Given that he's the CEO, it seems like a more reasonable outlet would have been to have the devs fix the notification system, if it's really that trivially pron

Given that he's the CEO, it seems like a more reasonable outlet would have been to have the devs fix the notification system, if it's really that trivially prone to abuse. Or, if he really has to do personal one-offs, fudge things so that he in particular doesn't get notifications as a result of mentions in specific subforums (e.g. /r/the_donald). Actually going and mucking with the content of other users' posts (as opposed to hiding or deleting them wholesale for TOS violations) seems pretty unsavory, and more importantly it demonstrates that the capability to do so is trivially available. That's going to be a difficult cat to stick back in the bag.