Reddit CEO Threatens to Boot Moderators Who Back Blackout Protest

pcmag.com:

Reddit's CEO is threatening to remove moderators who are backing the ongoing subreddit blackout on the social media platform. 

In an interview(Opens in a new window) with NBCNews on Thursday, Steve Huffman took a shot at protesting moderators, calling them “landed gentry” for keeping their subreddits private for the last four days.

Huffman plans on making a rule change that would allow users in those subreddits to vote out moderators participating in the blackout protest. “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said in the interview. 

On the same day, Reddit itself warned(Opens in a new window) it could remove moderators for keeping their subreddits private, citing the company’s existing rules. “If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users,” the social media platform says. 

The threat could bring an end to the protest, which started on Monday and grew to include more than 8,400 subreddits. It was supposed to last 48 hours, but thousands of subreddits have pledged to remain private indefinitely, although the number has fallen to around 4,800(Opens in a new window) from 6,500 on Wednesday morning. 

The subreddits are protesting the company’s controversial plan to charge for access to the Reddit API. Reddit argues that some apps are scraping Reddit’s data to train their AI language models while offering no benefit to the social media platform and its users. The proposed charges, however, will shut down several third-party apps, including Apollo, which said its bill could top $20