Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian has stepped down from the company's board, and urged the company to fill his seat with a black candidate

Ohanian, who is married to tennis star Serena Williams, said that he is urging the company to fill his seat with a black candidate. The venture capitalist said he would be using the future gains of his Reddit stock to serve the black community, beginning with a $1 million pledge to Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp.
"I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now," Ohanian said, citing his family as one of the reasons for spurring the act.
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Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian has stepped down from the company's board of directors in what he described as a long overdue move to "do the right thing" by ending his involvement with a site that has been long been criticized for providing a forum for racist and misogynistic hate speech.

"I'm writing this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks: 'What did you do?'," Ohanian said in a blog post on Friday. Ohanian, who is married to tennis star Serena Williams, founded Reddit 15 years ago with his college roomate. The privately-held social news aggregation site is now valued at $3 billion.

Ohanian's resignation from the Reddit board comes as protests for racial justice continue to rage across the US in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police.

The venture capitalist said that he is urging the company to fill his seat with a black candidate. He also committed the future gains of his Reddit stock to serve the black community, chiefly to curb racial hate. Ohanian said he would begin witha $1 million pledge to Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp.

"I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now," Ohanian said.

Reddit, founded by Ohanian and Huffman in 2005, is one of the top-20 most popular websites in the world. But the site has long faced criticism for allowing racism and other forms of hate speech, as well as harmful misinformation, on its platform.

Ohanian's announcement comes just days after a slew of popular Reddit threads closed off from new posts and responses, as moderators called out Reddit leadership for allowing hate speech on the platform. Some outside critics even called out CEO Steve Huffman for not doing more to shut down hate speech on the platform.

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