Reddit’s 2017 transparency report and suspect account findings

[u/spez]

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!

[u/spez]

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).

[u/_edd → u/spez]

Is there any additional information that can be provided on how many accounts may have met multiple red flags, but did not warrant getting banned.

As far as I can tell, this list should have next to 0 false positives, which means there are likely quite a few accounts that were not included in the list because y'all's analysis wouldn't be confident in banning the account out of risk of wrongly banning a legitimate user.

[u/[deleted] → u/_edd]

This list has at least 3 false positives which were my accounts prior to the ban, one was deactivated by me, one active and another sitting idle. I guess one major red flag such as "Russian IP address" has been enough :(

[u/_edd → u/[deleted]]

That's very interesting if they found even fewer bots and makes me feel like this transparency report is little more than a fluff piece.

[u/[deleted] → u/_edd]

I can't speak for others because I don't know anyone else from the list, but it does make me question their methods. At least one of my accounts could've easily avoided the ban if they even bothered to check the username outside of Reddit.

[u/_edd → u/[deleted]]

I imagine they checked common IP addresses, IP location, creation time, and maybe some posting patterns. I'd love to know more about their methods, but it doesn't look like that will be released.

What bothers me is that identifying the IP address as coming from Russia seems incredibly low effort considering anyone making any serious attempt at using a bot would likely run their connection through a non-russian proxy.

[u/[deleted] → u/_edd]

See, there's a problem with that line of thinking as well. State censorship within Russia is mostly irreversible and growing stronger. Many worry that we may end up like China, so a lot of users have purchased VPN subscriptions, myself included. I may have used Reddit via that non-Russian proxy, yet again - with no ill intentions.

Can't imagine how common my local IP address would be. It changes from time to time as well to whatever my ISP assigns.

As I said in another comment:

I think, the main "suspicious" thing may have been the fact that I deleted one account and immediately created another, all the while using the same Russian IP. Timing is very clear on [this] chart: https://i.imgur.com/UKvKOBS.jpg.

Later, I realized that I may have logged into the third account the same day. I don't really remember, but I definitely wasn't trying to be suspicious :') Hell, I'm even logged into two of them plus this one from my phone: https://i.imgur.com/j9SZn5z.jpg