First In a 20-minute conversation, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, the sixth most-visited website in the United States, said he has a good impression of being a tech executive in the 2020s. “Our mission is to bring a sense of community belonging and empowerment to everyone around the world,” he said at one point.
But I ask Mr. Huffman about regulations. The U.S. government is increasingly figuring out how to rein in extremist content, viral falsehoods, and conspiracy theories that cross the thin line from social media to Meatspace and lead to violence and political discourse that mirrors 4Chan’s language and discourse. I’m looking for something. A case before the U.S. 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, who accuse them of censoring conservative views, and from the left, who say they are doing too little to prevent the erosion of democratic norms.
Mr. Huffman, nervous for a moment, leans forward. “Governments and elites, whatever they want to say, will always blame someone else before they blame themselves,” he says. Huffman is coming into his own, even though his PR rep (Reddit has one) intervened and gave him a three-minute warning to end the interview. “That’s what I’m really afraid of. Not just because of the company I work for. But for democracy,” he says. “Ironically, those who complain about the death of democracy are likely to be the ones who kill it, taking power away from the people and centralizing it in government.”
He then spoke about the spread of “memory holes” and prison conditions, his belief that theories dismissed as misinformation often turn out to be true, and governments seeking to control what gets published online. I will talk about how this attempt is tantamount to authoritarianism. Huffman argues that the U.S. government’s proposal to regulate social media platforms would shut down free speech.
“Literally, we’re talking about state media,” he says. “There’s no state that controls the media because they think it’s not noble. They always say it’s for their own good, they say, ‘We’re making things safer,’ and they probably believe that. He pauses for a long time. “State media is state media,” he says at the end.
I’ll happily block you
Huffman co-founded Reddit in 2005 with his college roommate Alexis Ohanian. Huffman now looks back on the site’s innocent early days with amusement. At the time, the founder’s first two moderation concerns were whether users would be allowed to use profane language and criticize his Reddit. “It seems like a pretty easy decision at this point,” Huffman said. “There were about three racist posts of his in his first two years, which I deleted.”
Aside from occasional interference from its founders and volunteer moderators who created and policed subreddits, Reddit had free access to almost everything on the platform in its early years. There were only a few rules and principles that all her Redditors were expected to adhere to. The leaking of personal information was not allowed, and incitement to violence was ultimately banned. But for the next decade, Reddit was a rare and popular platform that showed no even rhetorical interest in weeding out its darkest areas. In 2006, the founders sold the site to Condé Nast, which also owns WIRED, and Huffman left the company in 2009. (Reddit later became an independent company, with Condé Nast’s parent company Advance Publications remaining as a shareholder.) ).
It’s hard to pinpoint Reddit’s lowest point, but by the time Huffman returned as CEO in July 2015, Reddit had become a place where white supremacists openly used racial slurs in the names of their subreddits. It had become. Supporters of the conspiracy theory had wealthy homes. And misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia weren’t just common; they were ideas for users to organize large communities. Admittedly, these cesspools are a big draw for Pokemon Go players, houseplant enthusiasts, and people in moral predicaments who ask the Internet question, “Am I an asshole?” It coexisted with a large subreddit. But Reddit wasn’t exactly his 4Chan, but it was 4Chan-adjacent.
Huffman returned to Reddit during a firestorm. Former CEO Ellen Pao tried unsuccessfully to clean up the site, and her departure focused mainstream media attention on the platform’s tougher areas. Within weeks of his 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 such as r/rape, which rapes women, were common were banned, but some large, openly racist forums such as r/Coontown were not banned. “While the content there is offensive to many people, it does not violate current rules regarding bans,” Huffman said on 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 increasingly tough on communities that pushed the boundaries of tolerance, even if it meant making politically controversial decisions. . In 2016, Reddit removed r/Pizzagate, a QAnon-led subreddit that spread the conspiracy theory that a cabal of pedophiles led by Hillary Clinton conducted satanic rituals in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, to private individuals. It was banned for violating the policy regarding information leaks.
Reddit then quarantined r/TheDonald in June 2019. The site, which has been a focus for Trump supporters since it was founded when Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, has been linked to conspiracy theories and white supremacy, including support for the murder of Muslims in Christchurch. The content was also appealing. Moderators habitually promoted posts supporting white supremacist causes, such as the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The subreddit peaked at just under 800,000 users, but was banned in 2020 (later, leaked documents from Russian intelligence revealed that Russia had posted divisive content on Trump’s subreddit). It turned out that he was trying to increase it).