Reddit's Trump trolls are freaking out—and they're right

Trump trolls on Reddit want the site's CEO to quit over his response to a bizarre sex scandal called #Pizzagate. Crazily enough, they might be right.

If you haven't heard, #Pizzagate is the hashtag used by trolls spreading the unhinged, bogus claim that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex ring running out of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. Several employees of that pizza parlor received death threats as a result. It's exactly the sort of steaming pile of trash that Reddit's uniquely positioned to cultivate—it's just surprising it took so long to get here.

By order of Reddit CEO and founder Steve Huffman ("spez" on the site), the #Pizzagate subreddit was banned. Huffman got hit with major backlash for doing so, and in response, he edited some Reddit user comments. It was pretty innocent stuff, all told—he admitted over Thanksgiving to messing with the comments, replacing his username with those of /r/the_donald moderators ("/r/the_donald" being a Trump-supporting hub for topics like, "Cuck-in-Chief blames guns and defends Islam again."). The idea was to make it seem like the trolls were going after their own leaders when, in fact, they were flaming Huffman. Clever!

Except, not. Because now Redditors are furious, and want the CEO to step down.

"This is a horrendous ethics violation for a CEO. Fire yourself," Redditor Ant_Sucks writes, not unreasonably. Because loathsome as #Pizzagate is, there's something just as gross (even Trumpian!) about a CEO abusing his power to literally corrupt the words of others.

The perfect storm

Reddit has always been a bad place to exercise your right to free speech. Yet the site, ostensibly a series of online forums, remains one of the most popular in the entire world.

By default, it rewards popular opinions, with an algorithm that sorts the "best" comments according to the number of "upvotes" they receive measured against the "downvotes"—in other words, users vote for statements they like and against ones they don't. It's a messy system, in all sorts of ways: It rewards groupthink. It makes it easier to see diverse opinions in smaller conversations, because fewer people are voting on any given comment. And finally, it incentivizes users to game the site to accrue "points" (upvotes).

All of these concerns fold into the catastrophe we're dealing with now. As Gizmodo reported Tuesday, the site has now been overrun by Trump-loving trolls who've successfully turned the system against itself, so they can now occupy prime real estate on Reddit's r/all page—the page which displays the most popular topics from across the site. And that's where the real problems begin.

Bad problem, made worse

No one can blame Huffman for banning discussion about — big sigh — #Pizzagate, which is best described by Mashable's Gianluca Mezzofiore:

#Pizzagate refers to a fake news story that falsely claimed Hillary Clinton, aided by campaign chairman John Podesta, kidnapped, molested and trafficked children in the backrooms of a pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C.

Dozens of fabricated articles on #pizzagate and the child trafficking ring appeared on Facebook and conspiracy theory websites such as The New Nationalist and The Vigilant Citizen. 

Reddit is not the town square. It is a privately owned website with rules that are subject to the whims of its leaders. Just as everyone calls on Facebook's leadership to take on greater responsibility over the spread of misinformation, there's no reason to expect less from Reddit. Trolls have played the system so their posts are constantly plastered over the home page—there's nothing wrong with fighting against that.

But not like this. Consider Facebook, and imagine if Mark Zuckerberg decided to change the text in a user's post, even if that user was spewing lies about a pizzeria sex den. The words wouldn't matter—there'd still be an outrage. There's a major difference between banning a topic (or even deleting a comment outright) and changing someone's words.

The latter is a violation of user trust that doesn't just open a can of worms: It nukes one. What we write online in 2016 is intrinsically linked to our identities, and it might be for all time.

Which isn't to say that we can't sympathize with Huffman's frustration. #Pizzagate is disgusting, as are so many threads on /r/the_donald. And the emergence of "fake news" as a major problem in online media has left journalists, academics and news consumers at wit's end.

"At a moment of exhaustion for virtually everyone who thinks that truthfulness matters, who worry about facts being trumped by lies, distortions, allegations, denials, and who worry about the level of violent threats being expressed through social media under the cloak of anonymity, I'm not too put out that [Huffman] let down his guard and reacted to the anonymous hate-filled crap directed at him," Brett Gary, a censorship and propaganda expert who teaches at New York University, told Mashable Tuesday.

"Is the Reddit CEO going to have to face a backlash? Probably," Prof. Gary said. But, he continued, "is this a crisis for free speech, given the larger crisis of truthfulness we're in? I don't think so."

He's not wrong. Yet, there's also a need to be principled about how we communicate online. Otherwise, there's a long road of outrage, fake news and pizza conspiracies ahead for all of us, all the time. And no one, no matter who they support, really wants that.