Image caption Reddit chief Steve Huffman says racism is allowed on site

Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman has been accused of supporting racism in his commitment to free speech.

After being questioned directly by one Reddit user, Mr Huffman said that racial slurs are not against the site's rules.

Reddit user chlomyster had asked Mr Huffman for clarification of the firm's policies, questioning: " Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against Reddit's rules or not?"

Huffman responded: "It's not."

Mr Huffman who is known on Reddit as Spez, went on to clarify: "On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behaviour 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."

He went on to say: "Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules."

Many Reddit users were critical of Mr Huffman's position. Some said hate speech did constitute behaviour, and that communities such as r/The_Donald had participated in the organising of events such as the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which resulted in the death of Heather Hyer.

Reddit is the fourth most visited website in the US, with 330 million users per month and 14 billion screen views.

Earlier this week, it emerged that the site had banned 944 accounts, including ones that were posting fake Hillary Clinton porn videos.</s>Reddit CEO Steve Huffman recently made clear the platform's hate speech policy: open racism and slurs are technically permitted — but "not welcome."

Huffman's statement came about in a conversation thread about the activity of Russian trolls on the site. At one point, a user named clomyster shifted the discussion toward's Reddit's policy on monitoring racism: “I need clarification on something: Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against reddits rules or not?”

“It’s not,” Huffman, who writes under the handle "spez," responded.

He went on to explain that Reddit separates "behavior from beliefs." He was referring to the company's policy that allows racist language but doesn't allow harassment, bullying, or threats.

As far as far social media platforms go, this position puts Reddit out at sea on a lonely ice floe. As The Verge points out, most major sites like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, have very explicit hate speech guidelines and will quickly boot users for it.

Understandably, Huffman's ambiguous initial statement caused some uproar among Reddit users. The CEO's post was "downvoted" 1,400 times. Many commenters called out the platform's Trump-centric "r/The_Donald" forum, where they say the chatter often crosses the line into racism.

By Thursday, Huffman quickly wrote an addendum to his original comment:

"To be perfectly clear, while racism itself isn’t against the rules, it’s not welcome here. I try to stay neutral on most political topics, but this isn’t one of them. I believe the best defense against racism and other repugnant views, both on Reddit and in the world, is instead of trying to control what people can and cannot say through rules, is to repudiate these views in a free conversation, and empower our communities to do so on Reddit."

He went on to say:

There exist repugnant views in the world. As a result, these views may also exist on Reddit. I don’t want them to exist on Reddit any more than I want them to exist in the world, but I believe that presenting a sanitized view of humanity does us all a disservice. It’s up to all of us to reject these views.

It's important to note, as Huffman demonstrates, that the conversation about how to construct open digital platforms is separate from the conversation around racism and bigotry generally. The question, "How should we monitor a digital platform for racism?" (answer: we're not sure) is different from the question, "Is racism bad?" (answer: yes).

At the least, users should recognize what a difficult jam all these social media companies are in: They have to monitor, through human administrators or AI, the conversations of a user population that is larger than the population of many countries (542 million in Reddit's case, upwards of 2 billion in Facebook's). They further have to reconcile the "free and open" ethos that spawned these tech giants twenty years ago with the fact that their platforms are now woven into the fabric of society — and come to terms with their responsibility in it.

So what is Reddit's responsibility? The answer is not so easy.

Racism lives ultimately in the minds of those who are truly racist — not in the house of 1's and 0's that Reddit has built. Racists should be called out wherever they lurk, of course, and in this case, Huffman seems confident that either they will be called out by Reddit users or will be regulated by the rules set by individual Reddit forums. (And in any case, Huffman points out that many racists on Reddit ultimately get booted for breaking the site's rules against harassment and bullying).

On the other hand, there is a role for corporate responsibility. As Facebook is discovering in its ongoing attempt to put out the Cambridge Analytica fire, these social websites have become virtual societies where people's hearts, minds, beliefs, and politics come to bear.

