Reddit's CEO on Fake News and Free Speech

its co founders, Steve Huffman. We taped this podcast in front of a live audience at the wonderful Aspen Ideas Festival. I love this festival. I've come every year, I think for the past decades, so clearly it's one of my favorites. Now many, if not most, of the people who use Reddit are in their teens and twenties. So for my peers and others who may not be that familiar with it, let me get you up to speed. Reddit is a site that's made up of lots of different communities called

sub reddits, where people can post articles, videos, thoughts. The sky's the limit really, and there are actually over a million subreddits devoted to everything from world news to crafts to life hacks like how do you get abs? Like Brian Goldsmith answers it's very hard, very funny. The site actually has remarkably simple interface, almost dated really, And I was very excited to talk to Steve Reddit CEO because the site has found itself in the crosshairs of some

very thorny issues these days. So we spoke with Steve about everything from fake news to Russian bods, to pizza gate to hate speech, and we started by asking how would he describe Reddit? Even at Reddit, this is something we debate a lot of what redd it is and how to explain Reddit to folks, but effectively read it as a network of communities. And so we have communities that cover pretty much any topic imaginable. So things that that are very recognizable, so news, sports, politics, um, pretty

much any interest and passion. And birds with arms is would be up there. Um birds with arms as a community where one photoshops arms on the birds. Um. No, it's this is important stuff. I'm glad you're here. Um. And then we also have communities. Um uh, excuse me, I cleaned myself this morning. I have a hairball. Um. Communities uh dedicated to UH support in helping each other out.

Some communities for new parents who are maybe struggling with that, our communities for people are struggling with addiction or other difficult times in their life. And so really any topic around UH, you know, the things that humans will gather around a communicate around, is represented on Reddit somewhere. And so our mission Reddit is to bring UH community in a sense of belonging to everybody on the planet. So since people in this room no offense to you, all

may not be read it's demographic. Who is Rennet's demographic? And why do you think it caught fire so quickly at the outset? Sure, so uh you all are are maybe not our primary demographic, but um we read it is broad enough now that that pretty much everybody has represented on Reddit somewhere. So I guarantee all of you have a home on Reddit somewhere the way Redd has grown our origin. So we're thirteen years old. We started

in two thousand five. My college roommate and I started read it immediately after we graduated, and at the time read it was just a pile of links, no categorization, no communities, no no commenting even and what what made redd at work. Then it was very, very serendipitous. And the reason we grew is because both those that serendipity, you never knew what you're gonna find. You're gonna find

some politics, Are you're gonna find an Internet meme? Are you going to find commentary critical of Reddit or something else? And it was very genuine and authentic, and we resonated with I think I think a generation of people who had just become kind of skeptical and jaded of of everything, right, of all media, of news, of Anything's just this feeling of like everything is bullshit, I'm always being lied to, And so we still have that aspect to read it, and so we still um pick up users in high

school and college. I think when when when young adults are turning into adults and they're starting to develop kind of worldviews and skepticism and critical thinking, read it is a great place for them. But then we tend to keep them, you know, and and and so we're thirteen years old now, so I would say our our media age is probably you know, let's call it three, but

our average age is increasing over time. So people who want kind of an outlet to express their views and to share it with other people are attracted to read it. But like all of their social platforms, you all have been going through your fair share of controversy, and we're gonna talk about some of the challenges that you all had faced as a platform in a moment. But first we want to talk about how this whole thing began.

You started Reddit. You and your college roommate founded the company just a few weeks after graduating from the University of Virginia back in two thousand five. So how did you come up with the idea? Well, almost accidentally, my roommate Alexis Hanion and I we we have been roommates and housemates all through college, and on our last year of college, we started talking about companies that we might

start together. And at the same time an idol of mine, this fellow Paul Graham, who he started a company of his own that sold during the bubble, and he would write online evangelizing startups and and his whole journey, and he eventually founded why comminat So he started by Combinator, which at the time was a kind of a rag tag group of investors and is now the largest siege stage investment firm in the world. They do about four companies a year. Back in two thousand five, we applied

to y C with a completely different idea. I had to do with ordering food from from your cell phone. We were wisely rejected this first one. Yes, yeah, it was an idea actually ahead of its time. Um uh. But but Paul and his partner Jessica basically reached out to us and said, we really like you too. If you want to be in this program, let's find something

else for you to do. So we had a brainstorming session and in that session we basically decided we were going to build I have this on my first page and notes, We're going to build a front page of the Internet. And that's something we used to say tongue in cheek back then um, and I always say it um,

