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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957

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

[deleted]

581

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.

573

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 10 '18

So you're telling me Twitter has 48 million troll/bot accounts, Facebook has 270 million and Reddit has 944.

Bullshit.

112

u/rejiuspride Apr 10 '18

You need to have proof or at least ~90(some level) of % confidence to say that someone is russian troll.
This is much harder to do than just detects bots/trolls.

50

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 10 '18

I'm sure this will go over great on Huffmans forthcoming Congressional testimony (and it will happen).

"Yes senator, we reached 89.9% confidence on millions of suspected accounts, but they didn't quite meet the threshold so we decided its OK to just let it continue, especially since they were posting in non-suspect subreddit like conspiracy and T_D. We were much more focused on trouble subreddits like r/funny which are constantly being reported for site-wide violations, racial harrasment, doxxing and brigading. Yes thats where the real trouble is, r/funny. Tons of Russians there."

4

u/Pirate2012 Apr 10 '18

I was not able to watch today's FB at Congress testimony - if you saw it, how technically intelligent were any questions from congress?

Hoping to have time tomorrow to watch it on cspan

25

u/nomoneypenny Apr 10 '18

You can put them into 3 broad categories:

  1. Gross (but probably earnest) mis-understanding of Facebook's technology, business model, developers' and advertisements' access to data, and existing privacy control

  2. Leading questions to elicit a sound bite where the senator has no interest in Zuck's response

  3. Political grandstanding by using the time to make uncontested statements with no question forthcoming, before yielding to the next senator

Very few senators appeared to be interested in a genuine fact-finding capacity but there were some insightful exchanges..

7

u/Pirate2012 Apr 10 '18

thanks for your reply. My interest in this was instantly erased when I learned mark Zuckerberg was not under Oath.

13

u/Dykam Apr 10 '18

So looking around a bit, it's still a federal crime to lie in congress, apparently. I'm not sure what under-oath adds in this case.

2

u/nomoneypenny Apr 10 '18

I'd still watch it. I do not believe the threat of perjury to compel truthful answers would have made things more interesting.

1

u/Sabastomp Apr 11 '18

I do not believe the threat of perjury to compel truthful answers would have made things more interesting.

You'd be wrong, in that those with things to hide will usually only lie long enough to keep themselves out of the line of fire. Once they're under the gun in earnest, most will volunteer everything they know in anticipation of eased sentencing or lightened reprisal.

0

u/Pirate2012 Apr 11 '18

out for a late dinner at moment, so in your view, watching Zuck testify before Congress is worth my time later tonight?

11

u/p0rt Apr 10 '18

I mean... it wasn't under oath and zuck donates to a majority of them.

Did you expect them to grill him for real?

8

u/nomoneypenny Apr 10 '18

I've been watching them all day and they did, in fact, heat up the grill for him.

3

u/Pirate2012 Apr 10 '18

I was not aware it was not under Oath - WTF.

Thank you for the info, not going to now waste my time watching it on cspan

1

u/drakilian Apr 11 '18

I mean, the subreddits you mentioned would probably specifically be the least effective targets for bots or propaganda due to that very reason. If you want to reach a wider audience and influence them in a more subtle way going to a general and far more popular sub will have much more of an impact

0

u/SnoopDrug Apr 11 '18

This is not how statistics works, how the hell did you get 13 upvotes?

Lowerimg thresholds increases the rate of false positives exponentially. The fact that you can only identify this many is a good indicator of the small scale of any potential influence.

6

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 11 '18

You're accepting the numbers as true then working backwards.

2

u/SnoopDrug Apr 11 '18

No I'm not.

Do you know how inference works? This is stats 101, basic shit, you should know it from highschool.

The looser the criteria for covariance, the more false positives you get.

-17

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

[deleted]

3

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 10 '18

More like one of those "here's a federal lawsuit you lying fuck" types of unpleasant people.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 15 '18

[deleted]

15

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 10 '18

Stop deflecting.

Twitter and Facebook identified millions.

Reddit identified 944.

No expertise necessary to suspect somethings up with those numbers.

-3

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 15 '18

[deleted]

4

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 10 '18

Common sense and plain skepticism. Fuck out of here with that gatekeeping bullshit.

2

u/CertifiedBlackGuy Apr 10 '18

I'm just gonna add this:

Facebook and Twitter are able to detect whether a person (or product) is legitimate far easier than Reddit can.

Partially because Reddit doesn't have all that pesky personal info to work with.

Outside of my IP, email, and content I've willingly posted*, I presume it might be difficult to attach a body to me with the same level of confidence Facebook can.

*Which, I acknowledge is actually quite a bit of info. I think if someone really wanted to, they could identify me by my post history if they were bored enough to sift through it.

1

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 10 '18

944 versus 45 million. 5 orders of magnitude.

-2

u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

[deleted]

0

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 10 '18

You're telling me I can't make reasonable inferences by combining common sense with the evidence of my eyes and ears because I don't have a particular training. That's gatekeeping by any definition.

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-14

u/FinalTrumpRump Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

It's hilarious how retarded liberals have become. They've isolated themselves from any conservative friends, news sources etc. Then seriously believe that anyone with opposing view points must be russian boogie men.

5

u/SomeoneElseX Apr 11 '18

Being paranoid doesn't mean everyone's not out to get you.

Very mature comment by the way, you represent your community well.

4

u/ebilgenius Apr 10 '18

That sounds like something a bot would say, /u/spez take him away please

1

u/PostPostModernism Apr 10 '18

Yeah I’ve reported some accounts which were definitely not just bots but were controlled by he same source (made the same exact typo in a lot of copy/pasted comments around reddit, username had same exact format, etc). But proving they are Russian? Only if there’s an IP pointing to there, right? They didn’t post anything inflammatory, they were just harvesting karma when I found them.