For the primary 20 minutes of our dialog, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, the sixth most-visited web site within the US, does a superb impression of a 2020s tech government. “Our mission,” he says at one level, “is to bring community belonging and empowerment to everyone in the world.”

But 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 Court is testing the protections afforded to Big Tech companies as platforms, fairly 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 forestall the erosion of democratic norms.

Huffman, who has been tensing up for some time, leans in. “Government, elites—whatever you want to say—will always blame somebody else before they blame themselves,” he says. His handler from the general public relations division—Reddit has a type of—interjects to provide a three-minute warning for the tip of the interview, however Huffman is simply 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 speak concerning the unfold of “memory holes” and jail states, his perception that theories dismissed as misinformation typically change into true, and the way any authorities try to regulate what’s revealed on-line is tantamount to authoritarianism. US authorities proposals to manage 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 very long time. “State-controlled media,” he says lastly, “is state-controlled media.”

Happy to Block

Huffman cofounded Reddit in 2005 together with his faculty roommate Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz, a internet freedom icon who died in 2013. Now, Huffman seems to be 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 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 just about something go on its platform throughout its early years. There had been solely a handful of guidelines, or ideas, that each one Redditors had been anticipated to abide by: Doxxing was not OK, and incitement to violence was ultimately banned. But for a lot of the following decade, Reddit was a uncommon fashionable 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 father or mother Advance Publications remaining a shareholder.)

It’s arduous 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 fanatics, and folks in ethical quandaries asking the web “Am I the Asshole?” But 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. Within weeks of his return, the positioning started quarantining the worst subreddits, making them more durable to search 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 there is offensive to many but does not violate our current rules 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.

In the years that adopted, Reddit grew to become progressively harder in performing in opposition to 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 concept {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 change into a focus for Trump supporters but additionally attracted conspiracy theories and white supremacist content material—together with assist 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.)