FOR THE FIRST 20 minutes of our conversation, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, the sixth most-visited website in the US, does a good impression of a 2020s tech executive. “Our mission,” he says at one point, “is to bring community belonging and empowerment to everyone in the world.”
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 breached the thin boundaries from social media into meatspace, leading to violence and a political discourse that’s inflected with the language and narratives of 4Chan. A case before the US Supreme Court is testing the protections afforded to Big Tech companies as platforms, rather than publishers. Social media companies face attacks from the political right, which accuses them of censoring conservative views, and from the left, which says they’re doing too little to prevent the erosion of democratic norms.
Huffman, who has been tensing up for a while, leans in. “Government, elites—whatever you want to say—will always blame somebody else before they blame themselves,” he says. His handler from the public relations department—Reddit has one of those—interjects to give a three-minute warning for the end of the interview, but Huffman is just hitting his stride. “It’s something I’m really scared about. Not just because of the company I work on. But for democracy,” he says. “The irony is that people complaining about the death of democracy are likely going to be the killers of democracy, taking power from people and centralizing it in 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 published online is tantamount to authoritarianism. US government proposals to regulate social media platforms, Huffman contends, would shut down free speech.
“Literally, we’re talking about state-controlled media,” he says. “There’s no state that controls media thinking they’re not being noble. They always say it’s for your own good—‘We’re making things more safe’—And they probably believe it.” He pauses for a long time. “State-controlled media,” he says finally, “is state-controlled media.”
Happy to Block
Huffman cofounded Reddit in 2005 with his college roommate Alexis Ohanian. Now, Huffman looks back with amusement at the site’s early innocent days, when the founders’ first two moderation quandries were whether users were allowed to use swear words or to 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 police subreddits, Reddit let pretty much anything go on 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 OK, and incitement to violence was eventually banned. But for much of the next decade, Reddit was a rare popular platform that didn’t show even rhetorical interest in getting rid of its darkest 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, with Condé Nast parent Advance Publications remaining a shareholder.)
It’s hard to pinpoint Reddit’s nadir, but by the time Huffman returned as CEO in July 2015, it was a place where white supremacists openly used racial slurs in the names of their subreddits; conspiracy theory adherents had thriving homes; and misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia weren’t just common, but ideas around which users organized large communities. True, these cesspools coexisted with massive subreddits for players of Pokémon Go, houseplant enthusiasts, and people in moral quandaries asking the internet “Am I the Asshole?” But while Reddit wasn’t quite 4Chan, it was 4Chan-adjacent.
Reddit got progressively tougher on communities that pushed the boundaries of acceptability.
Huffman came back to Reddit in the midst of a firestorm. The previous CEO, Ellen Pao, had tried and failed to clean up the site, and her departure helped draw mainstream media attention to the platform’s grimmer spaces. Within weeks of his return, the site began quarantining the worst subreddits, making them harder to find and adding warnings that they included offensive content. Communities where threats of violence were common, including r/rapingwomen, were banned, but some large, openly racist forums, including r/coontown, were not. “The content there is offensive to many but does not violate our current rules for banning,” 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 acting against communities that pushed the boundaries of acceptability, even where it meant making decisions that were politically controversial. In 2016, Reddit banned r/PizzaGate—a QAnon-driven subreddit that propagated the conspiracy theory that a cabal of pedophiles led by Hilary Clinton performed Satanic rituals in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria—for breaching its policies on doxxing.
Then, in June 2019, Reddit quarantined r/TheDonald, which since its founding when Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign had become a focal point for Trump supporters but 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 habitually promoted posts supporting 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 show that Russia had attempted to boost divisive content on the Trump subreddit.)
“There have been multiple big moments, and that was one of them,” Huffman says of shutting down r/TheDonald. Such moments hinge around a conflict of values, he says, “almost always freedom of speech and expression on one side and safety on the other.” Historically, Reddit would have instinctively erred on the side of freedom of speech. But now the site’s management sees that there are compromises to be made.
