BREAKING: Reddit CEO caught editing posts without a trace

Credit to Velostodon of reddit:

REDDIT ADMINS AND DEFAULT MODS HAVE BEEN CONSPIRING HOW BEST TO CENSOR US
/u/spez is the CEO of the 27th largest website in the world. He controls about 6.25% of Conde Nast/Advance Publications' media arsenal. (Same people that run Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker. That pretentious #.)

What he did: He edited comments critical of himself without leaving a trace. It was found out because the comments were changed in an obvious manner. He intended this to be a joke. The problem is there was no trace they were edited.

What this means: The Admins have this capability. This should not be a surprise. The Admins use this capability. This ought to be a bit of a surprise. They do it to comments critical of themselves as a joke. Does this mean they do it hide things critical of their Advance Overlords? Have they ever done this to 'frame' someone for breaking site rules to ban them or a subreddit?

More pure implications: The CEO of a major media company edited the comments of Trump supporters because he did not like what they had to say. He did this after allowing the Washington Post to cite the thread he changed comments in for an article. This calls into question the integrity of the website. Not in a "muh free spech" sense, but in a legal sense. How many court cases are riding on user history submitted as evidence? Stonetear as just one example.

Reddit allows illegal activities like /r/fakeid to persist, but edits the comments of Trump supporters because they were mean to the CEO personally? I'm sorry Spez (not really, actually, though I understand), but I'm pretty sure you're done here. Conde Nast isn't going to tolerate the #storm you've brewed. PR and legal wise, huge # up. Possibly the biggest in this site's history. One more thing.... Impersonating another person, i.e. user, violates reddit TOS. The CEO violating TOS may be seen as a breach of contract leaving reddit liable to anyone who had their comment altered.

Reddit CEO /u/spez was critical of The_Donald sub posts. Many members found themselves shadowbanned ( had their posts hidden from other members without any indication of being banned) Spez received posts swearing at him "f**k u/spez/" (lots and lots of swearing on reddit) and changed his name to The_Donald to read "f**k The_Donald"

Although it may seem a minor issue the implications of this are huge: posts from Reddit have in the past been used as admissible evidence in court. If this evidence could be changed or tampered with it perverts the course of justice. Most recently was the case of stonetear;

[stonetear] was an admin for the infamous Clinton e-mail server. During the investigation he was offered immunity but still refused to testify. Recently it was found that a couple years ago, he posted on Reddit asking for help sanitizing some data from the e-mail archives. Depending on who you ask, the request was anywhere from completely innocuous (replacing e-mail addresses with generic placeholders but keeping the names intact) or highly illegal. As soon as this was found out, he went through deleting every one of his posts. So now the investigations are firing back up because of possible new evidence and Reddit is apparently getting asked to cooperate by turning over the deleted posts.

cred to throwaway234f32423df

Theoretically his lawyers can now argue that the evidence against stonetear could have been changed to implicate him or completely change his posts to downplay his involvement.
I just wonder what else could have been secretly been changed to incriminate redditors to get them banned, to change the record etc. I'm so sick of propaganda on one side of the mediascape and accusations of fake news on the other. When did journos and media platforms loose their integrity.

SO the pizzagate sub was shut down with little notice and mods/etc were scrambling to backup the investigations into the pedophile network before it was deleted. The sub was moved to unfiltered site voat. Not many threads were resubmitted to voat and much was lost.

Spez citied that the TOS were violated several times by the /pizzagate community by doxxing (posting personal information and whereabouts of people who could be used to track them down in real life) The mods were working overtime to monitor the sub and ensure that it toed the line. Hell, they even borrowed mods from The_Donald to help with manning the sub. When it was declared that pizzagate violated TOS everyone demanded proof but none was provided. No one on the thread had even seen evidence of doxxing not being removed. The mods were dumbfounded.

Now Spez is being accused of changing the posts to violate TOS and get the sub deleted. C**kery is afoot!

Why would spez shut this investigation down?

I've been on the fence about this pizzagate business from the beginning. I don't want any of it to be true. But then you see something like this from Reddit's CEO, it just looks bad. I can't believe for a moment that he wouldn't understand how it would look if the edits were discovered. So some other greater consideration motivated his actions.

Dumb move, imo.

As a member posted in the other thread regarding the r/pizzagate shutdown, this wasn't just any admin editing users comments, it was Reddits equivalent to Skeptic Overlord or Springer doing it and in a manner that wasn't straight forward with the users.

And it's even more suspicious because this all happened on topics regarding pizzagate... this is some Orwellian #.

Coming from a site that allows pedo sub forums, no wonder it's gone down the tubes. The thing is with this it's showing how deep the hole goes. As the OP mentions there very well could be concern over Stonetear here.

