Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said Wednesday that the website takes a more permissive approach to racist speech relative to other mainstream social media platforms.

Huffman had started a thread to release Reddit’s 2017 Transparency Report, which listed 994 accounts believed to be connected with Russia’s Internet Research Agency, and made himself available to answer any questions. One user asked, “I need clarification on something: Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against reddits rules or not?”

Huffman, who uses the handle “spez” on the site, responded:

It’s not. On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behavior from beliefs. This means on Reddit there will be people with beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so. When users actions conflict with our content policies, we take action. Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules.

Users were dismayed by this response: The post had lost 1,443 karma points by the next day, which is calculated by subtracting the number of downvotes from the number of upvotes a comment receives.

The most popular reply to Huffman’s comment read, in part, “How do you respond to the idea that hate speech leads to genocide, and that scholars and genocide watch groups insist that not all speech is credible enough to be warranted? … Not all speech is ‘valuable discourse,’ and by letting it exist on your platform you are condoning its existence and assisting its propagation.”

Last month, United Nations investigators criticized Facebook for facilitating the spread of hate speech in Myanmar aimed at the Rohingya people, who have reportedly been the target of an ethnic cleansing campaign. When Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy brought up the issue during Mark Zuckerberg’s hearing before the Senate on Tuesday, the Facebook CEO said that the company planned to hire “dozens” more Burmese language reviewers to stamp out hate speech along with modifications to the platform.

Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies have also struggled to keep content on their sites compliant with their hate speech policies. Twitter has notably faced multiple waves of public outcry for the bigotry and abuse that have proliferated on its platform, and in October, it ramped up its rules to crack down on a wider range of hate speech.

While Reddit does not have such hate speech prohibitions, administrators have consistently cracked down on doxing, threats, and other forms of speech that could directly and immediately lead to physical violence. When administrators shut down an offensive subreddit, they typically stray away from citing the underlying racism or other prejudices that make it toxic in the first place and instead cite another rule violation. For example, they referred to specific instances of harassment when they banned the r/fatpeoplehate subreddit, and to incitement of violence when they banned the misogynistic r/incel subreddit.

However, this approach can still lead to inconsistencies. It appears administrators couldn’t find a rule violation when they wanted to remove the r/coontown subreddit in 2015. Rather than pointing to the blatant racism that infected the forum, Huffman offered a convoluted justification for their decision: “We are banning a handful of communities that exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else.”

Update, April 12, 2018, at 3 p.m.: Steve Huffman posted an addendum to his original comment on Thursday: