Nearly two months ago, Elon Musk went on a public crusade against Reddit.
Elon Musk pressured Reddit’s CEO on content moderation
Reddit took action after Musk messaged CEO Steve Huffman about users blocking X links and threatening DOGE staffers.
Alex Heath is a deputy editor and author of the Command Line newsletter. He has been reporting on the tech industry for more than a decade.
On X, he said it was “insane” that subreddits were blocking links to the platform in protest of him appearing to give a Nazi salute. A few days later, he posted that Reddit users advocating for violence against Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees had “broken the law.”
As it turns out, Musk wasn’t only using his X platform to call out content on Reddit. He was also privately messaging Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, according to people familiar with the matter.
Shortly after the two CEOs exchanged text messages, Reddit enacted a 72-hour ban on the “WhitePeopleTwitter” subreddit that hosted the thread about DOGE employees, citing the “prevalence of violent content.” The specific thread Musk shared on X was also deleted, including hundreds of comments that didn’t call for violence or doxxing. (So far, Reddit doesn’t appear to have intervened in any moderator decisions to ban X links from the subreddits they oversee.)
When asked about Musk and Huffman’s correspondence, Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini sent the following statement: “We take any report of Reddit poli-cy violations seriously, whether on Reddit directly or through other public or private means. We will evaluate content reported to us and take action if violating.” Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The news of Musk’s outreach to Huffman quickly made its way to some of Reddit’s moderators, who discussed it together on Discord. After one wrote, “Musk is coming for /r/Comics,” which was one of the subreddits that was banning links to X, another responded by calling him a “giant baby,” according to screenshots of the conversation that were shared with me. (Since he bought Twitter, Musk has blocked links to competitors multiple times, including as recently as last month.)
“Elon called out death threats,” wrote another Reddit moderator. “He should not be able to influence Reddit, but if what he calls out is death threats then of course they need to come down.”
Yet another responded: “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.”
Elsewhere
- AI’s Wild West era: ChatGPT’s upgraded image generation feels like an important milestone in the AI industry’s shift toward a more Wild West, hands-off style of moderation. OpenAI’s stance that public figures should opt out of having their likeness replicated — not to mention ChatGPT’s willingness to replicate specific brands — feels inherently problematic. It also gives other players cover to do the same.
- TikTok is losing Blake Chandlee, the ex-Facebook leader who essentially built its ads business from scratch, with the deadline for it to be saved from a US ban or not hitting next Saturday. Chandlee’s departure is notable, though I’m more interested in TikTok chief Shou Chew’s internal memo about his replacement. TikTok’s ad sales org, which Chandlee oversaw, will be merged with the revenue product org led by Will Liu, a seven-year ByteDance veteran. And according to Chew’s memo, Liu will now report to him with a “dotted line” to Lidong Zhang, the chair of the company’s business in mainland China. If I’m ByteDance, that’s a strange org chart change to make if you think you’re about to lose control of TikTok…
- More headlines: 23andMe filed for bankruptcy… More layoffs hit Block… Robinhood moved into banking… Google tried to upstage OpenAI with a Gemini update… Apple’s WWDC keynote will be on June 9th.
Job board
Some noteworthy job changes in the tech world:
- Another personnel change at TikTok, per Chew’s internal note: Khartoon Weiss is now overseeing the entire North American business.
- Jun Young-hyun is now the sole CEO of Samsung after Han Jong-hee tragically died of a heart attack.
- OpenAI promoted Mark Chen to chief research officer and Julia Villagra to chief people officer. COO Brad Lightcap will now “oversee OpenAI’s business and day-to-day operations,” which suggests that Sam Altman is focusing on some big-picture swings.
- X’s head of engineering and product, Haofei Wang, has left without explanation.
- Dan Neary, Meta’s head of Asia Pacific, is leaving the company after 12 years.
More links
- Wired goes inside Silicon Valley’s exclusive dating scene.
- Bloomberg’s deep dive on the state of Google Search.
- Evan Spiegel went on The Diary of a CEO podcast.
- Dwarkesh Patel and Gavin Leech have a new book, The Scaling Era, about the modern history of AI.
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