San Francisco (AFP)
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the Reddit chat platform and husband of Serena Williams, resigned from the board on Friday and asked the company to hire a black candidate to replace him.
"It was time to do the right thing," he said in a video posted to Twitter as the United States experiences a wave of anti-racism mobilization after the death of George Floyd, asphyxiated by a police officer. White.
The entrepreneur added that his future dividends on Reddit shares would be put to the service of the black community, in particular to "fight against racial hatred".
He explains that he made this decision as a "father", so that one day he could answer his daughter's (mixed race) question when she asked him: "And you, what did you do?".
The social network Reddit was founded 15 years ago, like a large forum, on the principle of unbridled freedom of expression, without safeguards.
As the dominant platforms like Facebook or Twitter have tightened their rules on hate content, part of the American far right has ended up on the Reddit or 4chan platforms.
But for about two years, Reddit has been undertaking a major cleanup to get rid of so-called "toxic" groups and users.
According to the specialist media The Verge, the decision of Alexis Ohanian comes as moderators from certain large communities of the platform challenged Steve Huffman, the CEO and co-founder of Reddit, accusing him of not having acted against racism and certain virulent communities, like that of supporters of Donald Trump.
Steve Huffman said in a statement that the group would honor Alexis Ohanian's request to replace him with a black person and that his teams were working to "change the rules on content that expresses explicit hatred".
© 2020 AFP