It appears the so-called censorship Ellen Pao was accused of at Reddit will continue under the reign of her successor, Steve Huffman.
Huffman, the new CEO who took over Reddit, said on Tuesday that hate speech and online communities with reprehensible purposes would no longer be welcome on the Internet discussion site.
, Huffman wrote:
The overwhelming majority of content on reddit comes from wonderful, creative, funny, smart, and silly communities. That is what makes reddit great. There is also a dark side, communities whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don t have any obligation to support them. And we also believe that some communities currently on the platform should not be here at all.
Neither Alexis (Ohanian, Reddit s co-founder) nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen: These are very complicated issues, and we are putting a lot of thought into it. It s something we ve been thinking about for quite some time. We haven t had the tools to enforce policy, but now we re building those tools and reevaluating our policy.
Huffman said he would hold an Ask Me Anything, or AMA, on Thursday at 1 pm PT to discuss the matter.
The proposal to keep Reddit s forums free of malice and vitriol was one that some in the Reddit community immediately and loudly rejected.
Wasn t it just a couple years ago Reddit was all about some free speech even if it wasn t popular and all about defending that? wrote one user. Times they are a changin .
Said another: Are we rewriting history now?
Others pointed to Reddit s policy in 2012, which banned child pornography but said it would allow, well, basically anything else:
We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal… We remain committed to protecting reddit as an open platform.
Pao face similar criticism when she banned a Reddit discussion called fat people hate and other discussions dedicated to homophobic, racist, and generally hateful and menacing speech, often targeted at vulnerable people.
The Reddit community responded by and Mao Zedong.
Months of personal attacks on Pao culminated in an all-out revolt earlier this month after Reddit fired Victoria Taylor,a well-liked employee. Taylor coordinated Reddit s highly popular AMA and was considered by the Reddit community to be one of the employees who supported and communicated regularly with the volunteer moderators. Her July 2 firing, without warning or explanation to the Reddit moderators, led many of them to take parts of the site dark in protest and sparked a vicious backlash from the Reddit community.
However, several Redditors, — not Pao.
Image: Reddit logo
