An additional step may be required before creating an account and posting to Reddit in the future. According to the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffmanthe social media platform is exploring different ways to verify that a user is a human and not a robot. Questioned by the TBPN Podcast How to confirm it’s a human using Reddit, Huffman responded with several verification methods with varying degrees of heaviness.
The RDDT demanding Face ID wasn’t something I had on my bingo card, but something needs to be done about all the fake/booted content – I just don’t know how to sell face scanning to editors or even lurkers. https://t.co/7e7K3Di4ip
– Alexis Ohanian 🗽 (@alexisohanian) March 21, 2026
“The lightest way is to use something like Face ID or Touch ID,” Huffman said in the interview. “They actually require a human presence, like if a human were to touch or do or look at something, that just proves that there’s a person there or gets you far enough away.”
Besides these passkey methods that use biometric data, Huffman said there are other options, such as relying on third-party services that are decentralized or do not require identification. On the other end of the spectrum, Huffman also mentioned more cumbersome options, like identity verification services.
Recent years have seen an increase in the number of robots flood social networks platforms, including Reddit, where they have even been used to conduct secret experiments. It doesn’t appear that Reddit has yet figured out how to verify the human identity of its users, but Huffman stressed that the platform still wants to prioritize the anonymity of its users. However, verifying humanity using identifiable and personal data could pose a barrier for Reddit users who value the anonymity of the platform.
“Part of our promise to our users is that we don’t know your name, but we want to know that you are a person,” Huffman said. “This will be an evolution for us for a while, and probably for every platform, finding the happy medium here.”
Reddit co-founder and former executive chairman Alexis Ohanian said on We’ve reached out to Reddit’s communications team and will update the story when we receive a response.
This article was originally published on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/reddit-is-weighing-identity-verification-methods-to-combat-its-bot-problem-195814671.html?src=rss