More recently, Huffman says he and his team have become more comfortable acting against people who test the boundaries of the platform’s policies, posting content that almost but doesn’t quite break the rules. “One thing we developed over the last few years is we have a lot more courage to call that out,” he says—Reddit is increasingly happy to ban, block, or delete a user, or post a policy and then change it afterward. Huffman is also trying to encourage more users to report problem content, including by improving the process for flagging nonconsensual sexualization, which he judged to be forcing victims to go through a humiliating and complex process to report images or videos posted without their consent.
Tighter rules mean that Reddit isn’t what it used to be—that’s probably a good thing.
Researchers who study hate speech and moderation on social media have looked at Reddit’s quarantines and bans and concluded that they have worked. Unsurprisingly, if you ban Nazis from your platform, you end up with fewer Nazis on your platform. “These are pretty, you know, commonsense, straightforward things to do,” says Eric Gilbert, an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan who has studied the quarantining of r/TheDonald. With a host of caveats, he also says that Reddit has improved the community on its platform and made some significant calls. “These would have been kind of unthinkable moderation decisions in 2015, 2016.”
Tighter rules means that Reddit isn’t what it used to be, and that’s probably a good thing. You can still find misogyny, transphobia, and conspiracy theories, as on any large platform. But stripped back to the pre-Nazi message board feel, with guardrails to stop the darkest content encroaching, much of the site feels familiar and comforting for early millennial internet users—largely wholesome, consciously strange, filled with ironic shitposting, earnest advice, and adverts for health drinks. There’s one subreddit with more than 300,000 members that’s just pictures of bread stapled to trees. It’s called r/breadstapledtotrees and while it’s not the most active of communities, six years after it was created it’s still going. “I’m trying to stay positive through some things right now and stapling a tortilla to this tree makes me happy,” one user posted last month.
Control is also better for the bottom line. As Twitter has found out since Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022, taking off the guard rails for the most aggressive and offensive users of your platform can alienate some would-be advertisers. There’s an edge-of-the seat itchiness to Huffman as we talk moderation, but talk of the financial upside seems to release him.
“Yes! Thank you!” Huffman almost shouts, straightening up in his chair and throwing his arms out. “Tech companies often will get accused of putting profits ahead of doing the right thing, or morals or whatever. And I can’t speak for the other platforms, but for us, doing the right thing is aligned with our business. People getting harassed and abused is bad for business, right? Pissing off advertisers is bad for business.”
Mid-2000s Redditor
Huffman met WIRED in a London WeWork in a former church that has the words “Enter, Rest and Pray” above the door. The lobby space is, like Reddit, a throwback to an earlier vision of tech; low pastel sofas, fridges, and the tick-tick of a pingpong game in play feel antediluvian at a moment of layoffs and cutbacks across the industry. (Huffman says Reddit has cut an unspecified number of roles this year in a “performance management exercise,” but that the company’s headcount will grow in 2023.)
Throughout the interview, there have been flashes of Huffman’s slightly more radical, early-Reddit side. We talk briefly about r/WallStreetBets, the subreddit that effectively created the meme-stock movement, as Redditors pushed stock in the video game retailer GameStop to more than 100 times its value, wiping out a couple of short-selling hedge funds. Some small traders made a lot of money, but others sustained losses. Does Reddit have any responsibility to act when people do risky things because of content they see on its platform?
“People are allowed to make risky decisions,” Huffman says. “There is this idea that the government knows best, the elites know best, that people shouldn’t be allowed to XYZ. They shouldn’t be allowed to make stock trades, they shouldn’t be allowed to short things. They shouldn’t even be allowed to have opinions.” It’s government, not the people, he says, “that’s always consistently wrong.”
Even if Reddit doesn’t think it bears responsibility for the offline impacts of content on its platform, others do. In February, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in a case brought against Google by the victim of a terrorist attack in Paris, alleging that the perpetrator was radicalized by videos recommended to him by YouTube’s algorithms. The case challenges the protections that tech companies have in the US under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that platforms can’t be held responsible for content posted by their users.
Reddit filed an amicus brief in support of Google, arguing that striking or weakening Section 230 protections would leave Reddit mods—people who voluntarily manage subreddits in their spare time—legally responsible for content posted by other users, making the platform’s model unworkable. The filing featured various mods, including the curator of the horse-centric subreddit r/Equestrian, as amici.
