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For more than a week now, Reddit moderators have been using the site’s tools to protest proposed business changes. The stalemate reveals how much power the site’s users have accumulated over the years—and just how much the site depends on its moderators’ free labor.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump seems to be afraid, very afraid. Pixar’s talking blobs are becoming more and more unsatisfying. The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism

Not a Worker, Not a Customer

If you’re looking for pictures of John Oliver, for some reason, I have a recommendation for you: The Reddit group r/pics. For the past several days, the r/pics forum, normally populated with food pictures and nature shots, has featured a steady drumbeat of photos of the comedian: John Oliver with his wife. John Oliver’s face Photoshopped onto Spider-Man’s body. John Oliver at a desk. John Oliver on his show. Indeed, the group’s moderators have forbidden users from posting anything besides John Oliver photos.

This is more than just a fun stunt (though it is pretty fun for observers). It is one of the various creative ways that Reddit moderators have used their authority in recent days to register discontent with proposed changes to Reddit’s business.

For the past 10 days, moderators of thousands of Reddit forums have been protesting the company’s plans to charge third parties to run apps on the site. Last week, nearly 9,000 forums went dark for 48 hours. Some forums remain shut down this week, and others are continuing to disrupt the normal flow of posts through the pipelines of the platform.

The trouble began after, earlier this spring, Reddit said it would start charging some other companies for Application Programming Interface (or API) access. In April, the company framed upcoming changes as an effort to ensure that it would be compensated when AI companies scraped the site’s reams of user-generated content. More recently, changes have meant that some beloved apps that make the site easier to use will be forced to shut down because of prohibitive expenses.

Reddit moderators can be forgiven for resenting changes that might make their lives harder. After all, they do a significant amount of work for free. Reddit’s users, especially power users such as moderators, contribute in a big way to the quality and growth of the platform. They lead and nurture (and police) communities that gather around various interests, such as relationships, parenting, plumbing, or weighing in on whether, in a given situation, a poster is the asshole. The relationship between Reddit and its users is unique. The company places outsize responsibility on its volunteer moderators, but as a result, they also have outsize power—which means that their coordinated actions can cause much disruption on the platform.

Moderators are not paid employees of the site. But they are not always customers, either—though Reddit has a premium tier, many users don’t pay to use the platform. Reddit, like many tech companies that provide free products, runs ads (cue the adage “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”). Now, with its new rules, the company is attempting to monetize the content that users—and particularly moderators—have been generating for free.

By protesting the changes, moderators are reminding Reddit just how much the site needs them—and how much the moderators need third-party tools. “Many Reddit moderators rely on third-party apps in order to do their jobs,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany, who reports on internet culture for The Atlantic and recently wrote a great book about online communities and fandom, reminded me this morning. “Without them, they’re rightfully concerned that their forums will be flooded with garbage.”

The API debate has exposed broader fault lines on the site, Fraser Raeburn, a historian and Reddit moderator, told me. He said that Reddit should better acknowledge “the role volunteers play within it, in terms of curating content and keeping Reddit a relatively safe and functional part of the internet.” The moderators of his forum, r/AskHistorians, have restricted posts on their forum as part of the protest. Raeburn said he hopes to see Reddit’s leaders engage constructively with questions and clarify how they will handle the disruptions that come from losing some add-ons.

So far, things have been fractious. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told NBC last week that moderators were like “landed gentry,” and suggested that he might make changes that would allow users to vote moderators out. (When I asked Reddit for comment on the recent protests, I was directed to a blog post from last week on the API updates.) For now, moderators remain powerful.

Moderated communities are what have made Reddit distinctive as a platform, and as a result, helped it last. As Kaitlyn pointed out, “Reddit’s model of empowering moderators has given the site a much longer shelf life than I think many would have thought possible 10 years ago.”

It’s not easy for a tech company to make a lot of money and make all of its users happy—especially on a platform that has an open-source ethos. For all the talk among VCs and techies about the power of community, Reddit is demonstrating how fraught the community-based model can be. Especially as Reddit eyes a potential IPO, its corporate interests and user needs may clash.

Raeburn told me he wants this resolved so that he can get back to the reason he’s on the site: talking about history. But for now, he marvels at the way that the site’s structure and culture made this type of action possible. “Reddit had to give us a degree of control over the site because they wanted us to do that work for them,” Raeburn said. “Reddit, probably inadvertently, has created the structure for protest to succeed.”

