing several comments that criticized him on the site. He made the admission on Reddit, where he posts under the username Spez. CNET adds: Huffman got a lot of flak from members of the The_Donald, a subreddit for supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, after Reddit banned the Pizzagate subreddit. Pizzagate was dedicated to a debunked conspiracy theory linking Hillary Clinton to a paedophile ring. In response, he edited comments reading "fuck Spez" to instead be directed at moderators of the The_Donald subreddit. "I messed with the "fuck 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," he wrote. "As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly." Huffman added: "Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won't do this again."

Comments

Debunked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Debunked by who?

Re: Debunked?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well by Snopes of course! The obviously Non-Partisan fact checkers of the world who would NEVER lie for The Clintons.

Re:Debunked?

[serviscope_minor]

Debunked by who?

Wrong question. If there's no evidence then it's automatically debunked.

Re:Debunked?

[clampolo]

By anyone who looks at it. A pizza restuarant posting pictures of kids does not make it a pedophile ring. Hell they were so far lost they were convinced the birthday bracelet biden made for obama had a slice of pizza on it. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cp... If you can't see that that's a piece of cake you really aren't in touch with reality.

The question isn't whether or not it is true. The question is a message board deciding what is true and deleting things they disagree with.

Re: Debunked?

[Cryacin]

This isn't unique. Slashdot is run by VERY NICE PEOPLE.

Re:Debunked?

[Rei]

1) Alefantis is not a "friend" of Clinton; he's just a supporter. He's never met her.

2) The art in his restaurant is weird, but it's not "kids being tortured or placed in sexual poses"

3) The case in Haiti was 10 Baptist missionaries from Idaho trying to rescue children after the earthquake without permits. The missionaries had previously planned to build an orphanage and school in the Dominican Republic. There are Podesta emails that mention Silsby, but in the context of current events and how the US government should handle what had become an international diplomatic issue between the US and Haiti (aka, Hillary's job). Example here. Silsby is in no way a "friend" of Clinton.

You all have a strange way of declaring everyone to be a "friend" of Clinton.

Re:Debunked?

[Mashiki]

It was deleted because people were using it to harass people in the real world, some users were even making up stories about unrelated restuarants and posting child pornography to go with those stories.

Not quite true. People there weren't harassing people, nor were they doxing them. There was a non-doxing/harassment rule like on most subs. What's interesting is that members of the /r/pizzagate mod team have claimed that the administration were unbanning people, who were being banned by the subs mods. Those people who were being banned included those who were doxing, and posting CP. On top of this, that subreddit had already broken open a massive CP ring on twitter. Last count ~7000(I've seen numbers as high at 14k) or more accounts. Twitter's response so far has been to ban the people who found the accounts. Some of those CP accounts have been banned but most have not.

This entire thing stinks. On top of that with Spez deciding to pull this bullshit, they've also likely lost their safe harbor provisions. On top of that, toss in the absolutely weird shit in the podesta emails, including wording that seems to indicate some kind of pedophile stuff going on? They may have found something, they might not have. But reddit turning around and banning the sub is going to toss more fuel on the fire.

Re:Debunked?

[AmiMoJo]

No, he didn't delete anything. He edited some insults directed at himself.

It's still bad, but it's not like he was trying to stop people posting their conspiracy theories. The more I think about it the more stupid it seems. Wow, the site owner can edit posts, what a shock.

Reddit isn't some highly respected debate forum that claims to be totally non partisan and allow absolutely any content.

Re:Debunked?

[ironbastard]

Until you can identify an actual victim, or a victim's family, this is at the same level of tin foil nonsense as claiming Sandy Hook or the Boston bombing were all crisis actors.

Re:Debunked?

[AK Marc]

Reality. That and everyone who's ever looked into it. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11...

Re:Debunked?

[Mashiki]

Because reddit has realised that angry, toxic crazies are making it miserable for the more sane majority, so they're finally not letting them have the run of the place. All those people are off to voat. I do not have a problem with that.

Really? Because they sure do seem to be catering to those angry, toxic crazies that are there. You know the ones, in /r/shitredditsays /r/circlebroke /r/offmychest and so on. Those same subs that have a history of doxing and harassing people. Oh I get it, you're okay with the insane angry left-wingers that attack people for perceived insults and slights, while engaging in witch hunts.

Re: Debunked?

[king neckbeard]

8th biggest US site (according to Alexa rankings) altering user comments isn't newsworthy? If I'm an investor, I might be concerned that the CEO is trolling in a way that could endanger safe harbor provisions.

Re:Debunked?

[DerekLyons]

But if you're asking why people are upset about this, it's because they're completely unhinged and hallucinating.

There, fixed that for you.
 
They haven't "found" anything - they've made up a bunch of completely unhinged nonsense (of the "substance x in your food is one atom different from dangerous substance y!" level) practically from whole cloth. The only people "creeped out" by this are people already dangerously disconnected from reality.

And what else?

[nefus]

But what else has he edited and not fessed up to?

Re:And what else?

[Cederic]

Yes, he should. That's called moderation and is a reasonable activity for a site owner to undertake, in an open and transparent manner (which may preclude 'shadowban', depending how Reddit interprets/implements that).

