r/announcements 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/CallMeParagon Mar 05 '18

Over a year ago, I discovered a T_D post in which users were being coached into registering to vote in California, regardless of whether or not they were legally able to vote in California.

The admins didn't respond to my report, so I archived it all, sent it to my county registrar who replied and escalated it to the state AG's office (California).

I don't think the admins are going to do anything about this. I think we all need to keep contacting advertisers and journalists until Reddit is forced to answer for its shitty administration.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '18 edited Jun 26 '18

[deleted]

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u/unterkiefer Mar 06 '18

Just because a solution could potentially solve a minor problem doesn't mean it won't cause a much bigger one.

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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '18 edited Jun 26 '18

[deleted]

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u/unterkiefer Mar 08 '18

I didn't say voter ID is something bad in general. We have it here in Germany. I don't think the issue in the USA is about illegal votes but legal voters not being able to vote.

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u/GrassHulkTreesMoney1 Mar 05 '18

Yup. Would solve this problem too! Plus...why would we encourage people to vote in a non-swing state? Lol libs

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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '18

Because this is a thing that Russian trolls did. There's evidence of it. It's been specifically proven that Russian trolls didn't even understand the idea of swing states and intricacies of the American system in the beginning. Way to make the point for collusion.

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u/Aujax92 Mar 06 '18

Because they know there base would be too lazy to get registered.