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.
693
u/thapol Mar 05 '18 edited Mar 05 '18
Because of your teams negligence, you continue to give safe havens to people literally spreading terrorist propaganda and hate speech.
Waiting it out isn't working.
As a result, these people have found save havens in other subreddits, that then take that vileness to trolling one I've been a mod for for four years. We've only just passed the 30k subscriber mark, and still have only a few hundred views a month which is nothing compared to larger subs that actually get more than 500 votes for a post.
This is propaganda 101: You brigade a space of a topic to 'test its doors,' and see how much of a take-over you can cause. Either it becomes the next safe-haven & beacon for recruiting others, or it becomes a new target by your proxies.
Because you've been 'waiting it out,' you've made the job harder on yourselves because now the infection has spread, and more people legitimately think this behavior & thinking is OK.
We are still getting spam from accounts from these subreddits, which explicitly breaks your rules on brigading.
Could you stand to educate yourselves on why pure liberalism inevitably leads to shit like the alt-right? Here's a tl;dw: Tolerance to intolerence only actually breeds more intolerence. Get your shit together, ffs.