Reddit COO shrugs off regulatory concerns
The social media age ban and the news bargaining code are two of the biggest moves in online regulation that Australia has seen – but neither seem to bother Reddit’s chief operating officer Jen Wong.
Reddit isn’t a news source, Wong says. She seems unconcerned that the pending news bargaining incentive – designed to force platforms such as Meta and Google into deals with news publisher — could be applied to her organisation.
Jen Wong, COO of Reddit
“Most of Reddit is actually original content … [but] we do have links,” she says. “People put links in, but it’s a minority of the content.
“Mostly, what people do on Reddit is commenting on the links, more than reading the links.”
Wong says any news links are provided as source notes, rather than content to be read.
“It’s usually just for a conversation,” she says of these links. “It’s more about commenting about the topic. But most of Reddit is original content, meaning somebody who posted an original question, with no links.”
Wong stresses that she will play ball if required to by law. Australia is an important and fast-growing market for Reddit.
“Our user base is really mature in this market,” she says. “It’s a top-five market for us, and it’s a high-growth user market.”
The site currently draws 17 million monthly users in Australia, according to data from ipsos. This is backed up by independent analytics providers who place Reddit in the top four or five sites in Australia (Similarweb, Semrush).
“It’s a big audience. We’ve become very mainstream. I think Australia is a really significant opportunity for us.”
Last December, legislation passed through Parliament cementing a minimum age limit for social media platforms. The Online Safety Act now requires social media platforms to “take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 years from having accounts on their platforms.”
These systems are required to be in place by the end of the year, but according to Wong, teenagers aren’t really interested in Reddit.
“Reddit’s not for kids,” she tells Mumbrella. “It’s a lot of words,” she smiles, referring to the text-heavy design, which functions in much the same manner as a bulletin board from the early days of the internet. Certainly, it doesn’t hold the same frenetic appeal as a platform like Tiktok.
“Reddit in the app store is 17+,” Wong also says. “We’re an anonymous platform, so there might be people who are under 18, but really, generally not – because it is 17+ in the app store. We’ll always comply with local laws, obviously.”
One of the challenges to this compliance is the anonymous nature of Reddit.
“We don’t ask for your name and your phone number and your age,” she says of the sign-up system. “Everything is based on an interest graph, with the targeting. It’s just based on your browsing on Reddit. We don’t track you on the internet. So we don’t want to know people’s ages. That’s not part of our interest.
“Obviously, there are different ways to do age verification. The best is government, if they could help with that. I don’t know if that will happen.
“So we’ll comply with the law, but it’s not a dramatic change to our addressable population, because Reddit’s basically 18+. We’re very clear about that.”
According to Wong, Reddit isn’t even a social media platform.
“When we first started, we said we were a community platform, and people looked at us like we had three heads. We couldn’t fit a box because we said ‘we’re not social media’. People didn’t know what to do with us, because we were different.
“Now, ‘community’ has become a buzzword. Everyone talks about community.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Jen Wong
News Bargaining Code
News Bargaining Initiative
Reddit
social media
social media age limits
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