Most of the social media attention in politics seems to focus on Facebook and Twitter (for obvious reasons) but Reddit has experienced its share of controversy and angst in 2016. I don’t tend to be a poster on the site, but I read a bunch of content there. (My favorite subreddit is this one, though decorum prevents me from typing out the name of it here.) As with most social media platforms there’s plenty of political action going on and Trump fans recently learned that the company’s CEO, Steve Huffman, had been going in and editing posts which which were critical of him and making them look as if they were actually critical of Trump supporters. Now that he’s been exposed, Huffman has a few regrets. (Washington Post):
Steve Huffman, the chief executive of Reddit, knows he has some explaining to do.
Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, landed in hot water Wednesday after admitting that he used his administrative powers to secretly edit user comments that were critical of him on r/The_Donald — a popular, pro-Trump forum (or “subreddit”). He swapped all mentions of his own username with the names of the pro-Trump group’s leaders, meaning that expletive-laden posts aimed at him looked instead as if they were insulting the group’s leaders.
It was not a good idea, he told The Washington Post Friday by phone. “I abused my power to give the bullies a hard time,” he said. Huffman thought of his name-swapping as a joke: a way to poke back at the people who’ve been harassing him and some of the site’s volunteer moderators for months.
Read more at:
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/11/27/reddit-ceo-hey-sorry-about-secretly-editing-your-content/