I think somewhat somewhat proudly now. But that was really the genesis of the idea and our motivation in those those first months was I didn't want to look stupid in front of Paul Graham, and I didn't want my mom to be right because she wanted me to get a real job. And I was going up to Boston to work with this weirdo Paul on this on this Reddit thing. Fun fact, by the way, we like to sprinkle our podcast with these. Your co founder, Alexis you

just mentioned, is now married to Serena Williams. That's pretty cool. That is a fun fact. Do you and your wife ever double date with them? I am no longer married. Well that do you ever go out as a threesome? Let's not misinterpret that question. Okay, do you ever tagal on ever the third Wheel? Uh? No, very very seldomly Alexis and Serna, I have honestly no idea where in the world they are at any point in time. But you're still good friends with Alexis. We've been friends a

long time. Yeah. Well, let's talk about after you launched the company, because it was seventeen months later and you sold it to Conde Nast of all places. You have said that you regretted that decision. Why, well, I have said that, and I've also backtracked off of that. I've in fact changed my story on this a lot over the years, you know, as it serves me, and really in gendering trust there, mostly with perspective. So the context in which we sold the company, this was in two

thousand six. As I mentioned, when we started the company, we didn't have a vision or a mission. We were a little dysfunctional. We didn't know where we were going. The economy wasn't looking pretty on the horizon. And along came Conde and asked offering to give us a bunch of money for this thing, and so we said, well, this seems like a pretty good idea, and and it's funny.

I went into that acquisition with the mentality of I thought I was going to have the stereotypical Silicon Valley startup journey, which is founder starts, company, founder sales, company, founder leaves two weeks later. I end up staying for another three years. I really really enjoyed working on Reddit, and I left in two thousand nine because for a couple of reasons. One, I felt stagnant um. I felt like as a person I wasn't learning and growing, and I felt like I was too young to have that

feeling at work. And it's any when I look back in that time, I think that's like just absolutely insane, right, because now I just feel like I have so much to learn and I'm like so far behind. But at the time that's how I felt. I also, uh, I liked perspective. I didn't realize I didn't appreciate how special red it was. It was the only thing we had ever done, and and and so I had this perspective that if you put something online, it'll just grow and

and and that was my experience with thout it. So I was like, well, I want to do something else

that just grows, but this time actually makes money. So I started a company with another buddy called hip Monk, which did travel search and hip Monk was interesting because we were not burdened with growth um and and so that was a really good set of lessons I learned there in that time, and actually as as as a as a business person, learned a lot of really important lessons about how to be discipline, about customers and product development and growing a team and shrinking a team at

the same time. Right, it continued to grow and grow and grow, and during this period when you were off working on hip Monk, credit was still growing. It hired Ellen Powell to be the CEO, and she was famous, of course pursuing Kleiner Perkins, the venture firm for gender discrimination, and when Pal got to read it, she took a number of tough, tough steps. She banned revenge porn. For example, she banned five sub credits that engaged in various forms

of harassment. About two users signed a petition asking her to leave, which ultimately she did with the benefit of hindsight. Do you think that she was treated unfairly at Reddit? Do I? I? You know, I think Ellen had a rough go at a readit um, some within her control and some knots. And but I think that the general criticisms of of of Ellen, both from the Reddit community

and from the kind of just greater community, we're really unfair. UM. Having been on the receiving end of that myself as well, I I know what that feels like. Um. Do you think the criticisms were motivated by gender? I think there was that dimension to it, And certainly I think when you also look at it through the lens of her very public lawsuit against Kleiner, that that only served to amplify that that narrative, and I think that was really unfortunate in light of a me too movement. Do you

look at what happened to her any differently? Have you had an epiphany or did you always feel that this was unfair. No. I always felt that way, you know, and study because when when she was going through that, I was not at Reddit. I was I was a civilian. I was a user watching this, and it was very frustrating to watch from a couple of dimensions. Right one

as somebody who knows Reddit really well. I was like, oh my gosh, there are things you just need to do that I think you can get ahead of this because one of the things we we saw is or always I observed from the outside, and I think Ellen was starting to get there. It's the the volume of the the vitriol was not in proportion to the number of people behind it, and that, to me is a technology problem, and that's something I read it. We've always thought a lot about, and this is something that I've

