For the primary 20 minutes of our dialog, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, the sixth most-visited web site within the US, does a great impression of a 2020s tech government. “Our mission,” he says at one level, “is to deliver group belonging and empowerment to everybody on the earth.”
However then I ask Huffman about regulation. The US authorities is more and more in search of methods to rein within the extremist content material, viral falsehoods, and conspiracy theories which have breached the skinny boundaries from social media into meatspace, resulting in violence and a political discourse that’s inflected with the language and narratives of 4Chan. A case earlier than the US Supreme Courtroom is testing the protections afforded to Big Tech companies as platforms, reasonably than publishers. Social media firms face assaults from the political proper, which accuses them of censoring conservative views, and from the left, which says they’re doing too little to stop the erosion of democratic norms.
Huffman, who has been tensing up for some time, leans in. “Authorities, elites—no matter you need to say—will all the time blame anyone else earlier than they blame themselves,” he says. His handler from the general public relations division—Reddit has a type of—interjects to offer a three-minute warning for the top of the interview, however Huffman is simply hitting his stride. “It’s one thing I’m actually scared about. Not simply due to the corporate I work on. However for democracy,” he says. “The irony is that individuals complaining concerning the demise of democracy are possible going to be the killers of democracy, taking energy from individuals and centralizing it in authorities.”
Later, he’ll speak concerning the unfold of “reminiscence holes” and jail states, his perception that theories dismissed as misinformation typically grow to be true, and the way any authorities try to manage what’s revealed on-line is tantamount to authoritarianism. US authorities proposals to manage social media platforms, Huffman contends, would shut down free speech.
“Actually, we’re speaking about state-controlled media,” he says. “There’s no state that controls media pondering they’re not being noble. They all the time say it’s on your personal good—‘We’re making issues extra protected’—They usually in all probability imagine it.” He pauses for a very long time. “State-controlled media,” he says lastly, “is state-controlled media.”
Completely happy to Block
Huffman cofounded Reddit in 2005 along with his school roommate Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz, a internet freedom icon who died in 2013. Now, Huffman appears to be like again with amusement on the web site’s early harmless days, when the founders’ first two moderation quandries had been whether or not customers had been allowed to make use of swear phrases or to criticize Reddit. “They appear like such simple choices proper now,” Huffman says. “There have been, like, three racist posts throughout these first two years, and I simply deleted them.”
Except for an occasional intervention by the founders or the volunteer moderators who create and police subreddits, Reddit let just about something go on its platform throughout its early years. There have been solely a handful of guidelines, or rules, that every one Redditors had been anticipated to abide by: Doxxing was not OK, and incitement to violence was finally banned. However for a lot of the subsequent decade, Reddit was a uncommon common platform that didn’t present even rhetorical curiosity in eliminating its darkest areas. In 2006, the founders offered the positioning to Condé Nast, which additionally owns WIRED, and Huffman left in 2009. (Reddit later grew to become an unbiased firm, with Condé Nast mother or father Advance Publications remaining a shareholder.)
It’s exhausting to pinpoint Reddit’s nadir, however by the point Huffman returned as CEO in July 2015, it was a spot the place white supremacists brazenly used racial slurs within the names of their subreddits; QAnon adherents had thriving properties; and misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia weren’t simply frequent, however concepts round which customers organized giant communities. True, these cesspools coexisted with huge subreddits for gamers of Pokémon Go, houseplant fans, and folks in ethical quandaries asking the web “Am I the Asshole?” However whereas Reddit wasn’t fairly 4Chan, it was 4Chan-adjacent.
Huffman got here again to Reddit within the midst of a firestorm. The earlier CEO, Ellen Pao, had tried and failed to wash up the positioning, and her departure helped draw mainstream media consideration to the platform’s grimmer areas. Inside weeks of his return, the positioning started quarantining the worst subreddits, making them tougher to seek out and including warnings that they included offensive content material. Communities the place threats of violence had been frequent, together with r/rapingwomen, had been banned, however some giant, brazenly racist boards, together with r/coontown, weren’t. “The content material there may be offensive to many however doesn’t violate our present guidelines for banning,” Huffman said in an Ask Me Anything on the time. A month later, the foundations modified once more, and r/coontown was faraway from the positioning, together with a number of different brazenly hateful subreddits.
Within the years that adopted, Reddit grew to become progressively harder in performing towards communities that pushed the boundaries of acceptability, even the place it meant making choices that had been politically controversial. In 2016, Reddit banned r/PizzaGate—a QAnon-driven subreddit that propagated the conspiracy principle {that a} cabal of pedophiles led by Hilary Clinton carried out Satanic rituals within the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria—for breaching its insurance policies on doxxing.
Then, in June 2019, Reddit quarantined r/TheDonald, which since its founding when Donald Trump introduced his presidential marketing campaign had turn out to be a focus for Trump supporters but in addition attracted conspiracy theories and white supremacist content material—together with help for the homicide of Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a far-right terrorist in 2019. Moderators habitually promoted posts supporting white supremacist causes, together with for the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The subreddit peaked at slightly below 800,000 customers however was banned in 2020. (Leaked documents from a Russian intelligence company would later present that Russia had tried to spice up divisive content material on the Trump subreddit.)
