'We Are Not the Thought Police': Huffman's Hate-Speech DMs — and the Teenager Suspended for Publishing Them

In April 2018, answering a user question in a public thread, Steve Huffman confirmed that the use of racial slurs did not contravene Reddit's rules. 'On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behaviour from beliefs,' he wrote, arguing that while Reddit prohibited harassment and violence, 'open racism, including slurs' was not against the rules. The admission drew wide coverage and internal backlash — employees and users asked why a mainstream platform with tens of millions of daily visitors would formally tolerate what its peers prohibited.

Three months later a 17-year-old user, Zachary Swanson, pressed Huffman on the point in private messages, asking why Reddit would not follow its peers: 'Facebook draws a line. Twitter draws a line. Why doesn't Reddit... draw a line?' Huffman replied that banning hate speech was 'not really done' and 'an impossible precedent to uphold,' adding: 'Additionally, we are not the thought police. It's not the role of a private company to decide what people can and cannot say.'

Swanson published screenshots of the exchange. The next day, his account was suspended for a week. Reddit did not respond to questions about why the user was suspended, and the sequence — a CEO defending maximal speech tolerance in private, followed by the suspension of the teenager who made the exchange public — became its own story. Ars Technica's headline captured it: Reddit's CEO told a user 'we are not the thought police,' then suspended that user.

The episode crystallized the platform's central contradiction in the pre-2020 era: a stated free-speech absolutism that reliably found enforcement resources when the target was embarrassment to the company rather than hate speech. At the time, r/The_Donald — described in the BBC's report as a 628,000-strong community in which overtly racist imagery and white nationalist views were sometimes shared — remained live; it would take until June 2020, and a very different news cycle, for Reddit to adopt a hate-speech rule and ban it.