Reddit CEO Confirms Racial Slurs Are Just Fine On His Site

Reddit CEO Confirms Racial Slurs Are Just Fine On His Site

In the midst of Mark Zuckerberg’s hours-long testimony before the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, Reddit dropped its 2017 transparency report. It contained a list of nearly 1000 user accounts the company believed were involved with the Russia-backed Internet Research Agency – and unlike Tumblr, Reddit has also preserved those banned accounts’ posts for review by any user. But the more alarming admission was made by CEO Steve Huffman in the comments below.

CEO Steve Huffman. Photo: Cody Glenn (Flickr)

“I need clarification on something,” a user asked. “Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against reddits rules or not?”

Huffman replied from his Reddit account, “It’s not.”

It’s a strong admission and one Huffman was under no obligation to make, although it’s consistent with the site’s ethos. Reddit typically opts for narrow enforcement – taking action against specific users rather than whole communities no matter how distasteful. Likewise, its definition of harassment appears to be limited to actions taken against a specific user over several interactions.

Granted, whether or not the use of a racial slur is harassment is dependent on context (it could just be regular racism!), and individual communities can and do enforce internal rules on Reddit against this sort of behaviour. But the site as a whole does not have a policy on hate speech. To put into context what a glaring omission this is, here’s an incomplete list of platforms and services with some form of policy that either prohibits the use of hate speech, or limits its acceptability to extremely specific circumstances.

To wit: Facebook and Instagram; Twitter; Google+, Google AdSense, Google Play, Blogger and YouTube; Tumblr; Snapchat; LinkedIn; Pinterest; MySpace; Yahoo; Microsoft, Xbox Live and Bing Ads; Steam; Playstation Network; Nintendo; Disqus; Amazon and Twitch; eBay; Imgur; Pornhub; GitHub; Yelp; Wikia; Wikipedia; and Apple’s App Store.

Does that list sound as though it describes the overwhelming majority of the modern internet? It does! And of the top sites in the US not listed, many either assume common sense on the part of their users’ candour (Craigslist’s broader language around “offensive, obscene, defamatory, threatening, or malicious postings or email”) or don’t have social functions for people to abuse (such as IMDB, which shuttered its forums over a year ago.)

“On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behavior from beliefs. This means on Reddit there will be people with beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so. When users actions conflict with our content policies, we take action,” Huffman added, though the clarification seems largely academic, since the means of determining a user’s beliefs is almost entirely reliant on their behaviour in posts and comments.

Reddit’s commitment to being “a bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web” is documented, although lately the company has been making a number of concessions, revising its policies to reflect the social and legal realities of life online in 2018. Changes in recent months have taken aim at removing communities centred around sex work, extremism, drug use and gift exchanges, among other interests. It’s unclear if hate speech – something other platforms have come strongly under fire for failing to prevent – is something the fourth largest site in the US intends to take action against as part of its campaign to prove its maturation.

We’ve reached out to Reddit to learn if Huffman accurately represented the site’s current policy, or if this policy will see an update in the near future.


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