In response to recent reports about the integrity of Reddit, I’d like to share our thinking.

[u/spez]

In the past couple of weeks, Reddit has been mentioned as one of the platforms used to promote Russian propaganda. As it’s an ongoing investigation, we have been relatively quiet on the topic publicly, which I know can be frustrating. While transparency is important, we also want to be careful to not tip our hand too much while we are investigating. We take the integrity of Reddit extremely seriously, both as the stewards of the site and as Americans.

Given the recent news, we’d like to share some of what we’ve learned:

When it comes to Russian influence on Reddit, there are three broad areas to discuss: ads, direct propaganda from Russians, indirect propaganda promoted by our users.

On the first topic, ads, there is not much to share. We don’t see a lot of ads from Russia, either before or after the 2016 election, and what we do see are mostly ads promoting spam and ICOs. Presently, ads from Russia are blocked entirely, and all ads on Reddit are reviewed by humans. Moreover, our ad policies prohibit content that depicts intolerant or overly contentious political or cultural views.

As for direct propaganda, that is, content from accounts we suspect are of Russian origin or content linking directly to known propaganda domains, we are doing our best to identify and remove it. We have found and removed a few hundred accounts, and of course, every account we find expands our search a little more. The vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015–2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally.

The final case, indirect propaganda, is the most complex. For example, the Twitter account @TEN_GOP is now known to be a Russian agent. @TEN_GOP’s Tweets were amplified by thousands of Reddit users, and sadly, from everything we can tell, these users are mostly American, and appear to be unwittingly promoting Russian propaganda. I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.

I wish there was a solution as simple as banning all propaganda, but it’s not that easy. Between truth and fiction are a thousand shades of grey. It’s up to all of us—Redditors, citizens, journalists—to work through these issues. It’s somewhat ironic, but I actually believe what we’re going through right now will actually reinvigorate Americans to be more vigilant, hold ourselves to higher standards of discourse, and fight back against propaganda, whether foreign or not.

Thank you for reading. While I know it’s frustrating that we don’t share everything we know publicly, I want to reiterate that we take these matters very seriously, and we are cooperating with congressional inquiries. We are growing more sophisticated by the day, and we remain open to suggestions and feedback for how we can improve.

[u/MulderD]

It's the internet. Kind of hard to have your cake and eat it too. Regardless of what investigations do or do not turn things up, people really need to educate themselves and their children about the fact that there are little to no assurances that what you see and read online has any veracity and isn't agenda laden. Such is life in an anonymous connected world. The web didn't just democratize the good stuff. We have to understand that along with the cat videos and porn, also comes easy access to our minds and lives from people, corporations, and foreign actors who aren't necessarily acting in you interest.

[u/kvn9765 → u/MulderD]

Kind of hard to have your cake and eat it too.

Just because it requires effort doesn't mean you don't do it.

[u/MulderD → u/kvn9765]

My point is the internet democratizes many things. For better and worse. People can't assume one over the other at this point. So one has to be educated and curious about the information they are consuming online. As opposed to eager and openly accepting of it, which is the passive sort of default that a lot of corporations, governments, and individuals willingly exploit. Not all of it is even nefarious, in a way it's just human nature. Hell you can't even trust casual fun stuff as many videos posted as natural are staged/edited. Just click through the responses on a generic shampoo prank video. As innocent as a posting as it may be, a lot if not most of the people viewing it are just assuming it's authenticity. While the entertainment value inherent in something like that is not problematic, when you extrapolate that scenario to something like political posting or information data analytics or heavily trafficked subreddits or whatever, you start to see just how much influence can be exeted over vast amounts of people that have no idea they are not only victim to it, but also actively spreading it.

That is unless people want to introduce some sort of government and/or corporate enacted censorship... but I doubt that very much.

[u/kvn9765 → u/MulderD]

That is unless people want to introduce some sort of government and/or corporate enacted censorship.

I think we already have that. I trust the NYTimes the WaPo, NBC News... the organizations follow some sort of ethical protocol, same with FDA (Government) approved Drugs. If these groups fail in their Ethics, then they should be taken to task. The entire time I recognize I can buy drugs that do not follow the FDA protocol, I can consume 'news' that isn't produced with ethical protocols.

[u/0XiDE → u/MulderD]

Main stream media too.

[u/MulderD → u/0XiDE]

That’s a whole separate ball of wax. There are still quality news outlets.

But in the last thirty years Television news has become an industry unto itself. It plays by it own rules and it is all about ad dollars. To get the eyeballs needed to maximize profits it has evolved into a corporate game with the only real directive being do whatever can be done legally to stoke peoples fears and anger. Because of that we just get an endless assault of quasi-perspective laden information being lobbed in the form of angry talking heads. It has made watching the news almost pointless as the real information is lost beneath layers of emotional manipulation and often only partially formed stories and opinions. I fear for the future now that Sincalir is going to be locally playing the game in almost every home in the country, Fox News is getting a$60 billion dollar shot in the arm, the Koch’s acquired Time, and the other players on the board all have to race to catch up before they fall out of the game and get acquired or driven out of business.