Impossible to consistently enforce ban on hate speech: Reddit CEO Huffman

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Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has said that consistently enforcing a ban on hate speech on the social news aggregator is ‘impossible’ and not so easy to even attempt.

A private chat thread leaked over the weekend, revealed Huffman's observation.

According to a report by The Huffington Post, a Reddit user and cybersecurity researcher Zachary Swanson asked Huffman to reconsider his stance on hate speech on the platform pointing that Reddit’s rules already ban “violent” speech.

Huffman, in his response claimed that the hate speech is “difficult to define, and a total ban on hate speech is a nearly impossible precedent to uphold and enforce consistently,” according to a report by The Verge.

Swanson then shared the screenshots of his conversation with Huffman on a few 'Subreddits' or subsidiary threads.

In April, Huffman found himself in the middle of a storm after refusing to moderate racism on his site, the report adds.

He had then suggested that hate speech did not constitute a “behavior”.

Huffman however clarified later that that “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.”