The White House joins Reddit and shares hurricane information | TechCrunch

VP Kamala Harris is on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, FEMA has a page dedicated to fighting the rumors circulating on social media about the hurricanes, and now the White House is on Reddit. It’s clear that the traditional means of disseminating news and information to the general U.S. population have changed.

As a big Reddit fan, I’m so excited we launched a White House account on the platform today! Meeting more people where they are to get out critical information about the work this Administration is doing 🫡 (With a perfect first comment from this Redditor on our first post) pic.twitter.com/UfnuY7vVfo

— Megan Coyne (@MeganCoyne46) October 8, 2024

On Tuesday, a White House official announced that the Biden-Harris administration has launched a White House account on Reddit, where it will release information about the work the federal government is doing. The decision was also driven by a need to meet “more people where they are,” noted White House Deputy Platforms Director Megan Coyne in a post on X. 

The account, u/whitehouse, is now sharing critical information about the administration’s response to Hurricane Helene, including the over $37 million in assistance already approved for over 28,000 households. The account also noted there are more than 1,000 FEMA officials on the ground and over 1,200 Urban Search and Rescue personnel in the field who have now rescued or supported over 3,200 survivors.

With Milton, another massive category 4 hurricane, now bearing down on Florida’s west coast, forcing mandatory evacuations, it’s likely that the next updates from the new White House Reddit account will continue to focus on the administration’s handling of these natural disasters, which represent the devastating impacts of climate change — a force that has warmed ocean temperatures to fuel powerful, record-breaking storms. 

Unfortunately, the White House’s participation on Reddit today didn’t get off to a great start, as the moderators of the r/Georgia subreddit removed the White House’s post about Hurricane Helene response efforts, even though it remained live on the r/North Carolina subreddit, where moderators confirmed they received a message from Reddit admins indicating the account was real.

Reddit tells us the account was actually created in 2021, though its account page only shows a handful of recent posts and comments.

The White House’s account on Reddit joins its other outreach methods across social media, which sees it distributing information via popular consumer sites like Facebook, Instagram, X, Snapchat, Threads, YouTube, and Linktree. If anything, it signals Reddit’s continued elevation as one of the most popular social media sites, now used by many consumers in the U.S. to get updates on news and events — sometimes in lieu of traditional media channels. 

Reddit has become such a highly trafficked resource that the company’s name is being appended to Google search results, leading the tech giant to build a feature that would better highlight the site’s forum posts in its answers to users’ search queries. Reddit has also signed deals with multiple AI providers, including OpenAI, permitting them to use the site’s content in the training data for their AI models. In February, Reddit said it had made $203 million from its data licensing for AI models — a number it expects to grow over time. 

Update, 10/8/24, 6:11 pm et: This story was updated to reflect that Milton is now a category 4.