Reddit has long been a standout community among its peers when it comes to advocacy and enforcement of free speech. While not as lax as its distant cousin 4chan, for a website with half a billion monthly visitors that has endured through its fair share of controversies around the issues of online harassment and privacy, Reddit's community continues to thrives without a wall of text on content moderation policies.

This isn't to say Reddit is a blackbox business or a lawless community where anything goes unchecked. Ironically enough, the fiasco began during an AMA session with Reddit's current CEO Steve Huffman following the release of its annual transparency report. When Redditor chlomyster asked if “open racism” was against the rules of the site, Huffman responded:

"It's not. On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behavior from beliefs. This means on Reddit there will be people with beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so. When users actions conflict with our content policies, we take action. Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules.”

To be fair, opening his response with a decisive negative to that particular question does sound like an open invitation for out-of-context headlines( and they came). But to those who've explored the depths of Reddit’s seedier communities, where racial slurs and prejudice run amok to this day, Huffman's statement probably didn't come as much of a shock.

Regardless, Huffman's statement was promptly met with a slew of critical headlines on Reddit's laissez-faire policy on racism from the tech news outlets. Two days later, Huffman updated his original comments to state that "while racism itself isn’t against the rules, it’s not welcome." According to Reddit's content policy, communities that harbor racism can be banned if it falls under the category of "Unwelcome Content," which includes acts of bullying, harassment and incitement.

The latest hubbub comes amidst growing pressure within Reddit's moderation community to ramp up its efforts in cleaning up the fumes of harassment and incitement in subreddits, a shadow that has been tailing the social media giant for years since its last major anti-hate speech initiative under the short-lived direction of former CEO Ellen Pao in 2015.