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Reddit Technology

Reddit chief admits to ’playing games’ with user comments

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By John Glenday | Reporter

November 25, 2016 | 2 min read

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has come under fire from site users, including his own community team, after publicly admitting to editing comments posted on the platform.

The frank admission saw Huffman acknowledge that he had surreptitiously switched mentions of his name to that of the president-elect ‘for about an hour’ after becoming incensed at being referred to as a paedophile by Donald Trump supporters.

The Reddit co-founder wrote: “Yep. I messed with the “fuck u/spez” comments, replacing “spez” with r/the_donald mods for about an hour.”

Huffman became a target of abuse by Trump trolls after Reddit closed down a fake news story which falsely claimed a Washington-based pizza restaurant served as a front for a child trafficking operation overseen by Hilary Clinton and her campaign manager.

Responding to concern that his actions may have undermined the credibility of his platform Huffman later 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.

“This was a case of me trolling the trolls for a bit,”

Reddit now bans racist and sexist content after a policy update to crackdown on abuse posted on the popular forum

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