Desperate times: Reddit considers adding ID verification to fight flood of AI bots

Reddit has a real bot problem on its hands.

And, in order to deal with this problem, Reddit is considering turning to the latest go-to solution for the tech industry: ID verification.

On the tech show TBPN, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman spoke about how AI has caused issues for the platform and discussed potential solutions.

Hoffman explained how the solutions would look to answer the question "Is there actually a human using Reddit right now?"

"Reddit is for humans," Hoffman said, before discussing various verification processes that the company is looking at. 

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"The most lightweight way is something like face ID or touch ID or broadly the family of technology that's called passkeys," Hoffman continued. "Every platform wants to know 'is this is a person?' Now Reddit's version is 'is this a person but we don't want to know which person this is.'"

That's a pretty important distinction for Reddit, which has based its platform on users' ability to maintain anonymity. Hoffman explained that there are "heavier versions" of ID verification, like "ID checking services," which the company already complies with where required by government regulations. However, it doesn't sound like they are looking to implement something like this more broadly to fight the platform's bot problem.

Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit who resigned from the company's board in 2020, posted a message of support for trying to solve the bot problem, but also pointed out how tricky it will be to do so without alienating Reddit users.

"RDDT requiring Face ID was not something I had on my bingo card but something has got to be done about all the fake / botted content — I just don't know how to sell face-scanning to redditors or even lurkers," Ohanian said.

In his TBPN interview, Hoffman expressed support for real AI use cases on the site, such as auto-translation bots. However, Hoffman said that even with good AI bots on the platform, the company needs to be sure a real human is behind the bot.

Reddit has long had issues with automated accounts and content farms submitting posts and gaming the upvote system. However, with the rise in AI, Reddit has become inundated with AI bots attempting to mimic real users and replying to real user posts and comments with spam.

Since 2024, Google has drastically increased Reddit's visibility in search results. As a result, spammers have flocked to Reddit as a search engine optimization (SEO) technique.

It'll be interesting to see which ID verification method is chosen by Reddit. Regardless of what it is, it'll very likely receive blowback from the platform's very opinionated and privacy-oriented user base.