Former Reddit boss calls out company for not shutting down Trump subreddit after it posts BLM statement

Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao has responded to a letter written by current Reddit CEO Steve Huffman about the George Floyd protests, calling out the company for not doing enough to stop racism.

“I am obligated to call you out: You should have shut down the_donald instead of amplifying it and its hate, racism, and violence,” Ms Pao tweeted.

“So much of what is happening now lies at your feet. You don't get to say BLM when reddit nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all day long.”

Mr Huffman’s letter, says that “we do not tolerate hate, racism, and violence, and while we have work to do to fight these on our platform, our values are clear.”

However, Ms Pao pointed specifically to the subreddit r/the_donald, a pro-Trump group which has been responsible for toxic behaviour in the past. Its users have been criticised for abusive language, offensive memes, and attempts to subvert Reddit’s rules in order to get onto the home page – to the extent that Reddit had to alter its algorithm to stop all political posts rising to the top.

Reddit also quarantined the subreddit for threats against law enforcement officers, with the CEO actively deleting posts that targetted him or editing them so they targetted r/The_Donald moderators instead.

Ms Pao was one among many to criticise Mr Huffman's statement. The Twitter account for the r/BlackPeopleTwitter subreddit quote-tweeted the letter with a screenshot from a Guardian article with the headline “open racism and slurs are fine to post on Reddit, says CEO”

In the article, from 2018, Huffman said:“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.”

In a Reddit thread one year before, Huffman said that racism and slurs were not against Reddit’s rules. “To be perfectly clear, while racism itself isn't against the rules, it's not welcome here” he also said.

Much like many social media companies, Reddit continues to struggle against balancing freedom of speech with cracking down on hateful content. Twitter has recently come under pressure from the US government following criticism that it was the “arbiter of truth” after it fact-checked, and labelled, Mr Trump’s tweets for "glorifying violence".

Facebook, meanwhile, has had to instigate an external board to handle its free speech issues, but also reportedly stopped research into making its platform less politically polarising for fear that conservatives would feel unfairly targetted by such policies.

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