That threat to what makes Reddit work may explain why Huffman is so exercised over what he sees as state overreach. But, I ask, does any level of regulation over what platforms can and can’t allow really equate to the state seizing control of the media?
“I think when the government is saying what you can and can’t say, that is a problem,” he says. It’s a blandly libertarian sentiment. But Huffman isn’t done. As he reaches full flow, he adopts the absolutism of—well, of a mid-2000s Redditor. “Almost everything where our governments and mainstream media have lost their minds over misinformation, it’s turned out the opposite was true,” he says.
(Huffman’s distrust of government taking any interest in media regulation isn’t unique in Silicon Valley. A few weeks after Huffman and I spoke, Twitter CEO Elon Musk slapped “state-funded media” labels on the accounts of National Public Radio in the US and the BBC in the UK, putting the independent news organizations in the same bracket as propaganda mouthpieces like China’s Xinhua or Russia’s RT.)
"Almost everything our governments and media have lost their minds over as misinformation, it’s turned out the opposite was true.”
STEVE HUFFMAN, REDDIT CEO
When he talks uninterrupted at length, Huffman tacks again toward the fringes of what might, in the hated mainstream media, be thought of as the boundaries of rational discourse. His earlier references to “elites” echo language popular within the “meta-narratives” that unify a spectrum of conspiracy theories from the “Great Reset” to QAnon, and he uses a rhetorical trick that’s common in those communities—using an incomplete truth to buttress an attack on a widely held consensus.
“Look at everything our governments were so convinced of about Covid—that it’s so dangerous, even racist, to suggest that it came from a lab,” he says. “Look where we are now. Those very same people are saying it probably came from a lab.”
The theory that the Covid-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from a Chinese research facility is not endorsed by a majority of the scientific community, and this shift in direction takes Huffman into dangerous territory. Reddit was slower than other platforms to act against Covid misinformation, banning some of the most prolific spreaders of such content in September 2021 after the mods of dozens of subreddits, including r/instant_regret, and r/PokemonGo, both of which have more than 4 million subscribers, staged a “go dark” protest, shutting down until Reddit agreed to kick off antivax communities like r/NoNewNormal. Before Reddit capitulated to the protests, Huffman wrote a wordy post rejecting demands to quash vaccine disinformation and calling on Redditors to have “empathy, compassion, and a willingness to understand what others are going through.”
It might feel like a leap from Covid lockdowns to state-controlled media, but in libertarian circles—and the online spaces where conspiracy theories evolve—these exist on a spectrum. State control is state control, they argue, and whether it’s telling you to stay home during a pandemic or censoring your social media, it’s to be feared.
“Go to China, they have a very different view of what they think Covid was, or what happened and, they’re probably just going to memory-hole the whole prison state they lived in for the last two years,” Huffman says. “But that’s state-controlled media. And it’s funny because our government wants to memory-hole the prison state they wanted us to be living in. So I think the centralized control of thought is not the solution.”
The problem, he seems to be saying, isn’t what’s on the internet; it’s everything else. In a world of misinformation, Reddit—with its tortillas stapled to trees, its absolute_units and crowdsourced morality—is, according to Huffman, reality. “One of the early ideas of Reddit is, like, this world is manicured and controlled and fake and misleading,” he says. “And so we’re trying to build a place that’s more authentic.”
Weeks on, as QAnon hardliners herald Trump’s arraignment for allegedly making hush money payments to an adult film star as the beginning of “The Storm;” accusations spread that Bill Gates engineered egg shortages to weaken society through a lack of protein; and an antivaxxer who believes Beyoncé is converting kids to Paganism rises in the Republican Party, it’s hard not to think Huffman is half-right. The world is increasingly fake and misleading; whether Reddit’s an authentic reflection of that or a coconspirator in making it so is a question for the censors.
Updated 04/17/2023, 1:15 pm ET: An earlier version of this story stated that Aaron Swartz was a cofounder of Reddit. Swartz was involved in the development of the platform, but was not a cofounder. It also mis-stated the date that QAnon conspiracies began appearing on Reddit.
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