How Reddit is combating coronavirus misinformation

Reddit is encouraging its users to combat misinformation about the coronavirus on its platform, prompting medical experts to take matters into their own hands.

The unpaid curators of the popular website’s largest coronavirus-related discussion groups, the r/coronavirus and r/china_flu subreddits, are working overtime to ensure verified information rises to the top of the platform. Reddit’s leadership is encouraging those users to take the lead.

“I’d rather have experts in the field being the ones deciding what is actually an instance of misinformation,” Chris Slowe, Reddit’s chief technology officer and one of its founders, told The Hill in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Reddit’s user-led content moderation system allows unvetted and anonymous users to decide what’s allowed on the website. That system has drawn immense scrutiny for years, with critics and researchers accusing Reddit, which calls itself the “front page of the internet,” of taking a back seat as users push conspiracy theories, hate speech and extremist messages.

But this time around, amid an escalating health crisis that’s left people around the world with few answers, Reddit says its hands-off approach is working. The structure of the platform itself offers users several tools to control what they see and promote, and a team of PhDs and committed experts have helped curb conspiracy theories.

“Being in infectious disease myself, I view this as some sort of extension of my day job, even though I’m not getting paid for it,” Emerson Ailidh Boggs, a Ph.D. candidate in infectious disease microbiology and a moderator of coronavirus subreddits, told The Hill.

Dr. Andrew Bohm, an epidemiologist who helps moderate the r/china_flu subreddit, said he dedicates hours each day to rooting bad information out of the forum.

“We’re doing everything we can to make our resource a safe place for people to come for news discussion, important information, during this scary situation when people are coming to us because they are scared and they want safe, reliable information,” Bohm said.

But some also say Reddit should do more, including instituting a policy against health misinformation.