Reddit CEO Steve Huffman defends platform's role in GameStop market frenzy

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Image Credits: Horacio Villalobos – Corbis / Contributor / Getty Images, Via Techcrunch

Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman has defended the role his platform played in the January surge of GameStop shares, which raised too many questions about market regulation.

Huffman testified before Congress on Thursday where he told members of the House Financial Services Committee that Reddit did not detect any significant activity driven by bots or foreign actors on the WallStreetBets subreddit.

Users in the online community helped spark a buying frenzy last month for highly-shorted stocks like GameStop and AMC.

Huffman said that Reddit’s moderation mechanism makes it particularly good at eliminating bad information. He said the site allows users to vote comments up or down to increase or decrease their visibility.

Moderators of different communities help enforce the rules in their corners of the platform. Huffman said Reddit has invested heavily into the voting system and that the WallStreetBets moderators have done an “excellent job.”

“Our userbase is exceptionally good at sniffing out untruths, misinformation, fake stories, both within this community and Reddit at large,” Huffman said. “In order for any piece of content to be successful on Reddit, it has to be accepted by that community and receive the same amount of votes that anything else would.”