Instead of destroyed any credibility Reddit may have had remaining by guaranteeing that you can no longer trust that anything posted there has any relationship to what the person identified as posting it intended to say. It may instead be pushing an agenda the CEO or one of his friends wants instead.

It's a grotesque betrayal of trust, an utter lack of ethics and completely fucking unforgiveable.

Re:And what else?

[Cederic]

You don't see the difference between banning and editing someone else's words?

It's a massive difference. It's the entire difference.

4chan made the choice to ban GamerGate. Their choice, and there were consequence but those were predictable and accepted. Reddit has been banning users and discussions for years, and that causes a lot of noise but most of the moderation is "We removed your comment" and the bans (shadow or otherwise) are simply preventing people posting, not changing what they say. Youtube and twitter similarly provide a "obey or don't participate" policy.

What this CEO has done is very different and very dangerous.

Interesting that Slashdot is now preventing posts containing certain words. I hadn't encountered that and I do think it's stupid and counterproductive. It's still infinitely better than changing the content of someone's post.

Re:And what else?

[Mashiki]

4chan, of all places, lost its shit when the owner had to ban GamerGate.

That's probably because the people in Gamergate were right. Never mind that mootles didn't have any problems with project chanology, until he got leaned on by them. And the so-called people who claimed they were "anti-harassment specialists" were the ones out there harassing, doxing, and doing the shit that they claim gamergate was. The "game journalism" industry is and was corrupt, several of those sites are now gone though. Having collapsed under their own corruption, many of the people involved in the "gamers are dead" articles are no longer writing in the industry. People like Sarkeesian have moved on to a new batch of suckers(just a fyi her dvd videos are only like 4 years late now and she hasn't even finished the project). But you can see that in the gamejournopros leaks exactly how corrupt. Not only were authors colluding, they were pushing particular political and social narratives. Shit like doritogate and kane & lynch were just the start. It took years for it to finally hit a breaking point. You know, much like how the brexit campaign or Trump's election.

But I'm guessing that you haven't learned anything from those two cases either.

Re:And what else?

[Mashiki]

GamerGate was using 4chan to organise their harassment. That's why it was banned, allowing it to continue would have made it impossible to keep the site going with hosting and ad revenue.

You know, 2 years on you've yet to ever show proof of this harassment. But you'll happily claim that 3rd party trolls are "gamergate people" even when it's shown that yes, they're actually 3rd party trolls.

4chan gets a lot of traffic and can only get low paying ads due to its content. 8chan can only tolerate the harassment because it needs much less cash to keep going, being much less popular. The operator being outside US jurisdiction helps too.

And another bit where you don't have any idea of what you're talking about. I'm sure next you're going to claim that the owner of 4chan is really, really short on cash and needs money. FYI 8chan's owner is a US citizen and the site adheres to US laws.

The First Rule...

[mrchaotica]

...of Usenet is of course, "you do not talk about Usenet." I'm breaking that. Sorry.

More importantly in this case, Second Rule of Usenet is "Usenet can't be subverted by its owner because, as a decentralized service, it doesn't have one." And that's why it needs to be supported instead of centralized shit like Reddit!

Re:The First Rule...

[mysidia]

Usenet can't be subverted by its owner because, as a decentralized service, it doesn't have one.

That's also its downfall.... too much spam and abuse, and there's no such thing as a team who can review posts, delete them, and block spammers.

On the other hand, each individual ISP /news provider can still censor content they don't want you to see, or tamper with posts; but there is just way too much spam/abuse for each news provider to create their own clean version.

Re:This great!!

[elrous0]

The Dems call all republicans racists because they are republican. Now the Republicans can fight back and call all Democrats pedophiles. In today's media led world there is in fact nobody who is not either a pedophile, a racist, or a nazi.

Don't forget when Dems tried to call Trump a pedophile too.

Yep, that's the level of political discourse these days, both sides seeing how far they can go to demonize their opponent as the worst human being on the planet. I think political discourse today has gotten worse than it was during the McCarthy era, and is rapidly approaching an 1850's level of vitriol. And the 1850's vitriol led to a civil war.

its not just an oopsie

[nimbius]

"Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won't do this again."

Huffman might not know it, but hes just torpedoed reddit as a source of valid independent discussion by exposing the ability to not only edit posts he didnt author, but to inject a political message in his favour. Im sure Stalin is applauding from beyond the grave.

Re:its not just an oopsie

[0100010001010011]

Forget 'discussion' there are active investigations that use Reddit as evidence.

There are multiple celebrities and political figures that have accounts to do AMA. What if Spez was caught editing comments by the 'president'? (Ok, President's Social Media handlers).

Admits

[ChoGGi]

but doesn't apologize...

Are you naive ?

[aepervius]

For all practical intent and purpose, all BBS and reddit like can be edtable by default. in fact you have to spend money to add security , encryption, and ensure non editability. Unless it is a selling point, you should always assume that everything is editable to match whatever goals political or not.

And..

[Nostalgia4Infinity]

This *should* be the end of Reddit. No post can ever be reliably attributed to it's author again.

Apology?

[Alypius]

I suppose this is what I get for not RTFA, but the CEO admitted to doing it, obliquely mocked the people pissed at him for doing it, and never apologized? So not only do we have social media moguls decrying "fake news" but now we have social media moguls actually manufacturing it.