00:00Hey, I'm Elisa Kreisinger and every Tuesday I unpack my strong opinions with the help
00:05of an expert who might not have all of the answers, but they certainly know more than
00:09I do.
00:10That's why this is Strong Opinions Loosely Held.
00:13And on this week's episode, Reddit.
00:16Reddit is one of the most popular sites in the US.
00:19It's actually more popular than Twitter, and a third of all Americans visit it.
00:23But what is it?
00:24And why is our president tweeting memes he found there?
00:27I asked journalist Christine Legorio-Chavkin.
00:30She wrote a book about Reddit after she befriended the websites, I mean platform, it's an app.
00:36No, I don't know.
00:37She befriended the co-founders of Reddit and she got the inside scoop.
00:40So I asked her, what the f**k is Reddit?
00:43Why should I care?
00:44Reddit is at times like a cauldron of just terrible behavior and awful hate speech.
00:49It's a really hard place for women to just even exist.
00:54Cool!
00:55Christine explained that Reddit is popular because it retains the grittiness and anarchy
01:00of the original internet.
01:02It even looks like 1998.
01:04Everyone is anonymous and there are chatroom-like communities that users themselves moderate.
01:09And this old school democratic system, it lends itself to some of the best behavior on the
01:14internet.
01:15People have these amazing heartfelt discussions that aren't airbrushed.
01:20They're not like Pinterest ready.
01:22Things that you might not want to put out there on your Instagram or your Facebook like financial
01:28concerns or relationship problems.
01:30But Reddit also includes some of the worst behavior on the internet.
01:34But then also that anonymity leads to people being able to say horrible, horrible things
01:38to one another.
01:39And women in particular, people of color, people of different weights and heights.
01:46And you know, anybody with a body can get harassed on Reddit.
01:50Cool!
01:52Over the last few years, this community building has led to the blurring of boundaries between
01:58what's considered free speech and what's considered hate speech or harassment.
02:02What they did not foresee at the beginning of all of this was that the community would learn
02:07to push those boundaries so far into the gruesome, so far into the uncivil discourse.
02:15That is some of the stuff we are seeing today in the far right wing and even the far left
02:21wing of our political spectrum right now.
02:24You know, horrible behavior started to happen.
02:26And at once the company was left to police this, but then saying, well, we're a free speech
02:32site.
02:32Right.
02:33Everything else should be allowed to exist, you know.
02:36Christine explained to me that Reddit is where Donald Trump's most reciferous online
02:40community took root.
02:41It's also the home of an alleged Hillary Clinton sex tape and a very large community dedicated
02:47to conspiracy theories.
02:48And this stuff doesn't just stay on Reddit.
02:50It becomes our news.
02:52I would say Reddit was one of several places online that drove things like conspiracy theories
02:58and untruthful news and misinformation, disinformation to the top of the news cycle.
03:04And Donald Trump did himself tweet memes that came directly from that community.
03:10Right.
03:10It did affect the news cycle.
03:13And some of the stuff that was spread by the Russian troll farms, these things that no
03:19one would have paid attention to before, now had credibility in some sense.
03:22Who could forget Pizzagate?
03:24In 2016, a man walked into a DC pizza shop and fired a semi-automatic rifle to self-investigate
03:31claims circulating on Reddit and other social media sites that Hillary Clinton's campaign
03:36was trafficking child sex slaves in the pizzeria's basement.
03:41But the shop didn't have a basement.
03:43What happens when you open up the internet to be a free speech forum and everybody can use
03:48your voice and then you find out that like everyone's kind of a troll?
03:51Oh totally.
03:52Or like an a*****.
03:53Right.
03:53Absolutely.
03:54And I think this is a question we should all be asking and we should all be thinking about.
03:58Do you know the answer?
04:00What's the answer?
04:00Oh my god, there's no answer, right?
04:01Like this is something that we have yet as like a society basically to determine, right?
04:06So how do you clean up the internet without limiting free speech?
04:09And how do we make sure that we're not using free speech as a mask for what in practice is
04:15hate speech?
04:18So how do we make sure that we have any forms of connectivity?