In a way, these companies are coming to grips with the same dualism that has for centuries lived in government: balancing freedom vs. order, liberty vs. safety, and the attempt to square ancient principles with modern sensibilities.</s>Reddit has in recent months fallen in for criticism. The website which initially professed to allow anything and everything has been seeing somewhat of a crackdown on the more extreme content. The latest revelation is, however, one which will surprise many. It’s certainly one that seems a little contradictory of recent trends.

In a report via the BBC, Reddit chairman Steve Huffman has said that racist comments are allowed on the website as in his opinion, it falls within the remit of free speech.

It was a matter which had been under some scrutiny in recent months and the decision will surprise many. Likely many on both sides of the argument. In the report, Steve Huffman has said: “Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against Reddit’s rules or not?”. In his opinion: “It’s not.”

He went on to clarify the point by saying: “On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behaviour 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.Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules.”

What do we think?

It’s not our place to say whether Reddit should ban or allow a subject. The decision to seemingly allow racist comments, however, is surprising. Particularly since we have regularly reported on how the comment posting site has recently clamped down on many groups.

There will likely be a backlash to this decision. As far as we are concerned though, we will again say that it’s not our place to say whether its the right or wrong decision, we’re frankly just surprised that they have allowed it.

What do you think about this? – Let us know in the comments!</s>Reddit has a history of allowing its users to say just about anything. Wednesday, its CEO said racist language is just fine — officially giving license to the hatred that already lives on the site, which bills itself as the front page of the internet.

As tech companies face increasing pressure to police content on their platforms, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said something to the equivalent of the old saying “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

In response to a question about whether slurs are against Reddit’s rules, Huffman said: “It’s not. 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.”

That resonates in 2018, in the aftermath of the fatal Charlottesville white-supremacist march last year, and as racists feel more emboldened to say what they want online and offline.

Some Reddit users, a.k.a. Redditors, let him have it.

“You allowed r/the_donald to advertise for a fascist rally that culminated in a deadly terror attack,” wrote a Redditor called kitten cupcakes, referring to Charlottesville.

“Not all speech is ‘valuable discourse,’ and by letting it exist on your platform you are condoning its existence and assisting its propagation,” user aYearofPrompts said.

And PostimusMaximus referred to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional grilling: “Zuckerberg is sitting over here getting grilled for not removing hate-speech fast enough due to AI limitations and yet you find yourself passing hate speech off as okay.”

Thursday, Huffman updated his remarks, saying that “While racism itself isn’t against the rules, it’s not welcome here.”

However, he seemed to stick to the spirit of his Wednesday response when he added: “I believe the best defense against racism and other repugnant views, both on Reddit and in the world, is instead of trying to control what people can and cannot say through rules, is to repudiate these views in a free conversation, and empower our communities to do so on Reddit.”

Previously banned Reddit groups include ones called “CoonTown” and “raping women.” Last year, the site banned two high-profile white nationalist groups. As I wrote then, it takes a lot to be banned from the pretty-much-anything-goes site, which has become a haven for hate. But “Altright” and “Alternativeright” were engaged in doxxing, or spreading people’s personal information.

Huffman, who co-founded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian, became its CEO in 2015. When he took over after Ellen Pao’s brief, tumultuous time as chief executive, Huffman pledged to ban the “dark side,” which he defined as “communities whose purpose is reprehensible.” He said then that Reddit had “no obligation to support” such communities, which provides an online discussion board that has about 330,000 monthly users, more than 138,000 communities, and an average 14 billion views according to the About page on its website. It is said to be among the most visited sites on the internet.
• Magid: Facebook needs fix, but so do Congressional hearings
• Angelina Jolie is among world’s most admired, while Obama — and even Putin — rank higher than Trump in new survey Also this week, Reddit announced that it had banned nearly 1,000 suspected Russian troll accounts.

