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Comment by iaw | Hacker News Reader

There's a vocal contingent of alt-right Donald Trump supporters that think this is a big deal.

I think it's a big deal and I wouldn't be in the "alt-right" for sure.

Having a CEO of a social media site impersonate users and censor comments calls into question the credibility of the their whole brand.

That's not a partisan perspective???

How would you feel if Paul Graham of HN changed your comment to "I am strong supporter of the alt-right?" ...you wouldn't like that. Opposing opinions are fine - using admin priledges to put words to literally put words in users mouths is madness?

I already made a comment elsewhere - but I'm surprised they haven't let him go. If reddit were a real company, they wouldn't tolerate that. I wonder what would happen if a middle manager started tampering with user comments - he would be gone.

As someone firmly left wing (by European standards), I agree.

It may very well be that there are "alt-right" people blowing it out of proportion, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal.

It's not a big deal because it's reddit, a semi anonymous Internet board. It's not like he was editing legal statements.

> It's not like he was editing legal statements.

That is not the case.[1]

[1]: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-pan...

It's a big deal because he was making it seem like users had made statements they haven't made. Maybe these specific instances doesn't matter so much, but the fact he did it, and did it without leaving a visible sign it was edited creates an issue of trust. We now feel less safe that Reddit admins haven't done this in the past too, in cases where it matters more.

Yeah, it's actually quite a gamechangr. sunglasses

Kidding aside, it is, though. It crosses a line that, from a strict point of view (like that of permissions or data security) can't be uncrossed. It's equatable to any and every comment being edited or editable without labelling, presented as the unmarked original.

We're approaching the point where reddit comments are seen as valid enough to appear in congressional reports (re: the combetta bleachbit thing); I can't even begin to imagine the legal exposure this would give reddit if that were further along. (Though I guess I can; imagine if this were Twitter or FB; I'm sure some tens of thousands of cases would potentially be under question...)

And that's not even approaching the whole 'potential for historical revisionism' can of worms. Don't worry mate - the gravity of this isn't lost on all of us. :)

There is also something to be said about a CEO with administrative privileges.

Seriously? You think he should be let go over this? You think that other CEOs would have been? If so you have not been following the news much.

Imagine Zuckerberg edited your facebook status, secretly, because you said something mean about him. The president elect has posted on reddit account, and has posted. 'Spez' has the power to impersonate and communicate as the president of the US, even retroactively, or anyone else for that matter.

> You think he should be let go over this?

Absolutely.

> You think that other CEOs would have been?

Even if other CEOs who have done similar things have not been let go, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have been let go. This was a major breach of trust.

> If so you have not been following the news much.

Apparently I haven't been following the news much because I haven't heard of any CEOs doing something like this recently. The most "scandalous" (for lack of better word) thing that I've heard of recently concerning CEOs and political stuff was the controversy with GrubHub and Pepsi. If you're referring to events like those, I don't think they're comparable. I don't agree with the actions of those CEOs either, but there's a difference between the CEO of a company taking a stance against a political candidate and the CEO of a social media network putting words in his users' mouths by editing their comments. If you're not referring to stuff like the GrubHub and Pepsi and there have in fact been other CEOs who put words in their users' mouths by editing their comments or posts, I'd love some links. Either way, I still think they should be let go.

Its definitely a big deal.

Censorship of this issue is seriously bad news: Either we expose the pedophile rings in our governments, or we are subject to their will - and abuse of power - at every point.

So, yeah. This is a huge breach of trust, and I hope that this story gets out there so that people can be informed while deciding whether to contribute to the reddit empire.

It is a big deal, but it's not like it's anything new in modern society. Graphic images of war have been censored since Vietnam. So in other words, the mainstream media has been doing it for decades, how is reddit suppose to be better then the media?

It wasn't just "censored".

He used his admin privileges to CHANGE users comments.

Like if you made your last statement and then Paul Graham changed it to read "It's a huge deal, it's never happened before"...so that became YOUR USER COMMENT

It's reddit for fucks sake, he didn't change a legal record. You are giving reddit comments too much credit for being a source of information.

Can you give me access to your account so I can change what you wrote to whatever I like? It's just a HN comment after all, not a legal record.

Forums censor their comments as a standard practice against trolling. But on the other hand, reddit is fully open and such attempts are easily found out by comparing older version to current version.

So, people were saying "fuck /u/spez" (CEO's username), and he edited that.

Deleting comments is fine - the problem is that he edited comment without explicit or implicit user consent or even remark about it. This is as bad as it gets for any media company.

If he was not CEO, he would have been gone by now with apology from the company.

That's fine, except it's not true. There is no evidence, and they are all false accusations.

http://www.snopes.com/pizzagate-conspiracy/

From a quick skim, that seems like a very biased account. It leads with counter-arguments from the principles and does not include the more provocative evidence e.g. the triangular sign which matches the FBI pedo alert and they have cropped the images the redditors created to remove the actual evidence linking the owners of pretty much every business on that street.

In the future, please wind down the usage of soft euphemisms like "alt right" and instead refer to the group by its proper name- neo-nazis.

Don't go lumping us in with the alt-right. We're not even right wing.

In a venn diagram of neo-nazi's and alt-right, I'm sure there would be plenty of overlap, if not neo-nazi's being a subset of the alt-right. But to categorize the entirety of alt-right as neo-nazis is itself not useful, as you can then not have a conversation about the actual viewpoints of the alt-right.

I'm really disappointed in the quality of the discourse on both sides this election cycle. Straw men abound.

What? The alt right us built os racism, misogyny, and white nationalism. This isn't some sweeping generalization like "all Trump voters are Nazis" or something like that, the alt right is built on fascist, neo-nazi ideals.

I'll admit that I was apparently ignorant on the topic and had a misunderstanding of the ideals of the alt-right. After reading for a while, I have come to a similar conclusion given the idea(l)s of NPI, Spencer, and so on.

As with anything label-related, it's hard to determine who wears what label for what reasons and what elements of the label are made up by outsiders attempting to discredit the wearers of the label. But it is currently difficult to come to a conclusion other than yours given the facts I've been able to find.

As a small aside, I still hold a small amount of hope given the history of inaccuracy in the media's portrayals of 4chan. Hopefully this is similarly overblown and hysterical...

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