I restored the original comments after less than an hour.” Huffman attributed his actions to his own history of instigation on the internet, writing, “I spent my formative years as a young troll on the Internet.” He went on to explain: “I honestly thought I might find some common ground with that community by meeting them on their level. I won’t do it again,” and adding “I am sorry for compromising the trust you all have in Reddit.” Today, Huffman finally issued a formal apology for his “attempt to troll the trolls,” writing “I fucked up. Preventing content tampering by Reddit staff needs to immediately issue an apology for CEO secretly tampering with users' comments, outline systems to prevent it in the future But he stopped short of apologizing or providing details on how Reddit would prevent this in the future, opening questions about whether he should remain CEO. Huffman soon callously commented that he was trying to unwind after trolls implicated him in a false pedophile conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton and a pizza parlor. The move could be viewed as censorship, or simply a childish, gross abuse of his power. Using his editing privileges as an engineer at the company, he was able to change the comments without leaving a trace, framing the trolls who insulted him as having insulted the leaders of their own sub-community. Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who goes by the handle Spez, secretly edited users’ comments in the pro-Trump subreddit r/the_donald from “fuck u/spez” to say fuck the moderators of that subreddit. Reddit will start issuing warnings, timeouts and permanent bans to its most abusive trolls, but will also limit the content manipulation capabilities of its own CEO after he apologized today for ethical violations that shook the trust of the online community.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |