This post is chalk full of misinformation!
WOW
First of all, This all started when Reddit, shutdown r/pizzagate after someone with a gun went inside of Comet Ping-Pong ( a pizza shop caught up in a lot drama stemming from a fake news article about Hillary and Co running a child pronography ring in the basement), fired a round, and refused to leave until he was certain there were no children being harmed.
The shutdown of r/pizzagate, a sub-reddit mainly consisting of believers in pizzagate and seemingly propagating violence, caused members from r/TheDonald (another seemingly problematic subreddit) to, en masse, create hundreds, maybe thousands of posts full of hate speech and obscenities specifically targeted at Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman.
Steve, in retalition, went into the reddit database, and changed all instances of his name in these posts, with "r/thedonald". essentially redirecting all of the hate speech back to the perpetrators as a group. He didnt change anything to any single persons name as you stated, but to an entire subreddits name.
He trolled the trolls essentially
I think its genius. Not exactly ethical, but its trolls. who wouldnt take the opportunity to troll a massive group of trolls like that?????????
He tampered with the speech of others.
Put words in their mouth, or at least changed them.
If there is a criminal investigation into the pizzagate thing, this would be literally tampering with evidence. Speaking as someone who has performed IT forensics for a living, if there was evidence of a crime in there, he's now contaminated the crime scene to the point nothing there could be admissible.
He proved beyond a doubt that he is not acting as a neutral carrier. He has now made reddit liable for everything posted by any user. After all, if he can change someone's unflattering words about reddit on whim, why shouldn't he be forced to change unflattering reviews of a powerful politician or a popular celeb? Heck they could start selling it as a service.
He could have shut those posts out by simply labeling them censored. As it is now, an investigator looking at that database cannot in any way prosecute, the data's been tampered with.
I stand by every word I said. The fact that he edited the message to reflect it back on the Attackers rather than using his censorship powers, means that he approved the messages to run on his website and just didn't have the courage of his convictions to stand up and own it.
There's no misinformation here at all. The fact is that if you are on any social media site you are vulnerable to exactly this kind of tampering. The things you say can be altered. This is true for everywhere except steemit, because steemit's blockchain uses cryptographic signatures as a sort of tamper proof seal.
i admire your mind!!!