“We also did not detect any effective use of these accounts to engage in vote manipulation,” Huffman said in a post Tuesday.</s>
• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said racism is not explicitly against the site’s rules.
• Huffman has taken a US-centric approach to free speech and wrongly suggests racist people are open to logical counter-arguments.
• Reddit is rife with racist communities that are uninterested in counter-arguments, and they often ban or expel anyone who disagrees with them.
• The structure of Reddit thus incubates racism by preventing racists from seeing anti-racist arguments.
• Policing speech online is hard, but Huffman needs to do better than this.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman caused outrage on Wednesday when he said racism wasn’t against the site’s own rules. Later, he issued an updated comment but fundamentally stood by his earlier statement.

This is what he said in his updated comment, which you can read in full here alongside his earlier comment on Reddit where he posts under the username spez:

The gist is that Reddit wants to try and distinguish between real-world, tangible harassment, and ideas – an idea it has expressed before. This strangely permissive attitude to racism is US-centric, and will encourage the toxicity that already pervades some Reddit communities, known as subreddits, and other online platforms.

Free speech absolutists argue that sunlight is the best disinfectant for hate

Huffman, though he doesn’t quite phrase it this way, is referring to a common argument in favour of offensive speech which goes like this: you are never going to quash someone’s racist views by banning them or shutting them down, and it’s better to shine a light on these beliefs and argue against them.

A major flaw in this argument when applied to racism is the assumption that prejudice is logical. Someone who sets up a subreddit called r/CoonTown to post racist memes is not going to be open to arguments about black people’s humanity and dignity. Reddit banned that particular community, but a subsequent Q&A with its moderator is still live. The moderator explained: “I’m out to smash the Zionist kikes who want to keep Whites in a box and from gaining racial consciousness.” What sunlight will disinfect that?

Huffman’s views also don’t make sense in the context of Reddit, which is made up of interest-based communities called subreddits. If you’re interested in technology, you go to r/technology. If you’re a bitcoin enthusiast, you might spend most of your time in r/bitcoin. As Redditors responding to Huffman pointed out, these communities tend to become echo chambers.

Some Reddit users, arguing against Hoffman, pointed to r/TheDonald, a pro-Trump subreddit rife with alt-right memes and covert racism.

In one example, still live on Reddit, one user posted an image of the Dhaka floods in 2016 which, combined with animal sacrifices for Eid, resulted in red-coloured rivers flowing through the city. The user commented: “and you’re telling me muslims can integrate into our society? ayy lmao fuck off libcucks. REMOVE KEBAB.”

Another wrote: “This is what happens when you worship Satan and moon gods.” And another replied: “you forgot “goat fuckers” and “pedophiles!”

Complaining about extreme subreddits, here’s what user LeConnor wrote: “These communities, mainly the more dogmatic ones, are allowed to remain separated and turn into echo chambers. If you disagree, you’re banned. If you use the wrong sort of language, you’re banned. It happens in /r/TheDonald and /r/socialism. For the most part there isn’t a even a chance for debate to happen. If you go into one a sub that holds viewpoints that are opposed to yours and try to debate or discuss your own views you’ll get dogpiled by the mob. You have to go to a debate sub or metareddit if you want to avoid that.”

In other words, the structure of Reddit means that most racist subreddits are unlikely to become places where comments pointing out the logical holes in racism will get an airing.

Huffman has a scarily US-centric view of the world

Free speech absolutism is not common outside the US, where people are free to spout racism thanks to the First Amendment.

It’s much blurrier in Europe, where there are strict laws around hate speech and incitement to violence. In Germany, it has long been illegal to be a Nazi or to espouse Nazi views. More recently, Germany introduced NetzDG, a strict law which prohibits hate speech online and covers all the US web giants – presumably including Reddit.

In the UK, a man was jailed for posting a Facebook comment calling for British Muslims to be killed after the Manchester bombing in 2017. More than 2,500 people in London have been arrested over the years for posting offensive or threatening messages in social media.

Similar comments reportedly appear on r/TheDonald subreddit, apparently with no wider consequences for the community. Per comments by other Reddit users, their ideas are rarely challenged, though they are often criticised outside r/TheDonald.

Huffman might disagree with Europe’s stricter philosophy towards free speech, but it seems odd to disregard the international legal consequences entirely.

