Tech

Reddit CEO Admits To Editing Comments By Trump Supporters Attacking Him

REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Alex Pfeiffer White House Correspondent
Font Size:

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman admitted Wednesday to editing comments by Donald Trump supporters who were attacking him.

Huffman’s username on the news and discussion site is “spez” and is identified on Reddit as “u/spez.” Following Reddit’s ban Wednesday of the subreddit “pizzagate,” which focused on the conspiracy theory that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and friends are pedophiles, Trump supporters on the subreddit “The_Donald” were letting Huffman have it.

They soon discovered that their comments saying “fuck u/spez” were being edited to replace “u/spez” with the name of a moderator of the Trump-supporting subreddit. Huffman then admitted to the editing in a comment on the “The_Donald.”

“Yep. 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,” Huffman wrote.

He added, “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.”

Reddit users became enraged and said Huffman should resign as it is unclear now if other comments have been edited by Reddit administrators before.

Posts on Reddit have previously been investigated by law enforcement. Reddit did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether administrators have previously edited other comments on the site.