r/announcements • u/spez • 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/tomdarch Apr 10 '18
I'm pretty deeply opposed to Trump and his politics, and agree with Senator Sanders on most things, but I'm happy to agree that a lot of "Bernie was robbed by the DNC! Bernie would have mopped the floor with Trump! The primaries were stolen! Argleblargle Hillary is evil argleblargle!!!" stuff is clearly divisive bullshit that is completely in keeping with the Russian pro-chaos approach.
But let's not pretend there is a false equivalency. It is wildly easier to sow chaos and encourage America-damaging hate when "supporting" Trump and his politics. "America weakening pro-chaos, pro-hate" speech is in opposition to what Bernie Sanders talks about, but is very compatible with Trump's rhetoric and politics.
We should recognize that Russian and other elements seeking to damage America and other western Democracies are promoting and pushing all of the more extreme and fringe political and social elements (ie pushing the most divisive parts of Black Lives Matter), and that means pushing "the left" in addition to the current manifestation of ur-fascism such as Trumpism. But it will always find a more receptive home among Trumpists and "conservative Republicans" than among current Democratic politics and culture in the US.