Social media website Reddit will start cracking down on abuse after co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman recently became the target of criticism because of his anonymous editing of comments by pro-Donald Trump users.

Mr. Huffman, who goes by the handle “Spez,” faced a wave of backlash in the Reddit community after shutting down a “Pizzagate” subreddit devoted to a conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and an alleged pedophile ring operated out of a D.C. pizzeria.

Mr. Huffman last week admitted to secretly altering some of the comments that attacked him in the pro-Trump subreddit r/the_donald forum, and he edited the comments to make it seem like those users were insulting their own community instead of him.

“I ruined Thanksgiving. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again,” Mr. Huffman wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “We are taking a more aggressive stance against toxic users and poorly behaving communities. You can filter r/all now.”

He said that Reddit’s policy against harassment will be more strictly enforced moving forward, starting with his own foes.

“Personal message harassment is the most cut and dry,” he told Reuters. “Right now we are in an interesting position where my inbox is full of them, it’s easy to start with me.”

“We have identified hundreds of the most toxic users and are taking action against them, ranging from warnings to timeouts to permanent bans,” he wrote in his post.

The first wave of bans will likely be skewed to the r/the_donald community because “that is a catalyst for a lot of this right now. That community is stirred up,” Mr. Huffman told Reuters.

“More than anything, I want Reddit to heal, and I want our country to heal, and although many of you have asked us to ban the r/the_donald outright, it is with this spirit of healing that I have resisted doing so,” his blog post read. “If there is anything about this election that we have learned, it is that there are communities that feel alienated and just want to be heard, and Reddit has always been a place where those voices can be heard.”

Mr. Huffman insisted that he doesn’t want to censor anyone’s political beliefs.

“That’s why we have worked so closely with the r/the_donald community. We tell them: don’t force us to ban you,” he told Reuters.

“We will continue taking on the most troublesome users, and going forward, if we do not see the situation improve, we will continue to take privileges from communities whose users continually cross the line — up to an outright ban,” he wrote Wednesday.

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