Related:

Reddit is finally facing its legacy of racism. Inside r/relationships, the unbearably human corner of Reddit

Today’s News

A ProPublica report revealed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had failed to disclose a 2008 luxury fishing trip with a wealthy conservative donor. Alito wrote an op-ed defending himself in The Wall Street Journal. President Joe Biden referred to Xi Jinping as a dictator at a campaign event in California. The Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates in the coming months, despite holding them steady last week.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers reflect on how media portrayals can sometimes be at odds with their own life experiences. The Weekly Planet: Car-rental companies are ruining EVs, Saahil Desai writes. Good luck charging your surprise electric rental car.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Indian dissidents have had it with America praising Modi. How deterrence policies create border chaos We’ve been thinking about the internet all wrong. The future of books is audiobooks.

Culture Break

Read. “The Night Before I Leave Home,” a new poem by Elisa Gonzalez.

“my brother gets out of bed at three, having lain down / only a few hours before, and pulls on his jeans, and stubs his toe / on the bed frame”

Watch. I Think You Should Leave (streaming on Netflix) is a comedy series that reveals the absurdity of office culture.

Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.

Or play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you haven’t already read it, I recommend checking out Kaitlyn’s book Everything I Need I Get From You, which is about the boy band One Direction but also about how fans reshaped the internet. Come for Kaitlyn visiting the spot at the side of the road where Harry Styles threw up; stay for her analysis about how users influenced and created value for major corporations. Also, I now see Beatles fans in a new light.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

No one knows how the fire started. But in 2002, a train was set ablaze in a Muslim neighborhood in Gujarat. Those killed were Hindu nationalists, and the state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, quickly deemed the fire a “preplanned” terrorist attack.

Modi’s government had the charred bodies brought to the state’s largest city, where they were displayed in public. His party called for a strike. The strike devolved into months of violence, and the Gujarati police did little to intervene, even as mobs killed more than 1,000 people—the majority Muslims—and destroyed tens of thousands of Muslim homes and businesses. Later, a top state official told investigators that Modi had directed the police to let the attacks play out. That official was shot dead in his car.

About three years after the riots, Modi applied for a diplomatic visa to come to the United States, where he was due to address the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. The U.S. government denied his application and revoked the regular visa he already had. No one had to speculate as to why: In a statement, the U.S. ambassador to India explained that Modi was liable for the Gujarati government’s handling of the pogrom, and U.S. law prohibited foreign officials responsible for “particularly severe violations of religious freedom” from visiting.

Today Modi has arrived in the United States under very different circumstances. He has come at Washington’s invitation, and while he’s here, he will deliver an address to a joint session of Congress. On June 22, President Joe Biden will host Modi at the White House for a state dinner, one of the highest honors a foreign leader can receive.

This year’s visit is typical of Modi’s reception in the United States since he became India’s prime minister in 2014. During one sojourn, he co-wrote a Washington Post op-ed with President Barack Obama, in which the leaders declared themselves “committed to democracy, liberty, diversity, and enterprise.” During another, he held a rally alongside President Donald Trump before 50,000 fans. And over the past two years, Biden and his officials have repeatedly praised both the prime minister and Indian democracy.  

[Read: The Hinduization of India is nearly complete]

“He is the most popular world leader for a reason,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in April, after returning from a trip to India. “He is unbelievable, visionary, and his level of commitment to the people of India is just indescribable and deep and passionate and real.”

Indians fighting for democracy beg to differ. Since Modi came to power, they note, the government has imprisoned journalists and arrested opposition leaders. It has stopped activists from traveling abroad. The country revoked the partial autonomy afforded to Jammu and Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state—and cut off its access to the internet. New Delhi then split the state into two and downgraded the resulting enclaves from states into territories, giving the central government even more power over the region’s residents. Not long after, New Delhi passed a law that could strip citizenship from millions of Muslims all across India.

For the country’s dissidents, the lavish American rhetoric has prompted anger.

“It is a punch in our face,” Kavita Krishnan, an Indian feminist activist, told me. “It feels like a letdown for those of us in India who keep trying to somehow make everyone wake up to the fact that this is a dangerous government.”  

Sushant Singh, a journalist and senior fellow at India’s Centre for Policy Research, agrees. “The idea that he’s this massive global leader who everyone in the world looks up to helps with his nationalist agenda,” Singh told me. Modi, he said, uses U.S. admiration “to almost show, ‘I did whatever I did in Gujarat, and the Americans have [bent] before my will.’”

Washington has a reason, of course, for being so friendly. The United States is locked in competition with China, and it wants India’s assistance. India’s activists and journalists know—and largely accept—this reality. Almost no one I spoke with wanted Washington to stop cooperating with New Delhi over security issues. And they certainly didn’t want the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of their country.

