What the White House Is Doing on Reddit

11.10.2024 02:31

TheAtlantic.com

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A couple of days ago, the account u/whitehouse posted on Reddit for the first time. Since it kicked things off with a photo of President Joe Biden leading a briefing on Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, the account has appeared on various pages related to the storms. “Yep, it’s really us!” one comment from the account reassured any (understandably) skeptical users.

This has been quite a week for disinformation across the internet: Some of the lies being spread as storms batter the Southeast come from accounts that belong to everyday users posting sensational images with the help of AI, but some have come directly from elected officials, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump, who are using the storm to fuel a political agenda. Debuting on Reddit this week was a way for the White House to push back against misinformation, Christian L. Tom, the White House director of digital strategy, told me earlier today. “We view Reddit as a good example of a service that allows people to align around shared interests,” including specific topics and locations, Tom said.

The White House is still posting on other major social platforms; Tom noted that using Reddit was among the White House’s various digital strategies, which include working with content creators, and he emphasized that having a presence on the platform doesn’t come at the expense of dealing with misinformation on platforms such as X. (Reddit itself is, of course, not immune to misinformation.)

That Reddit is now an appealing home for such content is a bit of a swerve: The site was once infamous for hosting unwieldy conversation threads and even hate speech. But since the mid-2010s, the platform has put major effort into moderating its content. Its user base has also grown dramatically in recent years. As Reddit’s competitors, especially Elon Musk’s X, have become vectors of inaccuracy and lies, Reddit is standing out as an unexpected place for real-time, accurate information to reach an engaged public.

The Reddit cleanup began after several high-profile crises—including a staff revolt against its former CEO Ellen Pao and swells of violent speech on the platform at the time of the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. The company soon updated the language of its content-moderation policies and banned accounts it found to be in violation. As the Reddit co-founder and now-CEO Steve Huffman told The New Yorker at the time: “We let the story get away from us. And now we’re trying to get our shit together.” For Reddit, part of the effort to tamp down on bad actors was clearly about revenue growth, and on that score, the company’s efforts seem largely to have worked; it went public this past March, debuting on the stock market at a $6.4 billion valuation.

My colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany, who has covered the world of Reddit, told me that the platform has always been a product of its time—including 20 years ago, when the web had different norms. The site today is no utopia, she cautioned. But its unusual system of volunteer moderators has allowed Reddit to evolve. The site has shifted “fairly organically because of a content-moderation system that empowers users to keep their own siloed spaces clean,” she said. Reddit can be understood as a collection of “fiefdoms,” known as subreddits, Kaitlyn explained, governed by rules laid down by the moderators of that space—and subject to the site’s broader policies. The system of allowing users to upvote and downvote posts “works as a built-in check against bad information spiraling out of control,” she added (though bad actors could always overtake a page and try to manipulate it).

Reddit’s role in this moment also speaks to the fact that other platforms have let lies proliferate unchecked: X, once carefully moderated and admired for its utility in fast-changing news moments, is now overrun with disinformation—some of it personally boosted by its owner, Elon Musk. The site formerly employed a robust team of trust and safety officials; Musk fired many of them in 2022, and has mocked the idea of content moderation. Meanwhile, Google is clogged with AI tools and nonsensical, not-always-accurate summaries. Into this landscape comes Reddit: 100 people per second are appending “Reddit” to their Google searches in order to get the results they’re seeking, a Reddit spokesperson told me; the site’s users were at an all-time high last quarter, she said, adding that subreddits for various Florida communities affected by the storms saw boosts in traffic over the past two weeks.

As my colleague Elaine Godfrey wrote yesterday, right-wing efforts to politicize the hurricanes “offer a foretaste of the grievance-fueled disinformation mayhem that we’ll see on and after Election Day.” In a moment when America’s elected leaders are fanning the flames of disinformation, and social-media lords are working against the spread of accurate content (in Musk’s case, literally leaping into an alliance with a political candidate doing the same), people sharing real-time facts are looking for somewhere to go. In our topsy-turvy media ecosystem, the answer may be—of all places—Reddit.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

At least five people are dead and more than 3 million people have lost power after Hurricane Milton battered Florida overnight.
The Department of Justice announced that TD Bank will pay a $3 billion fine for charges including violating the Bank Secrecy Act and failing to monitor money laundering.
Ethel Kennedy, widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and matriarch of the Kennedy family, died at age 96.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Hurricane Milton was a test of Florida’s coast, which has everything to recommend it, except the growing risk of flooding, Zoë Schlanger writes.
Time-Travel Thursdays: A 1938 hurricane left many New Englanders in a similar position to the Appalachian communities devastated by Hurricane Helene, Nancy Walecki writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Get Off the Family Plan

By Arthur C. Brooks

People constantly ask me what they should help their adult kids pay for, if they themselves have been lucky enough to do well in life. The dilemma they have is that they’re proud of having earned their way and feel that their self-reliance, not a handout, is the gift they want to pass on; yet they also feel that it’s stingy to hold out on their nearest and dearest, rather than share their good fortune.

Here’s a rule of thumb to help resolve that dilemma: If you can afford to help your adult kids, pay for investment, not consumption.

Read the full article.