Policing speech is a major challenge for the tech giants and Huffman is choosing to duck responsibility

The proliferation of trolls online and the easy spread of hate speech is a major challenge for tech platforms.

Facebook and Google are under particular pressure to tackle radical speech that may incite terrorism, right-wing conspiracy theories being promoted on YouTube, and abusive content. It’s a tough challenge, and Mark Zuckerberg recently said he’s “fundamentally uncomfortable” sitting in California making decisions about who gets a voice and who doesn’t.

This is, in some ways, understandable, but Huffman is blind to the way Reddit communities can ferment hate thanks to the site’s structure. Huffman’s problem is that he wants bad speech to be countered by good speech, but the structure of Reddit prevents that from happening and – even worse – provides a haven for the spread of racist ideas.

The distinction between real-world harassment and “ideas” also looks naive, given research by the Southern Poverty Law Center showed in 2014 that the now-defunct website Stormfront was connected to several killings. There isn’t evidence to show that spouting off on Reddit leads to murder, but the SPLC research suggests it isn’t much of a leap from extremist ideas to violence.</s>Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman has said that racism is allowed on the social media site.

In response to a direct question from a user, the site's chief executive said racial slurs are not against Reddit's rules.

Reddit user chlomyster asked Mr Huffman: "Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against Reddit's rules or not?"

"It's not," responded Mr Huffman, username spez. "On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behaviour 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."

Reddit is divided into communities and Mr Huffman said their moderators are allowed to make decisions on what speech is allowed on them.

"Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves," he said.

"Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules."

The discussion, part of a thread focusing on the site's annual transparency report, drew criticism from many users.

Some said Reddit community The-Donald was used to advertise for a white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville last year, where Heather Heyer was killed after a car rammed into protesters at the Unite The Right rally.

User PerdidasBH said there were communities that "exist solely and explicitly to incite racial hatred, or to demean women or condemn LGBT people".

User chaos750 wrote: "I know Reddit has free speech embedded deep inside its DNA, but I just can't fathom being okay with running a site where blatant racism is explicitly allowed."

Another, Nudetoes said they supported Mr Huffman, writing that Reddit is "one of the few places we can express free speech and hear others speaking freely too, no matter how polarising it may be".</s>Racist slurs are permitted on Reddit, says the popular social news and discussion site’s chief executive, Steve Huffman.

Within a discussion thread that followed the publishing of the site’s transparency report on Russian propaganda, Huffman, in reply to a question from a Reddit user about whether “open racism, including slurs” are allowed on the platform, said their use was not against Reddit’s rules.

“On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behavior from beliefs,” said Huffman under his username spez. “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.”

Hoffman’s controversial response explains why outwardly racist and high-profile communities have been allowed to operate on a site that has 542 million monthly visitors.

“Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules,” Hoffman said.

Reddit’s approach to offensive behaviour has evolved from a position of actively banning users for hate speech to one allowing it under the guise of free speech.

In July 2015 Hoffman said of banning hate speech: “I don’t think we should silence people just because their viewpoints are something we disagree with. There is value in the conversation, and we as a society need to confront these issues. This is an incredibly complex topic, and I’m sure our thinking will continue to evolve.”

That evolution appears to have created a light-touch moderation policy that permits racism and hate speech unless otherwise banned by the particular subreddit’s rules. Reddit will still take action when there is evidence of direct threats or incitement of violence. But some high-profile subeddits, including The_Donald, have been accused of participating in the organisation of events such as the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that led to the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, with seemingly little consequence.
• Reddit infiltrated by Russian propaganda in run-up to US election</s>Reddit's chief executive has claimed hate speech is not against the rules of the social networking site despite controversies surrounding several far-right forums on the website.

Steve Huffman, who leads the website often called "the front page of the internet", was responding to user questions about what content is acceptable on the site after Reddit banned close to 1,000 suspected Russian-troll accounts.

One user asked: "Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against Reddit's rules or not?" Huffman responded: "It's not."

Reddit's position counters that of sites like Facebook, which have in recent years sought to cement their user guidelines and ban certain kinds of offensive or threatening...</s>Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said Wednesday that the website takes a more permissive approach to racist speech relative to other mainstream social media platforms.