always thought a lot about. So watching that was particularly frustrating cause I was like, there are some solutions here. At the same time, it was the that whole conversation was just I think, very unproductive and toxic and and I don't I don't know if we really got anywhere with it, to be honest, either, Silicon Valley is you know, has an abysmal record on gender and racial equality. So you know, having done this company, what what kinds of things can be put in place that will change that

or improve it? Yeah, I would say you're you're not wrong, and I think on the history of Silicon Valley on the the silver lining, however, is that it is impossible to have a conversation in Silicon Value where this topic does not come up. Um, And I think, uh, we and I say we, as somebody you know from from that area, are very aware of this issue, and I think that's probably one of the most important steps to take.

And so, um, I think we're trending in the right direction, but I think we also have a long way to go. So do you think real policy initiatives will follow that greater awareness? Now, it depends what you mean by policy initiatives. And if we're talking about I think a massive problem like gender equality is going to take probably policy changes, just awareness changes, cultural changes. There's a generational aspect to

it as well. There's a lot of things that have to happen, and you know, regulation is one part of that. So in two thousand fifteen, six years after you left, you came back to read it as the CEO, and you were soon confronted by a number of controversies, and I want to talk about a couple of them. The first was pizza Gate, and I don't know whether you all are familiar with this crazy and false story, but it started on Facebook and Twitter in October of UM.

The allegation basically was that Hillary and some people close to her operated a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor called Comet Pizza in d C. Which would be laughable, um, except that the sort of fake news had real consequences when a man named Edgar Welch from North Carolina showed up at Comet with an a R fifteen to rescue the kids, the sex slaves who were trapped in the basement, only to find that there were no kids and no basement. Um. And this was

on Reddit to both before and after the election. So the bottom line is it could have been a real tragedy. Do you ever feel like, as the founder of this platform, it's the CEO of this platform, Oh my god, I created a monster. No, not quite in that dimention. You know. Pizza Gate was the community that that we saw develop on Reddit, and we banned it after about two weeks, long before the the incident with the the gentleman in

the pizza parlor. Um. And we do watch these things very closely because while I don't think we want to be in a position where we say conspiracy theories are not allowed, right, because sometimes conspiracy theories end up be being something um, But we do watch, especially in these fringe communities, um, where is the where is the conversation going,

what direction is it heading? And with that one in particular, we saw it going in a bad place, and it was also easily disproven, and so that's why we got rid of them as quickly as we did, and I think we were one of the first to do so. But could something like this happen again on Reddit? You know, obviously the human awareness of this is not infallible. So do you worry that this kind of situation, this kind of inform misinformation can get out of control and lead

to something that may have far worse consequences. I do think this sort of thing can happen in any place where people congregate and misinformation is uh, you know, it's it's a real threat and it's a it's a real thing that we all face on Reddit and and anywhere

else online or offline for that matter. And you know, I think one of the you know, we will do our our our best to do our partner, but I also think there is a collective burden we all have as a as a people to be skeptical and to push back on these stories, UM because you know, as a as a private company or even an individual, we're not always going to know all of the facts or be able to see everything. So we will do our

best on our platform. And and in fact, we have a number of teams dedicated to this, you know, in our Trust and Safety Team and our Anti Evil Team, which is our Trust and Safety team, is a team of people that enforce our content policies UM and and and in these communities, whether the conspiracy theory or generally

badly behaving, they generally violate all of our policies. And so so our policies, for context are no harassing or bullying, no involuntary sexualization of miners or or adults, uh, no spam, no inciting or glorifying violence. And so we look at these things very closely and and pretty pretty consistently. And then we also have another team called the Anti Evil Team, which is a team of engineers that supports the former team at scale and tries to do this in an

automated fashion. Um, but the operative word being tried. I mean, how can you really police all the things that are part of Reddit when I how many posts are put up there a day, Steve, I have no idea how many millions, millions and millions, So can you really patrol and keep this kind of misinformation even worse off the platform? Well, so another thing that's that's really important to us, and I think that separates Reddit from our peers is our

structure of community moderation. So all of our communities are created by moderators, and those are those are not employees have read it there, just users like anybody else, and their job is to set the rules and standards for their community and enforce those standards. And of course the communities themselves are submitting all of the content and curating the content. So every the structure of Reddit is basically

