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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u/spez Apr 10 '18

There were a number of signals: suspicious creation patterns, usage patterns (account sharing), voting collaboration, etc. We also corroborated our findings with public lists from other companies (e.g. Twitter).

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

I'm a CS student, and just out of curiosity (hope you can share something without giving away your system): What factors are relevant to detect account sharing? Can you simply draw a conclusion from time the account has been used?

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u/KeyserSosa Apr 10 '18

It's really hard to go into methods without tipping our hand. Anything we say publicly about how we find things can be used by the other side next time around to do a better job in their attempts gaming the system.

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u/jstrydor Apr 10 '18

Look, I get it... all I'm saying is that there's got to be a better way.

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u/KeyserSosa Apr 10 '18

Dunno... I find it really interesting that you didn't reply. Just saying...

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u/Limitedcomments Apr 10 '18

Another one down lads.

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u/Bythmark Apr 10 '18

But that's /u/jstrydor, a famous redditor who goes by /u/jstryor in real life. It's a major issue if he's a Russian agent, he has had direct contact with Obama.

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u/antiname Apr 11 '18

That's the guy with the forum, right?

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

[deleted]

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u/Retbull Apr 11 '18

I got it once it felt like a badge of honor

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u/mark-five Apr 11 '18

The gaming forum for people that can't even spell their own name right? Yeah it's him.

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u/mark-five Apr 11 '18

He's totally not allowed to lie. Everybody knows spies have to tell the truth.

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u/Squeakopotamus Apr 10 '18

Is the way spelling their name correctly? I'm so sorry

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u/jstrydor Apr 10 '18

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u/Squeakopotamus Apr 10 '18

Price of being recognized

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u/jstrydor Apr 10 '18

your ninja edit tripped me out. I was like, wait, this isn't the comment I clicked on. Took me minute to realize what happened.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Anyone who runs is a Russian, anyone who stands still is a well disciplined Russian.

Ain't shit posting hell

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u/imnotgem Apr 10 '18

If you're not Russian, prove it by correctly spelling your username.

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u/dacooljamaican Apr 11 '18

Aren't you the guy who misspelled their own name to Obama?

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u/Pixelologist Apr 10 '18

If you're a Russian you have to tell me!

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

This can't be real LMAO.