But dissidents and journalists say there are ways for the United States to play a constructive role without being a bully or jeopardizing the two countries’ security partnership. A few activists, for example, suggested that the United States might sanction select Indian politicians who engage in widespread abuses. Others argued that Washington should steer clear of direct action but lead by example, making a point of fixing domestic problems that are common to both states.

Mostly, however, Indian activists had a simple request for U.S. officials: Stop praising Modi, and instead tell the truth.

In India, those fighting for democracy face hard times. The government has cowed the country’s once-independent judiciary. It uses economic threats to coerce major media companies into avoiding critical coverage, and where such measures fail, it detains and imprisons journalists. Multiple government agencies are investigating Harsh Mander, a prominent human-rights activist, and in 2021, police raided his home and offices. Less than a year later, Mohammed Zubair, a co-founder of a major fact-checking website, labeled as “hate-mongers” the Hindu religious leaders who were filmed threatening Muslims. He was arrested and later released on bail.

The government is even trying to jail major politicians. In 2019, Rahul Gandhi—the opposition’s most prominent leader—suggested that Modi was corrupt. A legislator in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party sued Gandhi for defamation, and in March 2023, Gandhi was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. He remains free as he appeals.

The U.S. government is certainly aware of India’s backsliding. The State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom routinely puts out reports that detail the country’s human-rights abuses and democratic failings. The world’s three main democracy rankings have all downgraded India over the past decade. And when they discuss deepening ties with New Delhi, U.S. officials are frequently questioned by journalists about India’s politics. But American leaders continue to praise New Delhi and downplay its shortcomings.

“India is a vibrant democracy,” the White House spokesperson John Kirby said on June 5, when a reporter asked whether Biden was concerned about the country’s trajectory. “Anybody that happens to go to New Delhi can see that for themselves.”

[Read: What Narendra Modi is taking from me]

For many Indian journalists and activists, comments like Kirby’s are, at best, ridiculous. “Unless they are blind, they can tell that there’s a huge difference in what a thriving democracy should be and what India is,” says Hartosh Singh Bal, the executive editor of The Caravan—one of the country’s few remaining independent national-news outlets (and where I worked from 2017 to 2018).

At worst, dissidents said the comments set back their work. “Modi uses [U.S. praise] to belittle the criticisms that are made and the fears that have been raised among India’s minorities and progressives,” Mander told me. Kirby’s remark, for example, was plastered across Indian media outlets as evidence that New Delhi’s critics were wrong. One anchor on a popular channel used it to say the White House had “hit back” against liberals. Another channel declared that the U.S. had “silence[d] concerns over India’s democracy.”

The prime minister’s supporters use Western praise to do more than run defense. They trot out U.S. acclaim to actively argue that Modi is great. After Biden joked that Modi is “too popular” at the G7 meeting in May, a prominent right-wing website published an article about how the prime minister “established himself as the biggest leader of the democratic world.” One of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national secretaries tweeted that the prime minister was “the most revered leader” on Earth. Modi’s supporters now refer to the prime minister as Vishwaguru—or the “global teacher.”

U.S. criticism has the opposite effect: It makes the government insecure. As a result, Indian dissidents told me it could help their efforts.

“We know that international criticism and pressure bothers the government,” Puja Sen, The Caravan’s senior associate editor, told me. “Controlling the narrative is important to them, and so they care how it plays back home.” Some of the activists I spoke with thought that American expressions of disapproval, when they have come, have already been of assistance. During the 2020 presidential election, for instance, both Biden and Kamala Harris criticized Indian policies toward Kashmir. Trump said that Modi was “working very hard on religious freedom.” New Delhi ended the internet shutdown 16 days after the former two politicians took office.

“My speculation is that what was blocked for 17 months was lifted in less than 17 days because of what was felt to be a pressure coming in from the Democrats,” Aakar Patel, the chair of Amnesty International India, told me. He is no stranger to what rankles the government. In July 2022, India’s Enforcement Directorate fined Patel more than $1 million, allegedly for laundering foreign money through the organization. Three months earlier, he had been barred from leaving the country.

Patel told me that the U.S. could make more of its influence. For instance, the Commission on International Religious Freedom has issued reports suggesting that the U.S. sanction specific Indian politicians responsible for fostering violence against minorities. But other activists felt that singling out individual politicians would give the misguided impression that India’s failings were simply the fault of a few bad actors. And some dissidents were uncomfortable with the idea of Washington taking any kind of punitive action to shape India’s sovereign affairs.

