Reddit has positioned itself as “the most human place on the Internet” for years. That slogan, which CEO Steve Huffman has repeated since his first days at the helm of the company, is becoming increasingly difficult to defend. On the TBPN podcast on March 20, 2026, Huffman openly touched on a problem that many users have long felt and announced that the platform is considering a fundamental change in the way it verifies who is actually using Reddit.
Huffman mentioned technologies such as Face ID, Touch ID and the passkey system as the “easiest way” of verification, stressing that they require the physical presence of a person, thus proving that there is a living person behind the screen. In addition to biometrics, Huffman also mentioned decentralized third-party services that do not require an ID, as well as on the opposite end of the spectrum, significantly more invasive options such as identity verification through government documents. Reddit, he said, has not yet decided which path to take.
The reason for considering these measures is concrete and alarming. In 2025, researchers showed how AI accounts could infiltrate Reddit discussions in secret. In one controversial case, AI bots deployed on the r/changemyview subreddit left more than 1,700 comments and collected over 10,000 upvotes before being discovered and banned for violating the platform’s rules. It is particularly worrying that these bots were not naive spam accounts, but sophisticated profiles that imitated human behavior and interfered in sensitive discussions almost imperceptibly.
Huffman made clear what Reddit’s approach to verification should not be. Reddit doesn’t want to know who the user is, only that the user is a real person. “Part of our commitment to users is that we don’t know your name, but we want to know that you’re a person,” he said, adding that it will be an evolution for Reddit and likely any platform trying to find the right middle ground.
Reactions were swift and divided. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian commented on Xu that the Face ID requirement was not something he expected, but that something needs to be done about fake and botted content, noting that he doesn’t know how to “sell face scans” to redditors or even lurkers. Users in discussions within the platform reacted polarizedly: some threaten to leave Reddit if biometrics becomes mandatory, some consider it a necessary step, and others group around the issue of technical feasibility for users without a front camera or without an Apple device.
Reddit isn’t the only platform battling an onslaught of automated bots, especially with the rise of generative AI powering them. There is increasing talk of bot traffic exceeding human traffic on the web. The fundamental tension facing Reddit isn’t technical: biometric verification isn’t inherently complicated. The problem is that a platform built on anonymity is now going in the opposite direction of what it was built on, reports PCMAG.