For the first time 20 minutes into 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 at one point, “is to bringing everyone in the world to community and empowerment.”
But then I ask Huffman about regulation. The US government is increasingly looking for ways to rein in the extremist content, viral falsehoods and conspiracy theories that have crossed the thin lines of social media into meat space, leading to violence and a political discourse inflected with the language and narratives from 4Chan. A US Supreme Court case tests the protections afforded to Big Tech companies as platforms, rather than publishers. Social media companies are under attack from the political right, which accuses them of censoring conservative views, and the left, which says it is doing too little to prevent the erosion of democratic norms.
Huffman, who has been tense for some time, leans in. “Government, elites — whatever you want to say — will always blame someone else before blaming themselves,” he says. His supervisor from the public relations department — Reddit has one of those — steps in to issue a three-minute warning before the end of the interview, but Huffman is just getting going. “It’s something I’m really afraid of. Not just because of the company I work for. But for democracy,’ he says. “The irony is that people who complain about the death of democracy are likely to be the killers of democracy, taking power from people and centralizing it in government.”
He will later talk about the proliferation of “memory holes” and prison states, his belief that theories dismissed as disinformation often turn out to be true, and how any attempt by the government to control what is published online amounts to authoritarianism. Proposals by the US government to regulate social media platforms, Huffman argues, would curtail freedom of expression.
“Literally, we are talking about state-controlled media,” he says. “There is no state that controls the media and thinks they are not noble. They always say it’s for your own good – ‘We’re making it safer’ – and they probably believe it.’ He pauses for a long time. “State-controlled media,” he 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 on the site’s early innocent days, when the founders’ first two temperance issues were whether users could use swear words or criticize Reddit. “It seems like such easy decisions right now,” says Huffman. “There were three racist posts in those first two years and I just deleted them.”
Barring the occasional intervention of the founders or the volunteer moderators who create and control subreddits, Reddit pretty much let loose on its platform in its early years. There were only a handful of rules or principles that all Redditors had to abide by: Doxxing was not OK, and incitement to violence was eventually outlawed. But for much of the next decade, Reddit was a rare popular platform that didn’t even show rhetorical interest in getting rid of its darkest spaces. In 2006, the founders sold the site to Condé Nast, who also owns WIRED, and Huffman left in 2009. (Reddit later became an independent company, with Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, remaining a shareholder.)
It’s hard to pinpoint Reddit’s low point, but by the time Huffman returned as CEO in July 2015, it was a place where white supremacists were openly using racial slurs in the names of their subreddits; conspiracy theorists had thriving homes; and misogyny, homophobia and transphobia were not just commonplace, but ideas around which users organized large communities. Admittedly, these cesspools coexisted with massive subreddits for Pokémon Go players, houseplant enthusiasts, and those in moral dilemmas asking the Internet, “Am I the asshole?” But while Reddit wasn’t quite 4Chan, it was 4Chan-adjacent.
Huffman came back to Reddit in the middle of a firestorm. The previous CEO, Ellen Pao, had tried to clean up the site but was unsuccessful, and her departure helped focus mainstream media attention on the grittier 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 contain offensive content. Communities regularly threatened with violence, including r/rapingwomen, were banned, but some major openly racist forums, including r/coontown, were not. “The content there is offensive to many, but it doesn’t 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 increasingly harsh on communities that pushed the boundaries of acceptability, even if it meant making decisions that were politically controversial. In 2016, Reddit banned r/PizzaGate — a QAnon-powered subreddit promoting the conspiracy theory that a cabal of pedophiles led by Hilary Clinton was performing satanic rituals in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria — for violating its doxxing policy.
Then, in June 2019, Reddit quarantined r/TheDonald, which had become a focus for Trump supporters since its inception when Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, but also attracted conspiracy theories and white supremacist content, including support for the assassination on Muslims in Christchurch. , New Zealand, by a far-right terrorist in 2019. Moderators commonly promoted posts in support of white supremacist causes, including for the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The subreddit peaked at just under 800,000 users, but was banned in 2020. (Leaked documents from a Russian intelligence agency would later reveal that Russia had attempted to promote divisive content on the Trump subreddit.)
