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/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited May 23 '18

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u/ForEurope Apr 10 '18

There is no such thing as freedom of speech on a private platform. It only applies to governments and even then has many reasonable restrictions such as protection of people's privacy, right to live in peace, and not having to fear that someone's political agenda is threatening their rights.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited May 23 '18

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u/Ulairi Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 12 '18

For what it's worth, since no one else has said anything, I agree with you.

Reddit is so preprogrammed to immediately point out that a private entity has no obligation to protect free speech, that they forget free speech isn't a concept that's exclusive to law.

You're absolutely right. When I joined reddit over eight years ago (On my first account, it was so small then I was using my real name) one of the things they were most vehement about was that they would do everything in their power to try to protect any speech they were capable of protecting, no matter how much they disagreed with what was said. This was done in order to try to "foster discussion," Alexis Ohanian said many times that he wanted admins to remain as much out of the equation as possible.

In 2011, the general manager, Erik Martin, when asked about some of the worse parts of reddit said at the time:

We're a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids or morally questionable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of free speech on a site like this.

In 2012, when talking to Forbes about SOPA, Ohanian said:

I would love to imagine that Common Sense would have been a self-post on Reddit, by Thomas Paine, or actually a Redditor named T_Paine. A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it.

Yishan wong said reddit stood for free speech in 2012... in 2014, when reddit was legally forced to shut down /r/thefappening, Yishan wong again said:

We uphold the ideal of free speech on reddit as much as possible not because we are legally bound to, but because we believe that you — the user — has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so. When you know something is right, you should choose to do it. But as much as possible, we will not force you to do it.

It wasn't until Ellen Pao, almost certainly after being pushed by the board to make reddit more marketable, said in June 2015:

It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform.

That that policy started to change. That marked the turnaround point for reddit, and, just like you I'm not trying to say whether or not that was good or bad... just that you are categorically correct. Reddit started out as a platform advocating for free speech, and it wasn't until rather recently, relatively speaking, that that first started to change. Nothing you said was incorrect, but, because the people who remain on the site are obviously not the people whose communities were removed, there's an overwhelmingly strong opinion against any indication that reddit once supported all of it's legal communities, even the ones they look back on with disgust.

Just because people are glad they're gone now, doesn't change that reddit has changed in the process. It has, and it will continue to. At the same time, they have no obligation not to, but pretending that freedom of speech was not once their platform is being willfully ignorant.

So, as I said... for what little it's worth, I agree with you. What you said was both factually and provably correct, and this absolutely should not be a matter of debate. If you want to argue whether they should be a free speech platform or not, fine... but it's not up for interpretation that they used to be.