Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman had something of a TIL moment after he tried to curb abusive behavior in the site’s top subreddit for Donald Trump supporters.
In an interview with Reuters, Huffman discussed how he discovered that Reddit’s anti-harassment policies were not being adequately enforced after he tried to moderate the r/The_Donald subreddit, which is known for promoting Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories and racist and misogynistic content.
“Personal message harassment is the most cut and dry,” he said. “Right now we are in an interesting position where my inbox is full of them, it’s easy to start with me.”
Starting, apparently, with Huffman’s inbox, Reddit is in the process of ramping up its anti-harassment enforcement, adding more employees to the site’s “trust and safety team” and tasking a team of “anti-evil” engineers to head the overall process. So far, the site has identified a list hundreds usernames’ long of Reddit’s worst users and plans to admonish, ban, or suspend them, Reuters reported.
Huffman’s experience with harassment comes after Reddit shut down a subreddit dedicated to a conspiracy theory linking Clinton to a pedophile ring using a Washington, D.C. pizza chain as a front. Huffman said r/The_Donald’s moderators weren’t doing enough to shut down harassment, and got a taste of how pervasive the problem is when he used his administrative powers to redirect comments targeting him.
“The fact I was saying that combating harassment was important and then letting that openly happen to me, the CEO, there’s a disconnect there,” he said. Huffman apologized in a statement, saying he “will never risk your trust like this again.”
But if Huffman thought his executive position protected him from the piercing vitriol that exists 0n his site, it’s because he hasn’t been paying attention. Reddit’s former interim CEO Ellen Pao, who first implemented the site’s anti-harassment policies in 2015, and repeatedly faced harassment.
Following Pao’s crack down, many Redditors propagated Nazi memes and called for her resignation. Pao took it in stride, only addressing the problem after she left the company. Compare that to Redditors calling Huffman a “cuck,” an insult favored by white nationalists that implies a traditional conservative has abandoned their beliefs, and accused him of censorship after announcing increased enforcement.
Huffman’s response to Reddit’s harassment problem, which has become almost inextricable from the site’s brand, highlights a general tone-deafness and lack of empathy tech companies and their executives have regarding their products’ negative impact on those who aren’t part of Silicon Valley’s typified white male demographic.
Research and reports of everyday experiences have consistently shown that women, people of color, the LGBT community and other marginalized groups are more vulnerable to discrimination or harassment online. Yet, companies are reluctant to take hard stances on banning the behavior, instead favoring waves of suspensions following months and years of protest.
Huffman clearly sees that harassment is an issue, but it took a deluge of insults to recognize the problem is more complex than simply clear-cut personal attacks.
Online harassment is an internet-wide problem, one that major social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook have been slow to address. Comparatively, Reddit has been even more lenient on the issue, letting communities police themselves. But Huffman’s experience could change that.
In r/The_Donald’s case, Huffman found that asking moderators to step in wasn’t “particularly effective. We might see flashes of success, but things kind of revert.”