
The CEO of Reddit confessed to modifying posts from Trump supporters - vnchr
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ceo-reddit-confessed-modifying-posts-022041192.html
======
greenyoda
Extensive discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027031)

------
gamechangr
Honestly - He should be fired for this. If Reddit was a real company, he would
have been let go already. Being CEO requires that you keep ahold of your
emotions and not abuse your power.

This totally calls into question the credibility of the whole site.

------
generic_user
> Angry "The _Donald" members accused Reddit leadership of modifying or
> otherwise censoring their posts — which turned out to be correct, when
> Huffman posted the following comment, confessing that it was him personally
> who was performing the changes.

I knew this sort of thing was going to happen and stopped using most social
media.

These new platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook etc are devolving into the
same sort of ban happy in group out group tribalism you get on irc channels
Where some clique has all the oper accounts and anyone who has even the
slightest disagreement is banned.

I would rather use a much smaller bbs or forum that does not censor rather
then a huge social media platform where anything you say could get you booted
if it rubs the censors the wrong way.

~~~
geezerjay
> I knew this sort of thing was going to happen and stopped using most social
> media.

As hacker news is the same sort of "social media" as reddit, you certainly
haven't stopped using it at all.

~~~
generic_user
most, not all. hn is a small forum compared to those others.

------
synicalx
So as well as editing text, now that reddit are doing their own image hosting,
what's to stop them replacing/editing/manipulating images as well?

~~~
vnchr
Article 11 of Reddit's user agreement states, "You are solely responsible for
the information associated with Your Account and anything that happens related
to Your Account."

This sole responsibility is predicated upon user content not being tampered
with, except for removal for moderation or administrative purposes.

This act is unprecedented and not accounted for in their own legal agreements
with users. User trust aside, does this impact their ability to enforce their
user agreements?

~~~
synicalx
That's a good point.

What's to stop a u/spez with rustled jimmies finding someone he doesn't like,
then editing their comment in such a way that it suddenly becomes libellous?
How could the commenter possibly prove that they didn't write that comment?

------
jpgvm
I don't get why this is such a massive deal.

Kids were trolling, he trolled back. Reddit is a fun site, what do you really
expect?

Personally I think it's funny.

~~~
cargo8
Because it undermines the integrity of literally every post on the site.

If the admins have the ability to modify posts and comments without any notice
or indication, this opens the door to... \- Creating false content via
discrete edits that violate ToS, allowing for false flag to ban a
user/thread/subreddit \- Any comment or post used as evidence (ahem, e.g.
Hillary Clinton's IT guy, mention of drugs or crimes, literally anything like
that) now is called into question. Wouldn't surprise me if he now has to
testify that posts were not altered if it is accepted as evidence, etc. \-
Literally anything else where a verified identity post and people assume it is
what they (the person) said. AMAs are basically the thing that took Reddit
mainstream, so that is kind of a big deal.

~~~
mejari
>Because it undermines the integrity of literally every post on the site.

Maybe the posts on the site shouldn't be afforded the assumption of integrity?
Trump's supporters have already taken over the front page with a constant
barrage of false "news" stories and a fanatical devotion to defend them.

There's no reason you shouldn't apply the classic 4-chan disclaimer to reddit
as well:

>The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and
falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

------
canada_dry
It was pretty obvious throughout the campaign that mods were constantly
battling a tsunami of political spam from all sides.

I suspect you don't have to dig very deep to find out that quite a bit of
squelching was being done on several subreddits.

One needs to look no further than the spam that has made youtube comments a
no-mans land of crass stupidity to see why a fairly broad brush of modding is
req'd to keep some reasonable level of maturity.

------
iso-8859-1
this post is more popular
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027031)

------
vnchr
Original article by Business Insider syndicated through Yahoo:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-
modi...](http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-modifies-
donald-trump-the-donald-2016-11)

