They have to lie though. They may own the servers that the site is hosted on, but they don't really control the site... They need to maintain the myth that the site is founded on Free Speech or dedicated towards an Open Internet, whatever, because if users realize that they no longer have a say in what gets upvoted or what topics are discussed, they'll leave. The entire point of Reddit is the votes and the comments, isn't it? Otherwise Reddit would just be a normal website with blogspam and native advertising.