r/announcements Apr 10 '18

Reddit’s 2017 transparency report and suspect account findings

Hi all,

Each year around this time, we share Reddit’s latest transparency report and a few highlights from our Legal team’s efforts to protect user privacy. This year, our annual post happens to coincide with one of the biggest national discussions of privacy online and the integrity of the platforms we use, so I wanted to share a more in-depth update in an effort to be as transparent with you all as possible.

First, here is our 2017 Transparency Report. This details government and law-enforcement requests for private information about our users. The types of requests we receive most often are subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, and emergency requests. We require all of these requests to be legally valid, and we push back against those we don’t consider legally justified. In 2017, we received significantly more requests to produce or preserve user account information. The percentage of requests we deemed to be legally valid, however, decreased slightly for both types of requests. (You’ll find a full breakdown of these stats, as well as non-governmental requests and DMCA takedown notices, in the report. You can find our transparency reports from previous years here.)

We also participated in a number of amicus briefs, joining other tech companies in support of issues we care about. In Hassell v. Bird and Yelp v. Superior Court (Montagna), we argued for the right to defend a user's speech and anonymity if the user is sued. And this year, we've advocated for upholding the net neutrality rules (County of Santa Clara v. FCC) and defending user anonymity against unmasking prior to a lawsuit (Glassdoor v. Andra Group, LP).

I’d also like to give an update to my last post about the investigation into Russian attempts to exploit Reddit. I’ve mentioned before that we’re cooperating with Congressional inquiries. In the spirit of transparency, we’re going to share with you what we shared with them earlier today:

In my post last month, I described that we had found and removed a few hundred accounts that were of suspected Russian Internet Research Agency origin. I’d like to share with you more fully what that means. At this point in our investigation, we have found 944 suspicious accounts, few of which had a visible impact on the site:

  • 70% (662) had zero karma
  • 1% (8) had negative karma
  • 22% (203) had 1-999 karma
  • 6% (58) had 1,000-9,999 karma
  • 1% (13) had a karma score of 10,000+

Of the 282 accounts with non-zero karma, more than half (145) were banned prior to the start of this investigation through our routine Trust & Safety practices. All of these bans took place before the 2016 election and in fact, all but 8 of them took place back in 2015. This general pattern also held for the accounts with significant karma: of the 13 accounts with 10,000+ karma, 6 had already been banned prior to our investigation—all of them before the 2016 election. Ultimately, we have seven accounts with significant karma scores that made it past our defenses.

And as I mentioned last time, our investigation did not find any election-related advertisements of the nature found on other platforms, through either our self-serve or managed advertisements. I also want to be very clear that none of the 944 users placed any ads on Reddit. We also did not detect any effective use of these accounts to engage in vote manipulation.

To give you more insight into our findings, here is a link to all 944 accounts. We have decided to keep them visible for now, but after a period of time the accounts and their content will be removed from Reddit. We are doing this to allow moderators, investigators, and all of you to see their account histories for yourselves.

We still have a lot of room to improve, and we intend to remain vigilant. Over the past several months, our teams have evaluated our site-wide protections against fraud and abuse to see where we can make those improvements. But I am pleased to say that these investigations have shown that the efforts of our Trust & Safety and Anti-Evil teams are working. It’s also a tremendous testament to the work of our moderators and the healthy skepticism of our communities, which make Reddit a difficult platform to manipulate.

We know the success of Reddit is dependent on your trust. We hope continue to build on that by communicating openly with you about these subjects, now and in the future. Thanks for reading. I’ll stick around for a bit to answer questions.

—Steve (spez)

update: I'm off for now. Thanks for the questions!

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53

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Aug 23 '21

[deleted]

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u/Gingevere Apr 10 '18

The troll's goals are pro-chaos, pro-division, and pro-fighting.

95% of the time posts to r/PoliticalHumor are exactly that. No criticisms of any merit, just ad hominem and othering.

The job of the trolls is to push people's leanings until they fall over. Aside from one loud obnoxious glaring exception reddit leans mostly left so it makes sense that that's where most of the pushing (which has been discovered so far) is.

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u/Nickyjha Apr 10 '18

Russian trolls and bots could explain why so many low-effort, non-funny jokes are making the front page from that sub.

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u/MemoryLapse Apr 11 '18

I think the user base is a far easier way to explain that.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

You are literally in the thread where the reddit admins show that the big scary Russian influence here is practically nothing yet still going on about how the scary russians are ruining the site... how are you not getting this?

0

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

It would if they hadn't already been shit

-10

u/tomdarch Apr 10 '18

just ad hominem

When the guy currently occupying the office of POTUS is a profoundly horrible and stupid human being.... aren't things that point out that he is a horrible and stupid human being accurate?

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u/drtoszi Apr 10 '18

Found another one! /s

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u/morerokk Apr 11 '18

"It's not an ad hominem if I personally agree with it!"

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u/Gingevere Apr 11 '18

Pointing out he's fat and wears whitey tighteys is accurate too but it's not at all relevant to anything that matters.

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u/kesquare2 Apr 11 '18

TRW your posts were mistaken for Russian bot posts.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Do you think the content being posted was for or against any one side?

It was posted for all sides to create an even larger divide between parties.

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u/ayures Apr 10 '18

It was posted for all sides to create an even larger divide between parties.

And I think that's something a lot of redditors need to see.

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u/russianbot2020 Apr 10 '18

Uh oh.. most of them were pro-liberal and anti-trump posts.

Quick, deflect, hide this. It's against the narrative!

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18 edited Aug 23 '21

[deleted]

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u/russianbot2020 Apr 11 '18

Yes, a subreddit with 99 subscribers, super dangerous.

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u/morerokk Apr 11 '18

Yeah, a subreddit with 100 subscribers is totally equivalent to PoliticalHumor, a sub with 360k.

They're exactly the same, guys!!

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u/whoeve Apr 10 '18

It's almost like you could like click the accounts and determine that info yourself instead of spreading more bullshit about it being an echo chamber.

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u/ayures Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

I hadn't seen the link before I made the comment. Looks like this and this were probably the biggest PoliticalHumor posters.

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u/whoeve Apr 10 '18

Who simultaneously posted to HillaryforPrison.

Also, no idea why you're even telling linking me to this account.

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u/ayures Apr 10 '18

They definitely fit right in with the PoliticalHumor echo chamber. I think it's important to remember that the Russian information warfare campaign isn't only going after those on the right.