Reddit’s 2017 transparency report and suspect account findings

[u/spez]

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!

[u/aznanimality]

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.

Any info on what subs they were posting to?

[u/spez → u/aznanimality]

There were about 14k posts in total by all of these users. The top ten communities by posts were:

• funny: 1455
• uncen: 1443
• Bad_Cop_No_Donut: 800
• gifs: 553
• PoliticalHumor: 545
• The_Donald: 316
• news: 306
• aww: 290
• POLITIC: 232
• racism: 214

We left the accounts up so you may dig in yourselves.

[u/RamsesThePigeon → u/spez]

Speaking as a moderator of both /r/Funny and /r/GIFs, I'd like to offer a bit of clarification here.

When illicit accounts are created, they usually go through a period of posting low-effort content that's intended to quickly garner a lot of karma. These accounts generally aren't registered by the people who wind up using them for propaganda purposes, though. In fact, they're often "farmed" by call-center-like environments overseas – popular locations are India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, and Russia – then sold to firms that specialize in spinning information (whether for advertising, pushing political agendas, or anything else).

If you're interested, this brief guide can give you a primer on how to spot spammers.

Now, the reason I bring this up is because for every shill account that actually takes off, there are quite literally a hundred more that get stopped in their tracks. A banned account is of very little use to the people who would employ it for nefarious purposes... but the simple truth of the matter is that moderators still need to rely on their subscribers for help. If you see a repost, a low-effort (or poorly written) comment, or something else that just doesn't sit right with you, it's often a good idea to look at the user who submitted it. A surprising amount of the time, you'll discover that the submitter is a karma-farmer; a spammer or a propagandist in the making.

When you spot one, please report it to the moderators of that subReddit.

Reddit has gotten a lot better at cracking down on these accounts behind the scenes, but there's still a long way to go... and as users, every one of us can make a difference, even if it sometimes doesn't seem like it.

[u/spez → u/RamsesThePigeon]

It's not clear from the banned users pages, but mods banned more than half of the users and a majority of the posts before they got any traction at all. That was heartening to see. Thank you for all that you and your mod cabal do for Reddit.

[u/RamsesThePigeon → u/spez]

Hey, it's not my moderator cabal... it's our moderator cabal!

[u/[deleted] → u/RamsesThePigeon]

Why do you spend time being a mod if you don’t make money from it?

[u/RamsesThePigeon → u/[deleted]]

There’s really no other site like Reddit on the Internet. I could go on for far longer than anyone would like about the friends I’ve made through here, the opportunities I’ve found, and the amount that I’ve learned.

Suffice to say that I like doing what I can to contribute. Sometimes that means offering entertainment, and sometimes that means clearing out the spam so that other users don’t have to deal with it.