You can’t turn anywhere in the tech industry these days without running into Ellen Pao, now former CEO of Reddit. Pao came into the public scene in 2012 when she filed a landmark discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a hedge fund, for sexual discrimination in the course of her employment and dismissal from the company. In 2013 we learned that Pao was appointed to the role of interim CEO at Reddit, a position she would use to eliminate salary negotiations out of a belief that women can’t negotiate as well as men, while her discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins was still ongoing.
Pao lost her case against Kleiner Perkins earlier this year, marking the end of a long discrimination case and the beginning of Reddit and Pao really butting heads. Reddit, a website that once prided itself on free speech to the extent that it defended a subreddit for “creepshots,” now seemed to be deleting threads critical of Pao and her husband, Buddy Fletcher. Fletcher, it turned out, has a history of filing frivolous discrimination lawsuits of his own, and losing them, and is currently being sued under allegations of operating a ponzi scheme. Fletcher owes at least $140 million in court judgements, a number that seems to grow with each passing year.
But for Redditors, posting about Pao’s lawsuit or Fletcher’s troubled legal history meant bans, both outright and shadowban (a shadowban on Reddit is a way to ban people without them knowing. Their post is invisible to everyone else). The fighting has escalated over the past few months as Reddit changed focus from a website that vigorously defended all free speech to one focused on creating a safe space. Numerous subreddits were banned, leading to protests overflowing onto the Reddit main page, leading to more bans, leading to more protests.
Tensions boiled over when AMA curator Victoria Taylor was let go from the company, prompting multiple subreddits to go dark in protest. The protesting against Pao’s leadership has not ceased and, in a rather surprising move, Pao announced that she would be stepping down from her position, remaining on board in an advisory role.
Similar to the sustained attack on gamers following the Gamergate controversy, certain members of the press have immediately gone on the offensive, accusing Pao’s critics of being motivated by racism and misogyny. Gawker’s headline on the story is “Misogynist Tantrum Officially Drives Ellen Pao from Reddit” with
“Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web…”
-Mike Isaac, David Streitfeld, NYTimes.com
Nilay Patel, editor in chief at The Verge, took time to call out the “dirtbags” on Reddit for ousting Pao.
“Every dirtbag on Reddit is going to take Pao leaving as validating their dirtbaggery, and it will paralyze a company that needs to change.”
The Guardian is attempting to spin the story as Pao departing due as a victim with the headline “Reddit chief Ellen Pao resigns after receiving ‘sickening’ abuse from users,” while making time to acknowledge the petition for Pao to step down that had gained more than two hundred thousand signatures. Mother Jones, meanwhile, focused on the racist minority of users with the headline “Reddit’s Faction of Racist Trolls Celebrates CEO Ellen Pao’s Resignation.”
Given the history of both Pao and Fletcher making false allegations of discrimination based on sex and ethnicity, the media blitz of articles blaming misogyny and racism for Pao’s resignation, rather than a string of very unpopular actions, isn’t entirely surprising. Ultimately Pao and Fletcher’s histories are readily available for the whole internet to see, regardless of what headline the media decides to go with.
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