for the first In 20 minutes of our conversation, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, the sixth most visited website in the US, gives a good impression of a 2020s tech executive. “Our mission,” he says in One moment, “is to bring community belonging and empowerment to everyone in the world.”
But then I ask Huffman about the regulation. The US government is increasingly looking for ways to rein in the extremist content, viral falsehoods, and conspiracy theories that have stretched the thin lines that separate social media from the meat space, leading to the violence and a political discourse that is influenced by the language and narratives of 4Chan. A case before the US Supreme Court is testing the protections given to big tech companies as platforms, rather than publishers. Social media companies face attacks from the political right, which accuses them of censor conservative viewsand from the left, which says they are doing too little to prevent the erosion of democratic norms.
Huffman, who has been tense for a while, bows. “The government, the elites, whatever you want to say, they will always blame someone else before blaming themselves,” he says. His head of PR (Reddit has one of those) chimes in to give a three-minute warning to the end of the interview, but Huffman is barely making headway. “It is something that scares me a lot. Not just because of the company I work for. But for democracy, ”he says. “The irony is that the people who complain about the death of democracy are likely to be the killers of democracy, taking power from the people and centralizing it in the government.”
Later, he’ll talk about the spread of “memory holes” and prison states, his belief that theories dismissed as misinformation often turn out to be true, and how any government attempt to control what’s posted online amounts to to authoritarianism. The US government’s proposals to regulate social media platforms, Huffman argues, would kill free speech.
“We are literally talking about state-controlled media,” he says. “There is no state that controls the media thinking that they are not being noble. They always say it’s for your own good, ‘We’re making things safer,’ and they probably believe it.” She takes a long pause. “State-controlled media,” she finally says, “is state-controlled media.”
happy to block
Huffman co-founded Reddit in 2005 with his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian. Now, Huffman looks back with amusement to the site’s early innocent days, when the founders’ first two moderation dilemmas were whether users were allowed to use profanity or criticize Reddit. “They seem like such easy decisions right now,” Huffman says. “There were, like, three racist posts during those first two years, and I just deleted them.”
Aside from an occasional intervention by the founders or the volunteer moderators who create and control the subreddits, Reddit allowed just about anything onto its platform during its early years. There were only a handful of rules or principles that all Redditors were expected to abide by: Doxxing was not okay, and incitement to violence was eventually banned. But for much of the next decade, Reddit was a rare popular platform that showed not even a rhetorical interest in getting rid of its darker spaces. In 2006, the founders sold the site to Condé Nast, which also owns WIRED, and Huffman left in 2009. (Reddit later became an independent company, and Condé Nast parent Advance Publications remained a shareholder.)
It’s hard to pinpoint Reddit’s nadir, but when Huffman returned as CEO in July 2015, it was a place where white supremacists openly used racial slurs in their subreddit names; adherents of the conspiracy theory had prosperous homes; and misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia were not just common, but ideas around which users organized large communities. It’s true that these cesspools coexisted with massive subreddits for Pokémon Go players, houseplant enthusiasts, and people in moral dilemmas asking the Internet.”Am I the asshole?But while Reddit wasn’t quite 4Chan, it was 4Chan-adjacent.
Huffman returned to Reddit in the middle of a firestorm. The previous CEO, Ellen Pao, had tried and failed to clean up the site, and his departure helped draw mainstream media attention to the bleaker spaces of the platform. Within weeks of its return, the site began quarantining the worst subreddits, making them harder to find and adding warnings that they contained offensive content. Communities where threats of violence were common, including r/rape women, were banned, but some overtly racist forums, including r/coontown, were not. “The content there is offensive to many, but it does not violate our current ban rules,” Huffman said in an Ask Me Anything At the time. A month later, the rules changed again and r/coontown was removed from the site, along with several other openly hateful subreddits.
In the years that followed, Reddit became progressively tougher in taking action against communities that overstepped the bounds of acceptability, even when it meant making decisions that were politically controversial. In 2016, Reddit banned r/PizzaGate, a QAnon-powered subreddit propagating the conspiracy theory that a pedophile cabal led by Hilary Clinton was performing satanic rituals in the basement of a Washington DC pizza parlor, for violating its policies on doxing. .
Then, in June 2019, Reddit quarantined r/TheDonaldwhich since its founding when Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign had become a focal point for Trump supporters, but has also attracted conspiracy theories and white supremacist content, including support for the murder of Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a far-right terrorist in 2019. Moderators routinely promoted posts supporting white supremacist causes, including for the Demonstration “Unite the right” 2017 in Charlottesville, Va. The subreddit peaked with just under 800,000 users, but it was banned in 2020. (leaked documents from a Russian intelligence agency would later show that Russia had tried to increase divisive content on Trump’s subreddit).