Antisocial by Andrew Marantz

Author:Andrew Marantz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

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Reddit’s CEO at the time was Yishan Wong, an engineer who had worked at PayPal and Facebook. In an internal memo to his staff, he implied that he’d banned r/Jailbait reluctantly, and only because it had violated U.S. law. “We stand for free speech,” he wrote. “We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it.” Reddit’s goal, he continued, was to “become a universal platform for human discourse”; therefore, “it would not do if, in our youth, we decided to censor things simply because they were distasteful.” This implied a corollary question, although Wong didn’t raise it, perhaps because it didn’t occur to him: If a universal platform for human discourse were to be overrun with “jailbait,” grotesque misogyny, and Nazi propaganda, how would this affect human discourse?

Free-speech absolutism had been so central to Reddit’s ethos for so long that many redditors couldn’t let it go. Wong’s successor as CEO was Ellen Pao, a former venture capitalist. Early in her tenure, Reddit announced a crackdown on involuntary pornography: if you found a compromising photo of yourself circulating on the platform without your consent, you could report it and the company would remove it. This seemed like a straightforward business decision; but many redditors, constitutionally averse to gatekeeping of any kind, treated it as the first in an inevitable parade of horrors. “This rule is stupid and suppresses our rights,” wrote a redditor with the handle penisfuckermcgee.

A few months later, Reddit banned five of its most egregious communities, including r/FatPeopleHate and r/ShitNiggersSay. Again, many redditors were apoplectic (“We may as well take a one way ticket to North Korea”). Almost every day, abusive redditors called Pao a tyrant, an “Asian slut,” or worse. She resigned in July 2015. “The Internet started as a bastion for free expression,” she wrote in The Washington Post. “But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.”*

In July 2015, six years after leaving Reddit, Steve Huffman returned as CEO. He’d started Reddit in the hope of disrupting the gatekeepers, or perhaps eliminating gatekeepers altogether. Now, reluctantly but inescapably, he’d become a gatekeeper himself. He still preferred a laissez-faire approach to content moderation, all things being equal, but his stance had grown less absolute over time. It’s one thing to be a civil libertarian in theory; it’s another thing to start a warehouse party, watch it devolve into feral anarchy, and do nothing to clean it up.

One of Huffman’s first acts as CEO was to ban a half dozen viciously racist subreddits, such as r/Coontown. “There was pushback, as there is whenever we ban anything,” he said later. “But I had the moral authority, as the founder, to take it in stride.” He acknowledged that “it’s really hard to define hate speech,” and that “any way we define it has the potential to set a dangerous precedent.” And yet, he added, “I know the internet. Some people are reasonable, and other people just want to watch the world burn.

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