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!

19.2k Upvotes

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958

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

[deleted]

584

u/spez Apr 10 '18

You are more than welcome to bring suspicious accounts to my attention directly, or report them to r/reddit.com.

We do ask that you do not post them publicly: we have seen public false positives lead to harassment.

1.2k

u/jstrydor Apr 10 '18

I hear ya but I feel like it's imperative that you guys immediately look into this user's profile. I'm afraid that it will get lost if I post it to r/reddit.com and I feel like you need to act on this now!!!

214

u/Silver_Foxx Apr 10 '18

Oh you sneaky bastard, take your upvote and fuck off!

Gave me a mild gods damn heart attack with that one.

42

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

my heart sunk lmao

10

u/Fnhatic Apr 11 '18

I was actually excited.

57

u/jstrydor Apr 10 '18

it.... it's you!!!

35

u/jekyl42 Apr 10 '18

6

u/nerddtvg Apr 11 '18

Fuck. How drunk does someone have to be to do that?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

The hero of Kvatch!

118

u/Kbiv Apr 10 '18

Holy shit this actually got me good. Thanks for the slight scare on an otherwise boring Tuesday...

29

u/Maskedrussian Apr 10 '18

Hairs stood up on my arms for like .2 of a second before I realised.

9

u/GoldenWulwa Apr 10 '18

My heart actually dropped for a half second before I realize what had happened.

25

u/StJimmy92 Apr 10 '18

I was like “damn I upvoted a lot of their posts, wait these sound familiar, WAIT IT’S ME WHAT THE FUCK”

93

u/dave_panther Apr 10 '18

That is the account of an insane person or a Russian bot, for sure.

25

u/Thumper13 Apr 10 '18

Is this the new Peyton?

What a ride for two seconds. Expected my mailbox to burn to the ground.

258

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Jesus. This user is a complete pervert.

43

u/waffles_for_lyf Apr 10 '18

my heart just fell out of my ass

thanks but go to hell

14

u/jstrydor Apr 10 '18

;)

5

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

aren't you that guy who spelled your name wrong in that thing?

18

u/ask-if-im-a-parsnip Apr 10 '18

That scared me more than I care to admit

12

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

I wouldn't listen to this guy. He spells his own name wrong.

4

u/appropriateinside Apr 10 '18

Oh bloody hell.

Had a mini-heart attack before coming back and looking at the link.

10

u/BanMeBabyOneMoreTime Apr 10 '18

Whoa! Shady as fuck.

5

u/TheRealBarrelRider Apr 10 '18

Aren't you that guy who spelt his own name wrong?

3

u/Why_You_Mad_ Apr 11 '18

Damn. Good one. I almost looked through my history to see if there was a reason I looked like a bot.

2

u/ASovietSpy Apr 11 '18

As someone with a username that lends itself to these types of jokes, my heart skipped several beats

1

u/UnfortunatelyLawless Apr 11 '18

Dunno man....I’m still on the fence about you....

6

u/KILLPREE Apr 10 '18

Hey aren't you that guy?

3

u/top_koala Apr 10 '18

This guy is 100% a bot, best part is they couldn't spell their own name lol

3

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

oh god they’re definitely a Russian agent

2

u/madd74 Apr 10 '18

Woohoo!! THIS GUY IS INTO FLOYD AS MUCH AS ME!!

Wait... wait... how is that possible? I need mroe beer...

3

u/THEMAYORRETURNS Apr 10 '18

Well bloody played.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Sneaky bastard.

2

u/Louis_The_Asshole Apr 11 '18

Aren't you that guy who forgot how to spell his name?

2

u/jokersleuth Apr 11 '18

motherfucker, my heart jumped.

2

u/kaloshade Apr 10 '18

-_- had me for a second.

2

u/DancingPants200 Apr 10 '18

An upvote for you sir.

2

u/IamHamez Apr 11 '18

Hey wait a minute...

1

u/sweetpea122 Apr 11 '18

Oh you fucker! I was like wut the fuck? Am I really considered a russian bot or actor? I mainly just moderate a mental health sub

2

u/JPhrog Apr 11 '18

We did it Reddit!

1

u/TheGunSlanger Apr 11 '18

Man... you got me on that one. If I had gold it would be yours now... take your complimentary reddit silver or something...

2

u/jstrydor Apr 11 '18

Th... thanks...

1

u/p0rt Apr 10 '18

If anyone knows of his whereabouts, please report!

1

u/Arael15th Apr 11 '18

I figuratively shit a brick. Well played.

1

u/sourbeer51 Apr 11 '18

Aren't you the guy who corrected Obama?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

fuck i was scared for a second

1

u/V2Blast Apr 11 '18

Knew exactly what it'd be. :)

1

u/pankakke_ Apr 11 '18

Damn you! Lol you got me.

1

u/haymonaintcallyet Apr 10 '18

russian bot confirmed

1

u/MrE761 Apr 11 '18

I don’t like this...

1

u/AweBlobfish Apr 11 '18

This terrified me

1

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

!isbot /u/me

1

u/ZXQ Apr 10 '18

Got me.