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and X. The r/IsElonDeadYet page consisted of a daily post asking whether he was, in fact, dead or not, according to an archived version of the site in December.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.
Zaloguj się, aby dodać komentarz
Inne posty w tej grupie
Have you ever wanted to sign up for an online service but you didn’t want to provide your real email address as part of the process?
There’s a good chance your email address has
Did everyone get the Microsoft 365 rate-hike notice? The personal plan is going from $70 a year to $100 a year.
Few apps are as inextricably linked to the iPhone as Apple’s Messages. Introduced with the original iPhone almost 18 years ago, the app (then called “Text”) has become the primar
Elon Musk said on Friday that his xAI has acquired X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter, in an all-stock transaction for $45 billion, including $12 billion in debt.
“x
There’s a reason Haliey Welch seemingly vanished from the internet overnight: S
Meta wants to revive Facebook’s old-school appeal by introducing a new Friends Tab, which will focus solely on posts shar
This week, the internet had a rare opportunity to transform their selfies and family photos into stunning Studio Ghibli–style portraits. What started as a lighthearted trend quickly took a darker