there are over a hundred thousand communities. Within those communities, uh, community members, users, you know, me and you anybody can submit content and then every piece of content can be voted up or down. And so what you see is what is the most popular at any point in time. But the download is also important. Right in there, that's where the community sets the tone, removes content that's inappropriate. And one of one of our beliefs is that the

only thing that scales with users is users. And so one of the things we spent a lot a lot of time thinking about is how do we push this burden of enforcement into our user base so that they have control over this, because there's no way that a company of our size, which is around four people, or

any size for that matter, can police the entire internet. Um. However, I do think as a as a as a people, whether we're talking about our community or if we were to kind of take this these challenges up a notch and just talk about our society in general as a people, we can do that, and and and and as I think all of our burden to to police ourselves in that matter. In fact, you you wrote, you wrote a letter to users, and you say it, I believe the biggest risk we face is our own ability to discern

reality from nonsense. And this is a burden we all bear. But isn't that a bit of a cop out basically saying this is the user's responsibility primarily. I think if you were to interpret that as this is only the user's responsibility, that would be a cop out. Um. I think we all have rules to play here. I read. The thing that I think we are the most effective at is building the tools and providing the framework for

doing these things at scale. And of course, something that we were talking about earlier, which is very much a technology problem, which is ensuring that the the volume of any particular viewpoint on Reddit, whether it's positive or negative, true or false, is in proportion to the number of people who are saying it. Um. You know, to not let our our systems be abused by bots or what we call vote manipulation people, you know, trying to steal

the conversation in the wrong way. That's something that we spend quite a bit of time thinking about, because I think we should keep in mind the this this the scale at what we're talking about, which is um. If I were to paint with a broad brush, I would say about Reddit mirrors humanity and about of our communities and users are wonderful, creative, collaborative, you know, interesting people. And I would say the same thing about this people in general, and one percent are are nasty and they're

up to no good. And that means if we do our job on the technology side and and and enforcing that that can set appropriate standards and has visibility into what's going on, we can we can drown out the negative, you know, marginalize the negative, and do it that way when it comes to dealing with that nasty one percent, I'm trying to understand how much of that content is dealt with by non Reddit employees, community managers who are enforcing the standards, and how much of it really is

on you and how much But do you have to actively go and take down So for example, the year you came back, I read that you had to remove two sub reddits. One was called fat People Hate, the other was called coon Town, which were by the way, as repugnant as they sound. And then the hate speech, you know, sub communities went down, and overall hate speech went down on the platform because participants in those communities

either left the site or they changed their language. But it wasn't the moderators or the non employees who did it. It was you guys who had to do it. Yes and no, So those communities were repugnant and and and we took them down. We also did behind the scenes a lot of work on the individuals in those communities um on. One of the things we've gotten a lot better at over the years is how proactive we are. So during that era, so this is two thousand fifteen,

we were reactive in terms of individuals reports. So something bad is happening on Reddit, user reports it, then we action. Now we are Gosh, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, I want to say somewhere between se proactive, which means we are finding uh, instances of bad behavior before it even gets reported. How do you do that? Is it? Is it like playing a game of whack a mole or or do you have like software algorithms that can detect yes, yes to both? Yes, yeah, yeah,

I mean that's the thing. It's there. There is an element of an arms race, there's an element of whack a mole. Um, there's an element of of of being clever with with how we find things. Again, as I was saying before, we're talking about a relatively small population of users, and even in those communities, um well, the names are deliberately offensive and their motivation was in many respects to draw attention to waste our time to troll us um, and it was it was more organized than organic.

And that behavior stands out like we we can detect that with computers. Um. And and so when we remove those communities, yes, that the general tone of rehddick got better, but I would also point out to the fact that we got a lot better at UH enforcement on an individual level, and then other communities around reddits, our users

were doing the enforcement right. If you show up into you know, ask Creddit, Ask Gredda is one of our largest communities, and and and if you're new to read it, it's it's a place where I wuld invite you to get started. Um. People post thousands of questions every day that are completely you know, irreverence. UM. The one one I saw the other day was teachers of creddits, Um, what happened to that weird kid in your class? Um?

