Reddit CEO Steve Huffman testified before Congress on Thursday, defending the role Reddit played in the January GameStop stock surge.
Huffman told House Financial Services Committee members in a hearing on Thursday that Reddit has not detected any significant activity driven by bots or foreign actors on the WallStreetBets subreddit. Users in the online community sparked a buying frenzy for high-short stocks like GameStop and AMC last month.
As retailers continued to buy once-unwanted stocks, lawmakers and media observers raised questions about who was really behind the posts that were trading and how such a mechanism could be manipulated.
Huffman testified that Reddit’s moderation mechanism makes it particularly good at removing bad information. The site allows users to vote comments up or down to increase or decrease their visibility. Moderators from various communities help enforce the rules in their corners of the platform. Huffman said Reddit has invested heavily in the voting system and WallStreetBets moderators “have done an excellent job.”
“Our user base is exceptionally good at detecting falsehoods, misinformation and fake stories, both within this community and Reddit in general,” said Huffman. “For a piece of content to be successful on Reddit, it must be accepted by that community and get the same number of votes as anything else.”
While users don’t need to use their real identities, Huffman said it wouldn’t necessarily make the site more secure if they did.
“Other platforms have a real identity and it doesn’t help to improve their behavior,” he said.
Financial advice from Reddit users is arguably more reliable than advice from traditional media, Huffman suggested.
“People can say, in fact, they do that all the time on television, encouraging people to make what I would call bad investment decisions,” Huffman said. “On Reddit, I think, the investment advice is actually probably one of the best because it has to be accepted by many thousands of people before it gets that kind of visibility.”
Reddit is largely protected from legal responsibility for their users’ messages through a law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The law protects online platforms from liability for users’ posts and also allows them to moderate or remove content as they see fit. The law has been criticized by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who believe it is unfairly protecting them from responsibility for their products.
Still, Huffman suggested his company could be held responsible for things that happen on his platform. Huffman later noted that Reddit is still subject to civil lawsuits.
“Reddit can be held accountable and we take our responsibilities here incredibly seriously,” he said.
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