Reddit cofounder and Chief Executive Steve Huffman has admitted meddling with user comments, inflaming recent controversies concerning the user-generated news link site.

“I abused my power to give the bullies a hard time,” Steve Huffman told the Washington Post. In light of the recent furor over what has been perceived as the promulgation of “fake news” on social media, Huffman’s coming clean has only deepened the public’s growing distrust of the supposed impartiality of social media platforms.

Huffman went into the pro-Trump subreddit, r/The_Donald, and made negative comments about him look like they were being directed at the group’s leaders. Huffman had previously provoked the ire of pro-Trump Reddit users after the site took down the /r/pizzagate thread.

He was soon found out by the Reddit community. “This is a HUGE deal. Like, way more than some people even realize. Think about this,” said one of the leading critical comments. Huffman’s actions have provoked a suspicion that administrators have the power to put words into people’s mouths, mute voices by throwing them to the back of the stack and make subreddits disappear completely by invoking the site’s rules against them.

Criticism of Huffman and Reddit has been quite severe, in some part because people are now asking if this kind of thing has happened in the past. Reddit can choose to edit posts or expunge entire threads if it feels it has grounds to do so, although Huffman’s ostensible puerility led to an outcry because he subverted his own site’s policies. Editors can edit content, but the point here is that it was done out of malice.

One question the incident raises is whether an uber-blog should be expected to act like a professional media outfit. As an interactive computer service and not a content provider, Reddit could not be held legally responsible for user posts under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, although it’s been said that his altering of content has “exposed Reddit to liability.”

Taking down Pizzagate

The Pizzagate scandal, an unfounded child sex abuse conspiracy theory involving the Clinton family that spread across the Internet, recently led to a rather prominent pizzeria owner being harassed for alleged complicity in child sex trafficking. The New York Times reported that the owner and “his 40 employees had unwittingly become real people caught in the middle of a storm of fake news.”

Reddit says it took down the Pizzagate post, started by users who “are known for promoting conspiracy theories and fake news across Reddit and gleefully invading and bombarding the rest of the platform with pro-Trump memes,” because it revealed people’s personal information. Suffice it to say taking the Pizzagate thread down has only aroused more suspicion. It may also have served to protect innocent people from undeserved harassment.

Huffman’s actions breached Reddit’s employee policy, although he told the media he had intended to reverse his “editing” after an hour or so. Huffman had said after taking the CEO job that Reddit would not edit or remove user posts if they stayed within the guidelines.

The recent hoopla has left the platform with egg on its face, while those that fear Big Brother-style trickery have a reason to feel vindicated. What is the upshot and the message the public has been given at the end of this rather serious year – a year of outrage on the internet, when people en masse talked about the end of truth?

More Censorship

Huffman stated that rather than political subterfuge his actions were merely a form of digital hi-jinks. “I had my fun with them, they had their fun with me,” he told the Washington Post. “But we are not going to tolerate harassment for any others.”

Social media platforms have found themselves under discombobulating pressure: to do the right thing when the right thing is sometimes nebulous. Censorship can also provide needed shelter from not so nebulous haters and extremists.

Reddit made /r/WatchNiggersDie disappear as it did r/beatingwomen, but could revised censorship policies also cull voices from the web who in years ahead could be seen not as trolls but online iconoclasts. How long until so-called 9/11 Truthers are ostracized from mainstream forums, or climate change deniers? Remember the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, or missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

For the most part, the majority share universal ethics relating to racism and violence against women, but on universal truths the Internet is an extremely diverse place. Just as political correctness overshadowed political mandate at this year’s election, our eyes are diverted to hate or bad behavior on the internet when we hear about censorship.

Censorship of words in print goes back hundreds of years, and has arguably been more oppressive than it has been protective or progressive. Does this mean we should be wary about current plans to enforce “good” or “truthful” speech on the Internet? Information has never been more volatile in its impact, and we don’t know how to deal with it.

Dissent is indispensable

English-American activist Thomas Paine would probably agree if he were alive now that we need some anarchy on the Internet, views that upset and displace conventional thinking to offset that of the mainstream media. How do we separate outlandish, perhaps dangerous nonsense, from truth or heady criticism? We use “common sense,” which might at times mean condoning dissenting voices as well as accepting conventional wisdom.

Paine was called a “traitor” by George Washington, and a “filthy little atheist” by Theodore Roosevelt. Although he was imprisoned for his rebellious views, Paine was considered, and still is by many, a fulcrum of the American revolution and its independence from great Britain. Today he might have been an anti-establishment Internet activist, just as some conspiracy theorists might adjudge themselves to be.

Social media and internet forums have until now been the conduits of free speech and anarchy and we cherish this digital plexus of shapeshifting ideas and mutable truths. If we starting plugging the tubes in the digital membrane, we should ask what kind of truth, or harmony, we want to achieve. We might also ask who defines harmony in the era of what we might call post-truth.

In an attempt to condemn what Huffman considered to be an example of post-truth, he became himself an exponent of information fabrication. This was a poor attempt at righting a wrong by the Reddit boss, and if his plan now is a crackdown on what Reddit deems “harassment,” expect the banished to rejoice in self-justification on another platform. That is, if some kind of omnipotent censoring algorithm isn’t completely sanitizing the Internet by then.

Photo credit: fotologic via Flickr