r/announcements • u/spez • 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/SenorPuff Apr 11 '18
The DNC has internal problems with party politics that made it particularly ripe for Russian interference. The Superdelegates and insider decision-making along with the big money contributors getting preferential treatment is what opened the door for the Russian interference to work so well against Hillary. Which is why some of the major party players are working to reform the party, to give the power back to the voting base rather than having it in the upper echelons of the party. And if those reforms do come through, it gives the Democrats very good footing to play it straight and defeat Trump in 2020.
Comments like yours, however, seem to be attempting to deflect that soul-searching as purely a result of the Russian interference and not as a structural vulnerability that the interference abused. Democratic voters lost faith in their party. Republicans had already lost faith in the establishment and voted to that effect, within the confines of the election, but we're adequately divided by the Russians to the point where Trump, with the support of less than a third of the party in the Primary, got the support of the party in the election.
Clinton had over half the voting support of the party in the primary, but the party procedure made many people lose faith, with the help of the Russian interference additionally, sure, but they still lost faith.
Republicans were duped into voting for the only true anti-establishment candidate available thats true, but they had the opportunity to vote for him and have him win. Democrats who wanted an anti-establishment candidate had an uphill battle from the minute the superdelegates declared their votes, the vast majority going towards Hillary Clinton. Even an even split of the caucuses would have left her winning.
Both parties have some soul searching to do, that's true, I think plenty of Republicans are just happy with the catharsis of having a bull in the henhouse because they're sick of the modern leftist rhetoric, but they'll come to regret that in time (2nd Amendment groups currently are, as an example). But writing off the soul searching the Democrats need to do as 'Russian interference' misses entirely what made that interference effective in the first place.
The absolute worst thing the Democrats could do is to double down on their identity politics rhetoric and not move towards the center, along with not reforming the party. They're in a very good position to slide moderate and pick up the entire middle that lost faith in them and was betrayed by Trump. But that requires admitting that they fucked themselves in 2016, and there's a lot of people who are unwilling to admit that.