X owner Elon Musk was privately messaging with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman while also putting public pressure on the social media company’s content moderation efforts, The Verge reported Thursday.
Two months ago, several Reddit subreddits started to block links to X in protest of Musk appearing to give the Nazi salute. Musk called the efforts “insane,” while a Reddit spokesperson at the time clarified that Reddit itself wasn’t imposing a ban on the links. A few days later, Musk claimed that Reddit users who were calling for violence against members of his Department of Government Efficiency were breaking the law.
Musk has been a vocal critic of content moderation on social platforms—particularly since buying Twitter, now X, in 2022—to where he’s rolled back many trust and safety policies. At the same time, unironically, he’s been known to restrict links to other platforms on X.
And this certainly isn’t the first time Musk has gone after critics—journalists, users, even employees. Last month, Musk reportedly fired a Tesla manager who criticized Musk for a social media post that used the names of Nazis as wordplay.
The Verge reported that “shortly after” Musk and Huffman talked, Reddit enacted its 72-hour ban on the r/WhitePeopleTwitter subreddit, saying it was “due to a prevalence of violent content.” Reddit also fully banned a subreddit called r/IsElonDeadYet for breaking rules “against posting violent content.”
The r/WhitePeopleTwitter subreddit, which has more than three million followers, is mostly made up of users screenshotting posts from Bluesky and X. The r/IsElonDeadYet page consisted of a daily post asking whether he was, in fact, dead or not, according to an archived version of the site in December.
Reddit moderators learned that the two leaders had spoken, according to The Verge, and discussed it. In response to a user who said Musk is allowed to call out death threats, another reportedly said: “Oh, I don’t have any problem with removing rule-breaking content (and taking the respective admin action on said accounts), but I find it a bit problematic that he’s able to exert influence on both public and private institutions.”
Reddit has had ongoing tension with moderators and power users—especially after a policy change requiring some third-party developers to pay much more for its application programming interface led to widespread protests in mid-2023. The company, which went public last year, has struggled to maintain balance between changes from its leadership team and its hundreds of millions of monthly global users.
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
Curt Covert would love for people to play his latest board game—but with sky-high tariffs, he’s not sure anyone ever will.
“At 54%, I had a plan,” Covert tells Fast Company, ref
There is no bad seat at Cercle Odyssey. In fact, there are no seats. Within the rectangular structure, screens project an art film inspired by Homer’s
For years, Google made it incredibly easy to look up someone’s address, phone number, age, and other personal info.
All you had to do was type in a person’s name and where they live, and
