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Ellen Pao is in the middle of a one-year experimental run as CEO of Reddit, the hugely influential social media site that has recently become as known for flare-ups like Celebgate and Gamergate as for cute animal pictures and “ask me anything” interviews.
But even though some Redditors “have things to say that we don’t agree with,” Pao doesn’t want the site to limit what those people can say, she said today at the Code Conference.
“We don’t want to be a site where people put stolen pictures,” Pao said. “We also don’t want to be a site that censors content.”
That said, she acknowledged that she and others were made uneasy by Celebgate, in which one of Reddit’s several “subreddits” collected nude pictures of celebrities whose phones had been hacked.
“We have a responsibility to promote the values that we have as a company, as employees and as a site,” Pao said. “After the naked celeb photos, none of us were very comfortable.”
Reddit has 170 million monthly unique visitors, she noted — the implication being that it’s a bigger and more diverse place than its most infamous users would suggest.
“Reddit is the Internet,” she said.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