Leaked conversation of Reddit admins discussing ways to shutdown r/The_Donald in wake of CEO u/spez's violation of T&C by impersonating it's users

What's really concerning about this is that nothing can stop them from editing 2 year old comments from a user and using that message to send to the FBI or brand them as a pedo/racist by the media. This is full on 1984.

a reply to: Kalixi

just have to point out that :

" untraceble edits " are the defaul for any digital media system

if you WANT a log of eddits and a tracking system - you have to program that into the system

but hey - carry on

originally posted by: ignorant_ape
a reply to: Kalixi

just have to point out that :

" untraceble edits " are the defaul for any digital media system

if you WANT a log of eddits and a tracking system - you have to program that into the system

but hey - carry on

OK...so ...are you saying its all good because there is no tracking system for editing ?

a reply to: Konduit

That is an amazing slack discussion.

a reply to: ignorant_ape

Oh gee nothing to see here then.

How about you read the OP where it acknowledges this and 'splains why this is not okay. K?

More shady business being exposed.

Mods of r/pizzagate reported that accounts they banned for breaking the rules were immediately unbanned by admins and had no idea why, now suspect Reddit did it so they had an excuse to ban the sub.

Truly disgusting, they can ruin anyone reputation if they like, so many people post there Obama, Trump, not only commoners, and some guy in the shadows can change what it's said years from now, or even make new post impersonating.

The thread he edited was linked on Washington post, anyone not knowing what happened looking at it would think the reddit users were calling the mods of the donnald pedophiles instead of the CEO.

Several subreddits have now gone dark to protest the actions of the sites admins and CEO u/spez. This has done irreversible damage to the site and will be all over the internet today. Steve Huffman AKA Spez should step down immediately.

a reply to: Kalixi

What he did: He edited comments critical of himself without leaving a trace. It was found out because the comments were changed in an obvious manner. He intended this to be a joke. The problem is there was no trace they were edited.

So he admitted of editing posts or not? There should be some circumstantial evidence left regardless. They would need to determine the time frame (old search engine indexing of pages) when the posts were edited and then look at the logs to find out if he was online at that time. I know I know, he could be using services to mask his IP but that can be traced back or at least compared to his previous online activity. That should give a better perspective on things....however, it needs to be done asap, time is of the essence here.

originally posted by: Op3nM1nd3d
a reply to: Kalixi

What he did: He edited comments critical of himself without leaving a trace. It was found out because the comments were changed in an obvious manner. He intended this to be a joke. The problem is there was no trace they were edited.

So he admitted of editing posts or not? There should be some circumstantial evidence left regardless. They would need to determine the time frame (old search engine indexing of pages) when the posts were edited and then look at the logs to find out if he was online at that time. I know I know, he could be using services to mask his IP but that can be traced back or at least compared to his previous online activity. That should give a better perspective on things....however, it needs to be done asap, time is of the essence here.

He admitted it.

And it is further corroborated by the lengthy leaked discussion linked to in Konduit's above post.

So if this is a feature a forum has to add voluntarily, how many forums are we on where this can happen? Are forums now going to have to add a term saying they cannot edit posts without trace.

I feel like everything I write can be edited later.

For example what is the policy of this forum ATS?

a reply to: freetheworld

Posts in violation of forum conditions stay in thread, but content is blanked with message.

"Insane" threads are orwellized - as I can say for good reasons.

For some 8 years on this board I did not see any modification of posts by mods ... but who knows.

yes the who knows ? is the issue
Although I trust this site, thousands of people trusted Reddit, someone said Trump and Obama posted on Reddit! Any case of law with Reddit posts as evidence might end up being thrown out, the thought that someone high up like the CEO can edit posts is scary, what if they changed your posts to look like you started a riot, or put in child porn. He thinks it was a joke but it is blowing up on him.

quote `For some 8 years on this board I did not see any modification of posts by mods ... but who knows`.

FFS - the inability of people to actually read what i wrote - and comprehend it - is the truely deppressing take-away from this thread

FURTHER - AL I DID WAS MAKE A STATEMENT OF FACT - BUT PEOPLE STILL MANAGED TO EXTRAPOLATE A DISHONEST ASSUMPTION OF MY VIEWS FROM THIS - GO FIGURE

OS - just to really fooj with your heads - with top tier admin CP you can also edit the " edited by " - to say whatever you want

THINK ABOUT THIS

ETA : nothing

a reply to: DupontDeux

Yeah, I see now, thanks.

a reply to: Konduit

What's really concerning about this is that nothing can stop them from editing 2 year old comments from a user and using that message to send to the FBI or brand them as a pedo/racist by the media. This is full on 1984.

You can always do a print screen and save yours and others` comments when discussing sensitive topics. There is a creation date on the file as well as modification. The potential problem is that there is little to no telling whether or not the image has been manipulated at the point of creation. To add extra layer of security, you could film yourself doing it. Harder to manipulate the recording without a trace.