The CEO of one of the most prominent leftist artificial intelligence companies in the U.S. and another company with deep ties to the Communist Chinese government were revealed to be prominent shareholders of the censorship-obsessed tech giant Reddit.
Chinese censorship company Tencent and OpenAI’s Sam Altman were listed as two of the top three shareholders in tech company Reddit, behind only Condé Nast’s owner Advance Publications, according to The Verge. The outlet cited Reddit’s IPO filing, revealing that Altman had more shares than Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Reddit’s documented obsession with crushing free speech makes more sense in light of the new findings.
“While he isn’t a co-founder, Altman has been deeply involved in Reddit since basically the beginning,” The Verge noted. “He quietly stepped off the board in 2022 as OpenAI was rising to prominence and Reddit was gearing up to go public. Now, he owns a big chunk of a company that really wants AI companies to pay for its data. Interesting times!” That’s putting it mildly.
Because Altman owns 8.7 percent of Reddit’s stock, versus Huffman’s 3.3 percent, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI has more than twice Huffman’s voting power, The Verge explained. An August 2023 study found clear leftist/Democrat bias in ChatGPT. MRC Free Speech America recently uncovered how ChatGPT promoted leftist news ratings firms Ad Fontes and NewsGuard as a way to determine the quality of news organizations in the U.S. Both of those companies have documented histories of propping up leftist media while denigrating right-leaning media, as MRC research has emphasized. Does Altman influence Reddit to display similar bias?
Meanwhile, Tencent’s stake could trigger even more questions about Reddit’s position toward free speech. MRC Free Speech America reported in 2019 that Tencent was involved in doing the Chinese government’s censorship dirty work, and had invested at least $150 million in Reddit—even though Tencent got Reddit banned in China. Then, last year, Markets Insider reported that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was buying shares in tech companies, including Tencent. The apparent goal was to give the CCP “special rights over certain business decisions,” Insider explained. The anti-free speech CCP can even control the content tech companies provide, with rights over some company decisions, the outlet added.
But CCP influence on Tencent goes back even further. Taiwan News covered a report in 2020 that 23 percent of Tencent employees were CCP members. Among Tencent’s companies are social media WeChat and gaming studio Riot Games. It seems Reddit is one of the multiple American companies in which Tencent has invested, raising questions of the extent of Chinese government involvement.
For instance, the CCP also owns a stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, and TikTok has censored content to please the CCP, while its data is reportedly accessible to ByteDance. Could key Reddit data or information also be accessible to Tencent and thus the CCP? And does Tencent import its censorship activities to American companies like Reddit? Reddit has censored thousands of pieces of content in the past for “hate”, including a 2022 LGBTQ-inspired effort to censor the word “groomer,” an ominous sign.
Conservatives are under attack: Contact the Reddit admin and demand that the platform mirror the First Amendment: Tech giants should afford their users nothing less than the free speech and free exercise of religion embodied in the First Amendment as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