And it's just like at this incredible discussion and perspective that you wouldn't see in the stories that you wouldn't see anywhere else online. UM. If somebody shows up into that community, yeah, exactly right. If you show up in that community and and and start saying, you know, nasty stuff, you're gonna get You're gonna get crushed long before we see it right, You're gonna get downloaded by normal users, You're gonna get banned by moths, and and that will

be the end of it. So we all have roles to play on this. And I'm not claiming pfection by any means, UM, but I do, ah, I am proud of the progress that we are making. I think, especially confronting what are it's a little bit of a new frontier and a new set of challenges for I'm curious how many humans you have actually with the sole job of really trying to manage all of this. Dozens on our staff. So our staff is four hundred, about half engineer,

half engineering. UM. One of our largest teams collectively of the community, Trust and Safety and ANI Evil Team make up a significant portion of our employees. To Evil Team INTI Evil, Yes, that's the engineering team that UM you know works behind the scenes, does the stuff at scale.

But then of course it is I do think both on Reddit and in the real world, UM, we need to enable ourselves to to self govern and to self heal, because we don't want the government deciding what you can and cannot say, And I'm sure you don't want a private company, let alone me deciding what you can and cannot say, or can and cannot think. I think that's very, very dangerou It's time to take a quick break. We'll be back with Reddit co founder and CEO Steve Huffman.

That's right after this and now back to our conversation with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, live from the Aspen Ideas Festival. I want to ask you about this other challenge that you've had related to the presidential election, that was Russian interference and the proliferation of fake news. And by fake news, I mean false stories, not stories the president doesn't like. The Internet Research Agency, which was aligned with the Kremlin, famously put fake news on Facebook, but they also put

it on Reddit. Do you ever think as a result of that I contributed to the election of Donald Trump? So uh, not as a result of that, I mean the two reddits. It is where grassroots movements start, um, and we've seen it with our last three presidential elections. We were very very early on Obama. Um, it's those as you know, I'm obviously extremely bicyclesn't right at all time, but it was the first place where I learned of him.

We were very early on Bernie Sanders, right, who's who had a very vocal grassroots campaign in the US, and we're also early on Trump, who also had that kind of populist support. As it relates to Russia, we published a couple of months ago everything we found. We've published all of the accounts that we found, everything they posted, and that's still online for for our users, for journalists, for for the government to to investigate and see what's there.

And we've been fully cooperative, uh, you know, with the government behind the scenes this entire time. What we found, though, is the structure of Reddit's largely worked. Of the nine or so accounts that we believe we're compromised, um, a handful fewer than ten actually found any meaningful traction on Reddit. The vast majority were banned by moderators long before they said anything, you know, anything relevant. So there was some there,

but there wasn't a lot of there there. The challenge, however, that we face and and I and I need to continually remind people of this that when we talk about the president, sixty million people voted for that guy. Those weren't Russian boats. Those were real Americans, And um, but is what ideas were the Russian bots putting into the minds of those Americans. I'm not suggesting that they were

all manipulated by fake news. I'm simply saying, were they all making their decision on the basis of facts as opposed to fake news? As you know, it's hard to say because I think fake news is a new word for propaganda and propagandas as old as politics. Um and and we've seen this, and we see this on our own you know, cable news channels, which are effectively the propaganda department for for various political parties in the US. Um,

this is a real issue we face. Um uh, not just on Reddit, not just on on Twitter and Facebook. But I think as a people, but Russian interference was relatively unprecedented in this last election, So certainly you can't really compare sort of what you might term propaganda as a spousing beliefs that would be supportive a particular candidate or party with a foreign country actually interfering in our

democratic process. I think the Russia thing is a real problem on on reddits because of the nature of Reddit, those accounts, those efforts largely fell flats. Let's let's talk about that. You said you have done and you're doing your best to identify and remove Russian bots, Russian propaganda. You said you've removed nearly a thousand Russian trolls from your site. Just mechanically, can you walk us through how you did that? How do you identify who's a Russian troll?

How do you get that troll off of Reddit? Sure there are I don't want to get into the super specifics because these techniques are still valuable to us, UM, but when they help us as an ation, if you did share those technics, well, let me shure, let me share at at a high level. So, UM, there is there's information we get from from our peers, right accounts that they found i p s that they found we as a as a best practice of Reddit. We've done this long before the election and still do it now.

