Last week, Reddit chief executive officer Steve Huffman responded to growing calls for the front page of the internet to ban communities spreading misinformation.

The CEO said that due to the rapidly changing nature of COVID-19 “we believe it is best to enable communities to engage in debate and dissent, and for us to link to the CDC wherever appropriate”. That’s about as hands-off as it gets in our opinion.

However, yesterday Reddit shared data it has access to regarding COVID-19 conversations on the platform.

In one of the graphs shared, Reddit shows that reports regarding content that is considered COVID-19 misinformation has increased from 500 reports per day in 2020 to 2 500 reports per day since August.

Then things get confusing.

Reddit points to “some well known subreddits dedicated to discussing and challenging the policy response to COVID” which could be a good or bad thing because discussing and challenging isn’t always problematic. The ban on alcohol sales locally for instance has been challenged but that’s very different from “challenging” vaccinations outside a hospital.

Within these subreddits which are “discussing and challenging the policy response to COVID” content posted about COVID is three times more likely to be reported than in other communities.

“Together with information above we can infer that there has been an increase in COVID denial content on the platform, and that increase has been more pronounced since July. While the increase is suboptimal, it is noteworthy that the large majority of the content is outside of these COVID denial subreddits. It’s also hard to put an exact number on the increase or the overall volume,” says Reddit.

And that’s that on that. Seriously. Reddit acknowledges there is an increase in COVID-19 denial on its platform and offers no solutions to combat this. Instead, Reddit broke down its approach to how it deals with misinformation.

“We have long interpreted our rule against posting content that ‘encourages’ physical harm, in this help center article, as covering health misinformation, meaning falsifiable health information that encourages or poses a significant risk of physical harm to the reader. For example, a post pushing a verifiably false ‘cure’ for cancer that would actually result in harm to people would violate our policies,” writes Reddit.

Why COVID-19 misinformation isn’t lumped into this policy is mighty confusing although as Huffman said, “Given the rapid state of change, we believe it is best to enable communities to engage in debate”.

One subreddit banned, for brigading

Seemingly in a bid to earn some redemption, Reddit detailed the banning of r/NoNewNormal.

“While we want to be a place where people can explore unpopular views, it is never acceptable to interfere with other communities. Claims of ‘brigading’ are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods. r/NoNewNormal is the only subreddit in our list of high signal subs where we have identified this behavior and it is one of the largest sources of community interference we surfaced as part of this work (we will be investigating a few other unrelated subreddits as well),” said Reddit.

The front page of the internet says that it has also quarantines 54 COVID denial subreddits under Rule 1 of Reddit.

Essentially, r/NoNewNormal was banned because its members went to other subreddits and attacked them. The reason they attacked users however doesn’t seem to matter to Reddit.

COVID-19 misinformation can be deadly and the lackadaisical approach Reddit is taking here is, quite frankly, disgusting.

We feel Engadget said it best in it’s headline “Reddit offers a non-response to uproar over COVID-19 misinformation“.

What is clear is that if you’re looking for reliable information and opinions about COVID-19, Reddit is likely a platform you want to avoid.