Sudipto Mondal, the executive editor of The News Minute, told me that rather than focusing on criticizing New Delhi, America should try to help by setting a positive example. More than 5 million South Asians live in the United States, including people who belong to low castes. They can experience oppression that mirrors what low-caste people are subjected to in India. Large numbers of South Asian Americans belonging to Hinduism’s lowest caste, for example, have reported facing caste-based employment discrimination from high-caste South Asian Americans (who constitute most of the diaspora). So far, no U.S. state has added caste to the list of groups protected by antidiscrimination laws, but Seattle banned caste discrimination in employment, housing, and public spaces in February. California is moving forward with legislation that would do the same. If Congress followed suit, Mondal believes the effects could reverberate around the world.

“That would be a kind of moral pressure,” he said. Indian elites, he told me, “will be exposed.”

Shabnam Hashmi, an Indian human-rights campaigner, suggested that Washington could have a similarly positive effect by taking on Hindu nationalists in the U.S. The suggestion might seem strange, but the United States is home to groups with connections to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu paramilitary organization that founded Modi’s party and gave the prime minister his professional start. The RSS was inspired by European fascists and designed, according to one founder, to promote “the military regeneration of the Hindus.” Its longest-tenured leader cited Germany’s “purging” of the Jews as a way to deal with non-Hindus.

[Read: The end of the Indian idea]

These “fascist forces” within the United States should be of grave concern to Washington, Hashmi told me. “They are the biggest supporters of Modi.”

India has a well-practiced response to U.S. criticism: Accuse Americans of hypocrisy. When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Washington was monitoring human-rights abuses in India, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told journalists that he was calling out human-rights abuses in the United States. After Washington criticized India’s neutral stance on the war in Ukraine, Jaishankar said that he remembered “what happened in Afghanistan, where an entire civil society was thrown under the bus.” When Freedom House and V-Dem—organizations based in the U.S. and Sweden, respectively—both downgraded India’s democratic rating in March 2021, Jaishankar invoked colonialism, deriding the findings as intrusions by “the self-appointed custodians of the world.” He then went on to discuss the January 6 insurrection. At least in his country, he said, “nobody questions an election.”

Jaishankar’s parries appear to have had an effect. Aside from occasional oblique comments, the Biden administration has avoided calling out New Delhi for its repression. At times, it has even echoed the foreign minister’s suggestion that the United States had no right to remark on India’s affairs.

“Every democracy, starting with our own, is a work in progress,” Blinken said at a July 2021 press conference when asked about how Washington would address democratic backsliding in New Delhi. “No democracy, regardless of how large or how old, has it all figured out.”

India’s activists and journalists were far less sympathetic to Jaishankar’s logic. “Where am I going to find perfect countries or perfect human beings that can criticize anybody else?” Sushant Singh said. “The argument is disingenuous. It has no meaning.”

Singh and others I spoke with rejected the implication that the United States and India were equally blemished. “Every democracy is in some ways flawed,” Bal told me. “But there are degrees of being flawed, and at the moment, India is hugely more flawed.”

The dissidents I interviewed did not want Washington to try to fix India’s flaws or to coerce India into improving its human-rights record, especially given their country’s colonial past. They opposed, for example, sanctioning the Indian economy, conditioning assistance to the state, or even trying to finance prodemocracy groups. Such measures, they said, wouldn’t work anyway. “At the end of the day, the battle for democracy, the battle for various rights—human rights, democratic rights—has to be won within India,” Singh told me. “It will not be won outside.”

In the meantime, Indian critics of Modi were okay with deepening the partnership between Washington and New Delhi. There’s a difference, they said, between acting on shared interests and professing shared values. American analysts have made the same point. In Foreign Affairs, Daniel Markey, a former State Department official, recently argued that criticizing the Modi government may even be essential to creating a successful U.S.-Indian relationship. “If India and the United States are going to be strong partners, both sides need to learn how to navigate serious disagreements,” he wrote.

Patel, of Amnesty International India, told me he hoped that such honesty would become a feature of U.S.-Indian relations. Closer ties between the states might even allow American officials who want a pluralistic India to exert greater influence. But Patel knows that the nature of great-power politics is such that Washington will likely be sparing with its criticism. “The United States looks after its own interests, and at a point when it sees the South China Sea as the locus of its strategic problems, it will lean on countries like ours,” he told me. The realpolitik didn’t seem to bother him, or most of the people I spoke with. “That’s fine,” Patel said.

But what India’s democracy advocates do not want, what they cannot abide, is all the praise. They’ve had enough of it.