UM have a variety of information sources. For example, there are gray hat hackers that basically that we can get information from on. These are compromised VPNs, These are i p s areas we should start looking. UM. From there, you can find a couple of accounts UM, And by gray hat you mean they they would be willing to work for both sides in a in a way that a bad guy can acquire. Um, you know, i'd say there's a data breach, right, Equifax is hacked, right, and

they have all this information. That information is getting sold to somebody. Sometimes it's getting sold to the good guys who can say which of our which who has been compromised? Right? And so that's very common. Right. And you can go all these websites to see has is my information in there? Is my email information in there? Then we can look at behavioral things, right, and and this and this is these are techniques that again we've been doing for a long time. I read it because we care about the

integrity of our systems. You know, cookie hygiene, right? Are people sharing this account? Are people in multile geography sharing this account? Those things start to stand out. And so from there we can build out a weapon. So you know, we do it piece by piece by piece, and we grow this, We grow this stuff out. So the stuff we shared a couple of months ago was everything we have found so far. Um, we are by no means,

you know, done that. This is as I said before, Reddit's primary role in this is ensuring that our systems, the integrity of our systems, and so there is, you know, as as we said earlier, in an arm serice element to this, and we're constantly learning and the challenges are constantly evolving. But it is an issue we take incredibly seriously,

both as reddit and and as Americans. I know that American redditors who then promote or repeat or share the misinformation that is put out there by Russian bots, that's a thorny r issue, isn't it? And work difficult And that's where you believe user responsibility and our ability to discern fact from fiction or fake news from real news,

is that's when that comes into play. I mean, if we're to make it even thornier, the president is repeating that nonsense as well, and so I mean we have to ask ourselves some serious questions like what does it mean when the president is is is propagating you know, lies and fake news or whatever. Yes, that burden is on us, and I think we have a some serious

challenges in front of us. I'll fight what does it mean? Well, I think one of the the the silver linings of all of this, and I think of this what I would call it a challenging time is that our immune system is being tested, right, and in the same way that your body gets a virus and you're sick for a couple of weeks and you eventually developed antibodies and can fight against the next time. I think we as

a people are going through the same thing. People care about quality journalism again, um, people are more more skeptical than they have been in the past. I think our values are being tested. Um, your values don't mean anything until you use them. And I would say I think we as as as Americans, UM, haven't had to haven't had to flex some of these these these these muscles and in a little while and and so well, the medicine doesn't taste good. I think we will come out

of this. I hope you know. I'm an optimist. I think we will come out of it healthier on the other side, with a more skeptical population, with higher quality journalism, with higher standards of discourse. But it doesn't feel good right now, so to too awkwardly continue the metaphor how strong is the body politic in eighteen as opposed to how vulnerable are we to all of these factors and forces this year? I mean, I would I would UM, I often look to Reddit as a leading indicator of

what's going to happen. So, uh, in the two thousand and sixteen election, if you spend any time on Reddit, Trump when in the election was not exactly a surprise. UM. The engagement of the Trump support us on Reddit in terms of voting on Reddit was five times higher than that of the Hillary supporters. So when I look at what's going on now, um on Reddit the midterms, there are a number of communities galvanizing around the mid terms. And what kind of communities? What are they called? Like

I think once it's called blue mid terms. There's probably half a dozen or so mid terms two thousand and eighteen. Um, how are they weighed in terms of red versus blue? Almost entirely blue. All of these new communities are in response to, hey, we we cannot let our guard down, right, is we have to show up and actually vote. Um. I think you know, even when you look at the

voter turnout, it's it's always it's always dismal. And I think that's the that's the largest opportunity we have going forward, is is taking all these people who now care, who now know what's at stake, and getting them to the polls. I have to ask you about Charlotte's Ville. Yeah, vote everyone. Um, As we mentioned, we both went to the University of Virginia. You graduated just a couple of years after I did.

What's so funny? Um? Now, on a serious note, I was in smack in the middle of that white supremacist rally in Charlottesville last August. And I know that was a real epiphany for you, wasn't it. Um? That was very difficult, right. You know, I'm with a school in Charles Cille. I grew up about an hour from there.

