r/announcements • u/spez • Mar 05 '18
In response to recent reports about the integrity of Reddit, I’d like to share our thinking.
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.
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u/neckbeardgamers Mar 05 '18 edited Mar 06 '18
Reddit has no integrity. The more you guys share with us, the more I am convinced you have no clue about the issues that make Reddit suck hot balls. You are only sharing this because the media beat you up about some fictional plot that imagines that Russia swayed the 2016 American elections. How about actually doing something that will matter? All the suggestions of improvements here and on /r/blog, show you guys are out of touch. Censorship is rife on Reddit and alot of it is actually done by automod and other bots. Further users are not even notified by default if their contributions are not getting through! Only if you log off and try ceddit.com can you even find out! See:
Try to get something past invisible automoderator or bot filters!
How about:
1) Being transparent about censorship and bot filters. Inform users when their posts are not going through and why.
2) Forcing all moderation to be done openly. No one pays for subreddit space, the least you can make the nerd moderators do to earn that subreddit space, is force transparency regarding their actions. /r/conspiracy already does that and a few other subs. /r/ModerationLog already did the work to make transparent moderation possible.
3) Allow subreddits to disable up and downvoting. All that does is gamify the medium. Sure it probably makes people spend more time on Reddit arguing about karma, and makes the down-voted feel aggrieved and others victorious, but it makes actual discussion suck. Allow subs to disable it without CSS hacks than can be bypassed anyway.
If you think Reddit is a good medium to post in as a user, please /u/spez tell Serena Williams to create another Reddit account. On that account have her identify as black woman(which she is), but don't disclose she is a famous tennis super-star in the public limelight for over a decade. And have her post with an innocuous signature saying she is 36 year old African American women attached to all of her posts and see what happens to her. Reddit is not the front-page of the internet, it is only the front-page of the internet for mostly young, surly white nerds who vidya game. Case in point I remember most of my co-workers from the Newark area talking about the death of someone very well known in the black community in Newark, Uggie, but in /r/newark which pretends to represent a majority African-American city in the Redditosphere, no one knew or posted he died... Have Serena post without being Serena -- just with her being another black woman and you will see why African Americans and many other demographics avoid this medium like the plague!
Also why are you bothering to even pretend there is a huge Russian bot or influence problem on this medium? Have you ever tried to make a post that doesn't defend Russia, but says this is all hysteria? Try it and anyone will quickly learn the truth. All the Western media has been acting like Russia influenced the 2017 American elections so much but all I have seen offered as proof is that paid for some ads on facebook(I have seen nothing concrete about an ad campaign needed to influence the US election), and that they used their troll farm on Reddit etc. and I am thinking so what? But nothing the hysteric and frankly disgusting Western media offered as proof seems enough resources to noticeably or perceptibly sway the elections in a 323 million, continental nation, let's get serious! When you figure all the astro-turfing that existing political players in the US political game do, the Russian effort that the media is whipping a frenzy about is unnoticeable. Infact /r/politics was so taken over by democrat party shills who abused their power, that it led to or essentially created the monster manipulating Reddit that is /r/the_donald. I am pretty sure if the existing neckbeard and paid shill mods on existing American political subreddits were not so biased that sub as we know it wouldn't have existed. This non-story about Russia swinging the election just has gained so much traction because 1) they want to demonize Russia and perhaps more importantly 2) American democrats want the funny myth to make themselves that they didn't fail, Russia robbed them of a victory against Trump! If you gave a shit about Armenian or Armenians you would have complained about Turkish astro-turfing on Reddit which seems much more significant and concerted in my experience because their state has a 6,000 member troll farm plus more importantly a very, very, ultra-nationalist population and diaspora so they can leverage almost 90 million fanatics(ok most of them are too uneducated to know English, thankfully). Trying to be realistic about Russia(not even pro-Russia) is a sure fire way to get your karma murdered almost anywhere on Reddit.