Scaling Moderation

Roger Berkowitz

In an Interview with Kevin Roose, Steve Huffman explains his decision as CEO and co-founder of Reddit to ban a series of groups on the platform including “The Donald,” a group populated by many supporters of President Trump that has become “a source of countless memes, slogans and conspiracy theories that made their way into the broader online conversation. (In more recent years, it had devolved into a cesspool of racism, violent threats and targeted harassment.)” In the debate surrounding the role of social media platforms, social media companies now play the role of gatekeepers that used to be played by newspaper editors and journalists. For decades now, the social media community has rejected this role and argued that their platforms were simply neutral programs and that free speech means that anyone can say anything. What Huffman expresses is that his views have evolved and that he has come to understand that the free exchange of ideas does not mean that harassment and threats are unproblematic. In any community, there is a need to create rules and guidelines for what kind of speech is allowed. The challenge now is to develop those rules absent the professional training and experience of journalism. Huffman is working on it: 

So The_Donald is complex, and I think reducing that community or any large political group to one thing or one viewpoint is impossible. One aspect of The_Donald is that it’s a very large political community that, at one point in time, represented the views of many Americans. Political speech is sacred in this country, and we applied that to Reddit as well.

At the same time, that community had rule-breaking content — content that was harassing or violence or bullying. And so our strategy has been to try to get that community to come in line with our content policies. We made moderator changes, different technical changes to try to bring The_Donald into line, some more successful than others, but ultimately not to the extent that we needed.

Something I’ve said many times is that the only way to scale moderation online is by working alongside our community members and the moderators, because they have the context to decide whether an individual piece of content is hateful or not, for example. Which means that if we don’t have agreement from our moderators and our communities that these are the rules that we’re all going to abide by, then a community that’s not willing to work with us has no place on Reddit. And I think that became abundantly clear with The_Donald over the years, and even the past few months.