Huffman had started a thread to release Reddit’s 2017 Transparency Report, which listed 994 accounts believed to be connected with Russia’s Internet Research Agency, and made himself available to answer any questions. One user asked, “I need clarification on something: Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against reddits rules or not?”

Huffman, who uses the handle “spez” on the site, responded:

It’s not. 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. Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules.

Users were dismayed by this response: The post had lost 1,443 karma points by the next day, which is calculated by subtracting the number of downvotes from the number of upvotes a comment receives.

The most popular reply to Huffman’s comment read, in part, “How do you respond to the idea that hate speech leads to genocide, and that scholars and genocide watch groups insist that not all speech is credible enough to be warranted? … Not all speech is ‘valuable discourse,’ and by letting it exist on your platform you are condoning its existence and assisting its propagation.”

Last month, United Nations investigators criticized Facebook for facilitating the spread of hate speech in Myanmar aimed at the Rohingya people, who have reportedly been the target of an ethnic cleansing campaign. When Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy brought up the issue during Mark Zuckerberg’s hearing before the Senate on Tuesday, the Facebook CEO said that the company planned to hire “dozens” more Burmese language reviewers to stamp out hate speech along with modifications to the platform.

Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies have also struggled to keep content on their sites compliant with their hate speech policies. Twitter has notably faced multiple waves of public outcry for the bigotry and abuse that have proliferated on its platform, and in October, it ramped up its rules to crack down on a wider range of hate speech.

While Reddit does not have such hate speech prohibitions, administrators have consistently cracked down on doxing, threats, and other forms of speech that could directly and immediately lead to physical violence. When administrators shut down an offensive subreddit, they typically stray away from citing the underlying racism or other prejudices that make it toxic in the first place and instead cite another rule violation. For example, they referred to specific instances of harassment when they banned the r/fatpeoplehate subreddit, and to incitement of violence when they banned the misogynistic r/incel subreddit.

However, this approach can still lead to inconsistencies. It appears administrators couldn’t find a rule violation when they wanted to remove the r/coontown subreddit in 2015. Rather than pointing to the blatant racism that infected the forum, Huffman offered a convoluted justification for their decision: “We are banning a handful of communities that exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else.”</s>Reddit’s steadfast commitment to free speech is landing the company in hot water once again. A Reddit user questioned the site’s policies on whether posts containing racism and racial slurs violate Reddit’s terms, and CEO Steve Huffman revealed that said speech are permissible on the site, according to Gizmodo.

“On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behavior from beliefs,” Huffman clarified. “This means on Reddit there will be people with beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so.”

It’s unclear if Huffman’s comments are representative of Reddit’s company policy, but protection of hate speech can — and do — lead to online harassment and cyberbullying. A recent study from Pew revealed that as many as 40 percent of Americans have experienced some form of harassment online.

And even if hate speech may still be protected content on Reddit, Huffman was quick to point out that any threat of violence is not tolerated on the site. “When users actions conflict with our own content policies, we take action,” he said. This distinction is consistent with Reddit’s prior policies for enforcement. Previously, Reddit was under fire when neo-Nazis used the site to incite violence. This prompted Reddit to ban affected community pages and clarify its terms to prohibit violence late last year.

“Going forward, we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise we will also take action against content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals,” the updated terms read, noting that “context is key.”

At the time, spokeswoman Anna Soellner told The New York Times that Reddit strives “to be a welcoming, open platform for all by trusting our users to maintain an environment that cultivates genuine conversation.

Reddit’s position on free speech — and its refusal to commit to an outright ban of hate speech — makes it one of the lone online communities in the digital age. Many of its peers, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube, Microsoft, Twitch, Playstation, Xbox Live, Steam, and Amazon — all have some policies prohibiting hate speech. Outside of hate speech, Reddit has had to make recent changes to adapt and grow with the internet, including removing communities that focus on drug use, sex work, and illegal activities.
Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit, says racism is allowed on the website. Some users criticize his position, while others praise Huffman for defending free speech.