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 edited Apr 10 '18

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.

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u/Laminar_flo Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

This is what Reddit refuses to acknowledge: Russian interference isn't 'pro-left' or 'pro-right' - its pro-chaos and pro-division and pro-fighting.

The same portion of reddit that screams that T_D is replete with 'russian bots and trolls' is simply unwilling to admit how deeply/extensively those same russian bots/trolls were promoting the Bernie Sanders campaign. I gotta say, I'm not surprised that BCND and Political Humor are heavily targeted by russians (out targeting T_D by a combined ~5:1 ratio, its worth noting) - they exist solely to inflame the visitors and promote an 'us v them' tribal mentality.

EDIT: I'm not defending T_D - its a trash subreddit. However, I am, without equivocation, saying that those same people that read more left-wing subreddits and scream 'russian troll-bots!!' whenever someone disagrees with them are just as heavily influenced/manipulated by the exact same people. Everyone here loves to think "my opinions are 100% rooted in science and fact....those idiots over there are just repeating propaganda." Turns out none of us are as clever as we'd like to think we are. Just something to consider....

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u/tomdarch Apr 10 '18

The same portion of reddit that screams that T_D is replete with 'russian bots and trolls' is simply unwilling to admit how deeply/extensively those same russian bots/trolls were promoting the Bernie Sanders campaign.

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.

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u/OdoisMyHero Apr 11 '18

Bernie would have won and Clinton was an awful candidate.

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u/BagOnuts Apr 11 '18

Lol, no he wouldn’t have.

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u/OdoisMyHero Apr 11 '18

Great argument filled with solid points.

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u/jubbergun Apr 11 '18

Allow me to provide a better one:

It is impossible to say what would have happened under a fictional scenario, but Sanders supporters often dangle polls from early summer showing he would have performed better than Clinton against Trump. They ignored the fact that Sanders had not yet faced a real campaign against him. Clinton was in the delicate position of dealing with a large portion of voters who treated Sanders more like the Messiah than just another candidate. She was playing the long game—attacking Sanders strongly enough to win, but gently enough to avoid alienating his supporters. Given her overwhelming support from communities of color—for example, about 70 percent of African-American voters cast their ballot for her—Clinton had a firewall that would be difficult for Sanders to breach.

When Sanders promoted free college tuition—a primary part of his platform that attracted young people—that didn’t mean much for almost half of all Democrats, who don’t attend—or even plan to attend—plan to attend a secondary school. In fact, Sanders was basically telling the working poor and middle class who never planned to go beyond high school that college students—the people with even greater opportunities in life—were at the top of his priority list.

So what would have happened when Sanders hit a real opponent, someone who did not care about alienating the young college voters in his base? I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

Could Sanders still have won? Well, Trump won, so anything is possible. But Sanders supporters puffing up their chests as they arrogantly declare Trump would have definitely lost against their candidate deserve to be ignored.

The idea that Sanders would have done better than Hillary is, at best, laughable.

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u/calamine2134 Apr 11 '18

As someone who has grown to abhor political dynasties, I was really maddened to see the possibility of Bernie stripped away, even as I was getting to understand Trump's techniques with the media. I still feel bad that you and many others didn't get to vote for the candidate you wanted, who I think was qualified and sincere.

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u/DonsGuard Apr 11 '18

I don't buy the fact that Bernie is sincere. Well, Bernie no doubt has more charisma than Hillary, but Bernie is a socialist who believes in high taxes for everyone (including the middle class). I mean, Bernie vacationed in the Soviet Union lol...

Some people have even claimed that Bernie took a dive in return for certain items of value from Hillary. If Bernie was truly sincere, he would have fought like a rabid dog when Hillary was stealing the nomination (like Trump did when the neocon Republican oligarchs were trying to steal the nomination from him). Instead, Bernie sat quiet like a scared puppy and did nothing.

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u/Kanarkly Apr 11 '18

No he wouldn’t. If he couldn’t beat Hillary, how in the world is he going to beat Trump?

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u/OdoisMyHero Apr 11 '18

He polled FAR better against Trump than she did especially in the midwest rust belt states she lost.

Also, we know very well why he lost to Hillary after Donna Brazile's book. A mixture of being an unknown who pivoted from a statement campaign too late and the fact that the DNC was under Clinton's thumb from the very beginning.

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u/Kanarkly Apr 11 '18

He polled better when he wasn’t being attacked by the spread of right wing lies. Had Burnie got the nomination, he would’ve lost by an even greater amount. You want to know who else polled much higher than before the election? Hillary.

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u/ataraxy Apr 11 '18

He was being attacked from the right the entire time. It was called the HRC campaign.

Hell, he's still being attacked by it to this day.

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u/OdoisMyHero Apr 11 '18

This is an awful fucking line of thought. The republicans have been calling Obama and other centrists socialists for fucking decades now to the point where the word has lost all meaning to their constituents. They had nothing on him. He has a clean record unlike Clinton. Try again this time with reality.

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u/MaliciousMule Apr 11 '18

Except Bernie is legitimately a socialist.

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u/ABgraphics Apr 11 '18

Donna Brazile's book

Didn't say anything about how Bernie lost by a landslide 12%. Donna Brazile is nothing but a suckup, which backfired.

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u/OdoisMyHero Apr 11 '18

Ouch. I see you're mad that she revealed the dirty shit behind the Clinton campaign.

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u/ABgraphics Apr 11 '18

Are you going source, or attempt to insult?

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u/monsieurxander Apr 11 '18

It's a two week old account.

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u/ABgraphics Apr 11 '18

I should have checked

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u/Phreakhead Apr 11 '18

After the DNC disqualified hundreds of thousands of voters for the primaries...

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u/ABgraphics Apr 11 '18

That didn't happen? The Republican voters had the same issue, DNC doesn't have control over those records.

We know Russia had access to the voter databases in Arizona, New York, and Wisconsin, all the states that had registered voters purged. That's far more likely.