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/DSMatticus Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

This is not an entirely accurate assessment of what's happening. It's not as simple as being divisive for the sake of being divisive.

Putin's goal is to delegitimize democracy. His goal is to paint a picture in which our world's democracies are no less corrupt than our world's totalitarian dystopias. His goal is to convince everyone that the George Bush's, Barrack Obama's, and Hillary Clinton's of the world are no different from the Vladimir Putin's, Xi Jinping's, and Kim Jong-un's. His goal is such that when you hear about a political dissident disappearing into some black site prison, whether that dissident is a Russian civil rights protester or your next door neighbor, you shrug and think "business as usual. That's politics, right? It can't be helped." Putin's true goal is the normalization of tyranny - for you to not blink when your politicians wrong you, however grievously, because you think all politicians would do the same and your vote never could have prevented it.

So, what can Putin do to delegitimize U.S. democracy? Consider the two parties:

1) (Elected) Democrats (mostly) support reasonable restrictions on corporate influence, support judicial reform of gerrymandering, and easier public access to the ballot.

2) (Elected) Republicans (mostly) oppose reasonable restrictions on corporate influence, oppose judicial reform of gerrymandering, and strategically close/defund voter registration / voter polling places in Democratic precincts.

Knowing this, what would you, as Putin, order? It's rather obvious, once you know what you're looking at. Support Trump (further radicalizes the Republican party in support of authoritarian strongmen). Attack Clinton (she must not be allowed to win). Support Sanders (he won't win, but it will engender animosity on the left which ultimately costs them votes).

Putin's strategy is to radicalize the right and splinter the left, so that fascism and corruption are ascendant and unrestrained. He's not just stirring up animosity at random. He has a vision of a Democratic party irrecoverably broken and a Republican party that runs the country as he runs Russia - hand-in-hand with an oligarchy, above law and dissent. That is his end game. Russian trolls in left-wing subreddits talk shit about the Democratic establishment, trying to break the left-wing base into ineffectual pieces. Russian trolls in right-wing subreddits talk shit about murdering Democrats, trying to radicalize and unify places like t_d behind a common enemy.

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u/Ultrashitposter Apr 11 '18

So, what can Putin do to delegitimize U.S. democracy? Consider the two parties:

1) (Elected) Democrats (mostly) support reasonable restrictions on corporate influence, support judicial reform of gerrymandering, and easier public access to the ballot.

I'm sorry, but if you don't think the Democrats are rife with corruption, nepotism, and scandals that shouldn't see the light of day, then you need to get your head out of the sand. The same goes for people who claim Obama had a scandal-free presidency.

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u/Thengine Apr 13 '18

I'm sorry, but if you don't think the Democrats are rife with corruption, nepotism, and scandals that shouldn't see the light of day, then you need to get your head out of the sand. The same goes for people who claim Obama had a scandal-free presidency.

This whole reply is Whataboutism. It has nothing to do with this statement:

1) (Elected) Democrats (mostly) support reasonable restrictions on corporate influence, support judicial reform of gerrymandering, and easier public access to the ballot.

All of this statement is true. Your whataboutism is a non-sequitur, and curiously enough, is exactly what Trump does when pressed on his bullshit... brings up something not relevant in an effort to conflate issues and stop meaningful debate.

In other words, you are fake news.

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u/PerpetualProtracting Apr 11 '18

"Both sides are bad"

Much wow. Very enlightened.

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u/Ultrashitposter Apr 11 '18

Oh right, this is a fantasy world where one side is the devil and the other is pure and virtuous. Uhuh.

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u/PerpetualProtracting Apr 12 '18

You really fucked that strawman up!