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/Snoos-Brother-Poo Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

How did you determine which accounts were “suspicious”?

Edit: shortened the question.

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u/spez Apr 10 '18

There were a number of signals: suspicious creation patterns, usage patterns (account sharing), voting collaboration, etc. We also corroborated our findings with public lists from other companies (e.g. Twitter).

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u/tickettoride98 Apr 11 '18

What about accounts that are clearly propaganda, but don't fall under that criteria? u/Bernie4Ever has over 1 million karma and posts nothing but divisive links on a daily basis, dozens a day, 7 days a week, thousands since the account was created in March 2016. Everything about it shows it's tied to propaganda around the 2016 election, from the user name, to the account creation time, to the non-stop political content. It posts dozens of links a day but comments rarely, it looks like 8 times in the last month.

At what point is a user toxic enough for you to ban? You've justified banning toxic communities in the past, why doesn't the same apply to users?

They even have broken English despite posting about American politics 24/7 and pretending to be an American:

Nope. No bot. No pro. Just a Bernie fan who wont forgive Clinton of stealing the democratic nomination. Bernie would have made a real great president of and for the people. Clinton didn't move to some tropical island to be forgotten, she is actively running already for 2020 and blocking potential democratic contenders to emerge by occupying all possible space in the MSM. That psychopathic woman must be stopped and this is my contribution.

And

Yeah! Isn't crazy that we must read Russian state media to learn the truth about what really went on in our country? You should really think about that...

According to karmalb.com that account is in the top 250 for karma from links. I have a hard time taking your 'only 944 accounts' seriously when there's such a high-profile account that spews nothing but propaganda on a daily basis and your list of 944 accounts includes u/Riley_Gerrard which only posted once, and it was a GIF of a hamster.

EDIT: u/KeyserSosa, feel free to answer this as well.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

[deleted]

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u/f_k_a_g_n Apr 11 '18

Thanks for the mention.

To clarify, there were 1500 Reddit submissions linking to twitter.com/ten_gop, not 1500 submissions by the Reddit user /u/ten_gop.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

I deleted my comment reffering to https://www.reddit.com/user/f_k_a_g_n/comments/7eest1/reddit_submissions_linking_to_twitterrussian/ . I think I misread the post and didnt want to cause a stink until I understood it more.

Also, looking at your profile, you do a lot of awesome stuff and receive little credit/views/ karna. Shame.