- Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian envisions AI moderating future social media platforms.
- Ohanian said AI would allow users to set tolerance levels for content.
- Reddit has prioritized AI, signing deals with Google and OpenAI for content data sharing.
The Reddit moderator is something of a near-mythical creature.
They are anonymous and unpaid, and some of them wield significant power over the flow of information. However, in the age of artificial intelligence, they might not be long for this world.
Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded the popular internet forum site in 2005, thinks AI is the future of social media moderation.
At a recent conference in Qatar, he said AI could even “unlock” a system where people use “sliders” to “choose their level of tolerance” about certain topics on social media.
“I’d imagine another wave of social media platforms building this way, and probably the incumbents adopting versions of it as well,” Ohanian told a CNBC reporter at the conference.
Reddit itself has made AI a top priority over the past year.
The company signed a licensing deal to train Google’s AI models using Reddit content for $60 million a year in February 2024. Then in May, Reddit signed another massive content data-sharing deal with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to train its AI models.
Reddit also introduced several new AI-powered tools last year, including an AI-powered search tool that generates answers from the site’s content and translation features that use AI to deliver content in different languages.
Reddit hasn’t said if AI moderators are also on their way. Ohanian sold his stake in Reddit in 2006 and is no longer involved in operations. His cofounder, Steve Huffman, is now CEO.
When he helped found Reddit in 2005, Ohanian said the company implemented a set of rules about content that he considered “federal laws” for the site.
Restrictions on some content — like banning revenge porn in 2014 — were “no brainers” that gave Reddit moderators a system of rules to work within so content moderation on the site remained consistent in individual communities, Ohanian said at the conference.
Ohanian said that for companies like Meta and X to move to a community notes model is a reasonable approach because mass fact-checking is unfeasible. Meta replaced its third-party fact-checkers with community notes last month.
“It is impossible to do fact-checking at scale, let alone in real time, as Facebook was trying to do,” Ohanian said. “So, in many ways, I think they were just winding back something that was a bad idea from the start, because it was untenable.”
Ohanian said at the conference that he thinks social media will “eventually get to a place where we get to choose our own algorithm.”
“We’re all incentivized to have the best possible algorithm, not because of anything sinister, but because we want to keep people engaged,” Ohanian said. “It drives revenue. It does all those things, but I think the next iteration of it is to actually let us choose the weights and levers of those algorithms so that we have a bit more agency and ownership.”
