Reddit CEO Admits to Editing Posts from Trump Supporters
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman admitted this week he modified comments on his own site from Trump supporters who said negative things about him.
“Yep. I messed with the … comments,” Huffman, who co-founded Reddit in 2005, wrote on a thread. “As the CEO, I shouldn’t play such games, and it’s all fixed now.”
The thin-skinned executive took major heat for the confession, with myriad users abruptly calling for his immediate resignation. Many said his casual dismissal of the magnitude of the issue—”it’s all fixed now”—was profoundly arrogant, as his actions as head of the company undermined the integrity his own site was built on.
Indeed, Huffman did not even apologize.
“Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again,” he wrote.
Why did he do this at all? Because of #pizzagate, a fake news story which suggested a pizza restaurant in Washington was the center of a child trafficking operation run by Hillary Clinton. It was a fabricated story, but gained enough traction to garner mainstream media coverage.
Huffman blamed his poor judgement on it being “a long week” for him. (It was Wednesday at the time.)
Huffman returned to his role as CEO of Reddit after Ellen Pao left last year following relentless waves of backlash against her approaches to managing the platform and also her controversial legal history.
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