The Reddit Paradox: Liberal Users, Fascist Owners and Executives
- john raymond
- Jul 8
- 2 min read
Reddit is living a lie.
This platform—the so-called “front page of the internet”—runs on the content, labor, and moral courage of millions of liberal, progressive, pro-democracy users. It’s our jokes, our threads, our community norms, and our mod work that make Reddit usable. We’ve built the culture, fought off the trolls, and taken on the fascists. We’ve held the line when other social media platforms collapse into MAGA sludge.
And what do we get in return?
Steve “Spez” Huffman bending over backwards to appease fascists and undercut us at every turn.
Let’s be clear: Reddit’s users are overwhelmingly liberal. The largest and most engaged subreddits—r/politics, r/worldnews, r/WhitePeopleTwitter, r/LeopardsAteMyFace, r/AskAnAmerican, r/antiwork—are filled with users calling out authoritarianism, defending human rights, and holding Trump, Putin, and their grotesque enablers accountable.
And yet Reddit’s executives, its owners, and especially Spez himself, continue to punch down at us while quietly giving space, protection, and platform access to literal fascists.
This is the paradox: Liberal users run the site. But the fascists own it.
Spez has made it a mission to neutralize Reddit’s left. He wants us compliant, quiet, and apolitical—unless we’re generating profitable engagement. He’ll let hate subs metastasize until they become a PR risk, but he’ll nuke liberal mods for organizing or calling attention to Reddit’s own moral failures.
Moderators are punished for banning hate speech.
Anti-fascist communities are treated with the same suspicion as pro-Nazi ones—because “neutrality.”
Spez’s changes to the API? They weren’t just a cash grab. They were a crackdown on tools of resistance. Tools that let users flag hate speech, surface disinfo, and keep bad actors in check.
And behind all this? Investment from reactionary venture capitalists and corporate overseers who want Reddit de-radicalized—not from the right, but from the left.
Reddit’s leadership doesn’t fear fascism. They fear accountability. They fear that their user base actually believes in democracy, worker rights, and truth. And rather than side with the community that keeps this platform alive, Spez sides with the money. And the money wants silence. It wants compliance. It wants the marketplace of ideas to be rigged for the strong.
That’s what makes this betrayal so galling. Reddit could be a bulwark against the slide into authoritarianism. It could be a platform that openly rejects fascist rhetoric, MAGA lies, and Putinist propaganda. Instead, we get a CEO who hides behind “free speech” as a shield for hate, while throwing his own liberal base under the bus.
Spez isn’t just ignoring the problem. He’s part of it.
So here’s the truth:
Reddit’s users are fighting fascism.
Reddit’s executives are enabling it.
And unless we call this what it is—a cowardly betrayal of the very people who made Reddit matter—we’re going to lose one more platform to the authoritarian rot.
You want to help, Spez? Start by picking a side.
Because history will remember which side you were on.
And right now, you’re not on ours.
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