That is that is very much my home. And it's was incredibly painful to watch, and and I still get emotional when I think about it, and and and for us that's we actually we were in the process at the time of finding our voice in our content policy. We spent a lot of time debating these and choosing the right words, and so we were in the process, um, prior to Charlotsville, of how do we talk about violence

and inciting violence and what are the rules there? And then in Charles still happened, and I actually had a very emotional reaction with my team where I was just like just go ban all those people. Right. We had banned the all right communities I think a month or two before, but there are still kind of some fringe you ones, and I was like, just just ban them all. And fortunately, you know, I'm not the sole decider, you know, in these conversations, and we have, UM, we have actually

quite a large team. It's it's me, it's our our GC who's in the audience, our head of policy, our head of trust and safety, UM debate these issues. UM. But Charleston, I think was was very clarifying for us and probably the country about like this sort of behavior

should not be tolerated. And in fact, as a result, you updated your content policy banning content that glorifies insights or calls for violence against an individual, groups of people are animals, after noting that the previous rules that you had you all had establed wish had been too vague. And I'm curious, have you seen any positive result from

strengthening that policy? Sure? I mean when the policies always really important because it allows us to make decisions a lot faster, right, And and we're often kind of in this position where we're trying to reconcile what our policies say and what our gut tells us to do, and can we find a way to articulate what our instinct is telling us to do in a way that can be enforced consistently and fairly, because that is is very important, especially for a platform like us that is home to

you know, views um of incredible diversity and consistency and enforceability is really important. But once we find those words, even if it's a couple of sentences, um, then we can go ham on these things, right, and we can be like you're done, You're done, You're done, You're done. And that actually feels very good. But I guess the big question, as you mentioned earlier, Steve, is how do you control harmful speech without becoming a censor and violating

the First Amendment? I mean that they're there in lies the rub right. Well, that is the challenge with the First Amendment. It is it is one of the founding principles you know, over this country, and it's it's incredibly important to our democracy, the marketplace of ideas and specifically supporting political speech and and and debates, and so the way we think about it, and if you look at our content policy, it's largely structured around behaviors and not beliefs.

Beliefs are very different, difficult to police, and you are free to have whatever belief you like, both on Reddit and the United States generally, but it's your behavior as we care about. And just like free speech in the United States, which does have restrictions, right there's one about inciting violence, UM, yelling fire in a crowded theater, slander and slander and libel and false advertising. There are, in fact many restrictions, but political speech is very very important

and very critical. And on Reddit we try to take our cues from the government the same way. So our content policies are things I shared before. Harassing and bullying, inciting violence, those are behaviors, UM, those are more objective. Your your your beliefs, your political beliefs in particular, we do our best to to keep that off limits. That

doesn't mean we're not tested from time to time. And and one of the actually the big lessons I've learned over the last few years is when I came back to read, I actually wanted to draw a fine line this is good behavior, this is bad behavior. I have since learned that that is basically impossible, right, wherever that line is, somebody's going to walk right up against it and stick their nose over it. Instead, we accept that there's some gray area there, and that's where we spend

our time. And so we we define our content policies to define that the clear area, and then we spend our time as a team and the gray errors and figure out is this, you know, is this on the right or wrong side of our content policy? Do we need to adjust our policies? This is a new behavior, and and so it's a constant evolution. How do you think Facebook is doing handling the issue of fake news and bots and privacy and all the stuff that's emerged

since the election. I'll give you I'll give you two answers. Um One, I have some empathy for what Facebook is going through, uh, in that I know they didn't build that platform for abuse, right. I brought that platform for for friends to connect, and they built an incredible business on top of it. Um. You know in Zuckerberg's congressional hearings talking about how AI is going to be the solution to all of their problems, I I don't believe that.

I think AI can help. Computers can help. But as I said before, this is a people problem, and people do we humans share some of the burden. And one of the sayings we've had it read it for a long time is is like humans do the hard part. I think as it relates to privacy, we are very different companies, right privacy to read it, that is in our d n A. We don't know your name, We don't know your gender, your age, barely know your location. Because of your you know your your computer tells us

we don't want to know those things. We think that's really important. Both we don't want the burden of of personal information. We're not building a business off of selling your personal information. And we believe that people when they detached from their real world identity and their names, can actually be more authentic, They can be more true to themselves. There are many facets of your personality, uh and you as a human that are not encapsulated in your name.

