LOS ANGELES—The online forum Reddit — one of the world’s most popular social media sites, with 430 million monthly visitors — has no plans to ban porn, according to the company’s CEO Steve Huffman. The declaration by Huffman, made during an interview with Axios on HBO, sets Reddit apart from many other social media platforms, and defies a global trend toward banning adult content online.
In the interview, Huffman added that Reddit does not want to see “exploitative” porn on its forums. "But there's another aspect that's empowering. And these are people sharing stories of themselves, pictures of themselves. And we are perfectly supportive of that,” Huffman said.
In late 2018, the blogging site Tumblr — once a haven for sexually explicit content and discussion in an online social media setting — announced that it would ban all adult material. Eight months later, Tumblr’s corporate parent, Verizon, sold the site at a $1 billion loss.
Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram, have long imposed bans not only on porn, but on nudity or most any form of sexually frank content, though users — and sex workers in particular — have complained that the rules are often enforced unevenly, in discriminatory fashion. Among social media sites, only Reddit and Twitter continue porn-friendly policies.
Huffman also added that Reddit would enforce its policy against nonconsensual, or as he put it, “involuntary” sexual imagery on the site, a category that includes “revenge porn” another types of nonconsensually created or posted images.
"We want people to be safe, we have rules on Reddit — no involuntary sexualization. And if anybody makes those sorts of reports to us we take those very seriously," Huffman told Axios. He also noted that Reddit does not permit sexualized images of minors.
It was on Reddit in 2017, however, that the “deepfakes” phenomenon originated, when Reddit users began creating and posting porn clips with the faces of mainstream female celebrities superimposed, complete with realistic facial expressions generated by artificial intelligence technology.
Reddit soon shut down the “deepfakes” subreddit (that is, forum) on which the videos were posted. The deepfakes phenomenon prompted Reddit at the time to create policies specifically banning “involuntary porn,” which included deepake porn.
“Reddit prohibits the dissemination of images or video depicting any person in a state of nudity or engaged in any act of sexual conduct apparently created or posted without their permission, including depictions that have been faked,” the then-new Reddit policy stated.
Reddit users are required to tag any adult content with an “NSFW” label, however.
"There are difficult decisions to make in this sphere, but we think they're worth making. As opposed to saying 'no sex at all,' for example," Huffman told Axios.
Photo By Web Summit / Wikimedia Commons
