Reddit will now ask accounts with ‘fishy behavior’ to verify they are human: here’s how it will work

Social media is changing with the rise of AI agents, and Reddit is aiming to counter that slop by ensuring that there is a human behind the screen actually writing the posts. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, in a blog post, confirmed that the company is introducing a series of measures designed to combat AI slop and ensure that users know whether they are interacting with a real person or a machine.

“The internet feels different lately. It’s getting harder to tell who—or what—you’re interacting with. But Reddit’s purpose is for people to talk to people. And we want it to stay that way,” Huffman said in a post on Reddit. “Our product has always been human conversation: messy, opinionated, sometimes great, sometimes not, but always real (or at least, really creative writing). As AI becomes a bigger part of the internet, we want to make sure that when you’re on Reddit, you know when you’re talking to a person and when you’re not.”

What’s changing on Reddit?

Huffman says that the company will now begin asking some suspected accounts to verify that they are human. However, the Reddit CEO notes that this process will be ‘rare and will not apply to most users’.

Instead, the platform is now introducing a targeted verification system, which is designed exclusively for accounts exhibiting “automated or otherwise fishy behaviour”.

The company is also allowing automation on the platform via a ‘good bots’ label. Developers will also be able to register their apps to receive the official label.

Reddit is also making it easier for Redditors to report AI bots, while the company will also take note of comments that suggest that they are coming from an AI bot.

How will Reddit verify you are human?

Reddit has outlined that it will use specialised third-party tools to make sure there is a human behind an account. Huffman says that the platform may ask users to complete passkey checks from companies like Apple, Google, and YubiKey. The company is also exploring decentralised services like Sam Altman’s World ID or Face ID.

The company also states that it may ask for government ID in certain scenarios but notes that it is the “least secure, least private, and least preferred” method, which it is required to follow in some countries like the UK and Australia.

However, Huffman noted that the platform is not banning humans using AI to write a post, while calling it a ‘gray area’.

“Before there was AI slop, there was slop. It’s not a new problem, and it’s one that Reddit, with its voting and moderation system, is better than most at dealing with,” Huffman noted.