Right on this stage, I'm Steve Huffman on the CEO of Reddit, but there are many communities I spend time on Reddit where I am not the CEO of Reddit. Right, I'm not telling you and that's important. Um and and because you can find it, because you don't want to share everything right, you know. Uh. For for example, community

I I learned about a couple of days ago. So we do these these moderator road shows where we go around the country and we meet with our moderators to say thank you for what you do and to put faces and names to to to the screen names that we've known for years. Um. I met this couple in London. They were at an American and a British person that

that it got married. They started a community called still Trying, and this is for couples that are trying to have a baby but struggling with it, and it's a place for them to to vent, to support each other, to you know, to go through this difficult time with other people like them. And you wouldn't find that on other platforms, especially associated with your name. You wouldn't would go talk about some of these really personal issues. And I think that's that for for us is what when we talk

about are we are? We are we proud of reddits. We are certainly extremely proud to have to have brought this out of people and to have created this enriching experience in a place where people can be themselves and be vulnerable and be authentic, and so that's really that's

what we deal on day to day. And so so you think we're going to get to the other side and closing, there's so much information, a tsunami of information that sort of floods us every day that isn't verified or edited, in many cases, no fact checkers, and it's designed in in many ways to foment outrage rather than understanding. So right now where we are today, not on the other side, if you're hoping we'll get is this good or bad for our democracy? I am hesitant to make

quick classifications of what is a really complex issue. I think that the fat for hundreds of years in the US that people can say anything and debate anything, that is the cornerstone of our democracy. The fact that we live in a time where it's less of a debate right, and and more of a low brow, quick to judge label everything, you know, identity, apolitis all these things that is bad for our democracy. And so how do we get back to the marketplace of ideas, getting the most

value out of free expression without losing it? And that's one of the things I'm most scared about when we talk about fake news. How do we eliminate fake news without eliminating free speech and discussion and and real debates. I think that is a real challenge. It's to end on a positive note. I think we do all have a role to play. I think as people, skepticism is really important, as as as journalists being that arbiter of

truth is plays a really important role. As a as a technologist, ensuring that the conversation is is is fair and authentic is important as well. So I think if we all play our roles and do our jobs, that we will get back to a healthier place. Well, Steve Kaufman, we really appreciate your honest and thoughtful discussion of these

really challenging issues. Thank you so much for joining us today. So, Brian, I thought that Steve Huffman was forthcoming, But obviously there are a lot of challenges that make it a very imperfect system when it comes to monitoring hateful, disgusting, gross, or just fake content on REDDA, as it is on many other social media platforms. And that's why he's trying to make the case that the burden rest as much

with the users as with the platform itself. I'm just not sure how much the public is going to accept that because there are dangerous real life consequences to the sort of speech that gets disseminated on social platforms like REDDA. I'm not sure people have the time or really want to put the effort in and really evaluating the credibility of some of the information that they're seeing. I mean, I think they should be skeptical, obviously, but is that

really their job? I mean, that's an open ended question. And there's also a chicken and egg open ended question, which is is is the hate speech caused by the platforms that give them a forum or was the hate speech always out there and has read it just bringing it to the fore or giving it more of a spotlight than otherwise it would have had. Well, I don't know if it's b I worry about sort of the contagious effect of hate speech and how it incites other

people to be hateful. In other words, it kind of unleashes hate that's been sublimated in our psyches. I don't know. I'm getting too heavy deep in real right now. But it was a very very interesting conversation, and I appreciate the fact that he's willing to to feel tough questions about his platform and about his business, and at least right now, we're a lot more aware of these issues

than we were two years ago. There's much more of a focus on preventing fake news and hate speech from spreading, and so maybe that will have a positive impact. Has that for an attempt at a happy ending. Well, we'd like to thank the Asthment Ideas Festival again for having us special thanks to Kitty Boone and Zach say Lewis for all of their help, and thanks to Gianna Palmer, Nora Richie, and Jared O'Connell our team at Stitcher who

helped make this show happen week after week. We'd also like to thank Betha Mas and Alison Bresnik who helped with the pod from their posts over at Katie Current Media. Also, I wanted to say quick thank you to Eliza from Costas Costas from the University of Virginia who's now working at the Aspen Institute, who helped make sure that we made it to the studio and of course that Brian found the bathroom anyway, and she was a wonderful first name by the way, right just like your little girl. Anyway,

Brian and I are the executive producers around here. Mark Phillips wrote our theme music. Have you subscribed to our show yet? Shame on you if you haven't. Yes, we're really into shaming people here. Have you left a rating an Apple podcast? Shame on you for that too. We'd love it if you would do both of these things. It really helps us out. In the meantime, we would like to say thank you very much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. Thank you very much.