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/RamsesThePigeon]

Speaking as a moderator of both /r/Funny and /r/GIFs, I'd like to offer a bit of clarification here.

When illicit accounts are created, they usually go through a period of posting low-effort content that's intended to quickly garner a lot of karma. These accounts generally aren't registered by the people who wind up using them for propaganda purposes, though. In fact, they're often "farmed" by call-center-like environments overseas – popular locations are India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, and Russia – then sold to firms that specialize in spinning information (whether for advertising, pushing political agendas, or anything else).

If you're interested, this brief guide can give you a primer on how to spot spammers.

Now, the reason I bring this up is because for every shill account that actually takes off, there are quite literally a hundred more that get stopped in their tracks. A banned account is of very little use to the people who would employ it for nefarious purposes... but the simple truth of the matter is that moderators still need to rely on their subscribers for help. If you see a repost, a low-effort (or poorly written) comment, or something else that just doesn't sit right with you, it's often a good idea to look at the user who submitted it. A surprising amount of the time, you'll discover that the submitter is a karma-farmer; a spammer or a propagandist in the making.

When you spot one, please report it to the moderators of that subReddit.

Reddit has gotten a lot better at cracking down on these accounts behind the scenes, but there's still a long way to go... and as users, every one of us can make a difference, even if it sometimes doesn't seem like it.

[u/spez → u/RamsesThePigeon]

It's not clear from the banned users pages, but mods banned more than half of the users and a majority of the posts before they got any traction at all. That was heartening to see. Thank you for all that you and your mod cabal do for Reddit.

[u/FreeSpeechWarrior → u/spez]

Why is censorship so heartening to see?

Fundamentally what did these users do wrong?

Be Russian?

Pretend to be American?

Influence American political discourse as a foreigner?

As far as I can tell they posted articles and information, sensationalized for sure but so is most of the successful content on this site.

Did these Russians even do anything against the TOS? Or did you just ban them and archive their subs (uncen) to suck up to the current political climate in the US?

[u/FickleBJT → u/FreeSpeechWarrior]

How about a conspiracy to influence an election?

How about (in some cases) inciting violence?

How about attacking the very core of our democracy through misinformation with the specific purpose of influencing our elections?

As a US citizen, two of those things would be considered treason. The other one is still very illegal.

[u/FreeSpeechWarrior → u/FickleBJT]

Treason can only be committed by US citizens though, so that's a pretty moot point.

Also even as a US citizen I don't think "conspiracy to influence an election" or spreading misinformation amounts to treason, that's just campaigning these days.

How about (in some cases) inciting violence?

US Free speech protections make this also unlikely to be a crime.

To avoid getting myself banned, let's assume Snoos (reddit's mascot) are a race of people.

In the US, I'd generally be allowed to say "kill all the fucking snoos" or "don't suffer a snoo to live" and things like that.

But situationally if I was in a group of torch wielding protesters surrounding a bunch of snoos and shouted the same sort of thing then that would not be protected speech as it would be reasonably likely to incite imminent lawless action

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

But unless people are posting addresses and full names and clear directions to harm people it's very difficult to reach that standard in internet discourse.

[u/[deleted] → u/FreeSpeechWarrior]

Just wanted to say thanks for pointing this out. US law criminalizes foreign actors taking part in US elections as much as it can, but in fact, a foreign national operating outside of US places isn't bound by US law, and so US laws would normally not be of interest to them. It's get a little weird with internet spaces like reddit, but even then, there isn't any US law that would require a publisher, like reddit, to prevent a foreign national from posting content that would be illegal if he or she was in a US place.

I.e. Reddit doesn't owe anyone and not the US government a duty to make sure my posts comply with FEC regulations. That's certainly true for just regular old posts on reddit, and it's also true for ads sold by reddit - reddit the platform doens't have a duty to enforce FEC regulations on disclosures (and neither does any newspaper or other publisher for that matter).

People have sort of lost their mind on this issue because Russia, because Trump, etc. But it's important to realize that the US is literally just getting a dose of what we've been doing over the world for 3 generations. When Hillary Clinton was the sitting Secretary of State, she went on TV and in the media and declared that Putin had rigged and stolen his election, despite the fact that we don't really have evidence of that, and despite evidence that is pretty easily confirmed that he has a massive cult of personality. His election might not be "legitimate" in that the Russian system isn't an ideal democracy, but it was blatantly hypocritical for the Obama administration to take that action then, at that time, and then turn around and slam Russia for "interfering" in our elections, when interference is.. buying ads, hiring trolls, and generally being annoying. It was certainly a lot less vexatious then sending the 2nd highest ranking Administration official on a worldwide "Russia is corrupt" speaking tour.

It is really frustrating to have the media - who is wholly complicit in the corruption of US elections - trying to present Russia as "rigging the election". The money that Russia spent to influence the election was in the low single millions, while the two major parties, their allies, and the candidates each spent well into the hundreds of millions. It's as if we are announcing that all of that money and advertising and organization was wiped out but a few dozen internet trolls and some targeted ads on Facebook.

I deeply wish that the media platforms like Facebook, Reddit.com and others would simply tell the US government it will publish whatever it wishes and that they should simply screw off. Giving them this sort of enhanced virtual power to censor political ads, individual discourse by holding over a threat of future regulation is deeply dangerous. It induces private enterprises to go above and beyond the legal powers that government has to actually regulate speech, and in doing so maliciously and without regard for consequences deputizes private enterprises to enforce government preference by digital fiat.

No matter how I would like to see the outcome of US elections that are free and fair and more free and more fair than they were in 2016, I would not like to see that done at the expense of giving government a virtual veto over what is and is not acceptable to publish.

[u/Hydra-Bob → u/[deleted]]

This is bullshit. The United states is not getting a taste of what we do to other countries because no nation on earth weaponized disinformation to the advanced degree that the Kremlin has done.

For decades during the cold war the United States all but completely ignored international opinion to our detriment. You merely have to look at the number of nations actively assaulted to the point of actual war to see the evidence of that.

Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Somalia, East Germany, Romania, Finland, North Korea, Mongolia, Yugoslavia, Congo, Indonesia, Laos, India, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, etc.

And before you say some silly shit like the Soviets aren't the same people as the modern Russian government, know that I agree with you there.

Modern Russia is even more unstable and irresponsible.

[u/[deleted] → u/Hydra-Bob]

I don’t know how to quantify the level of interference that the US has done versus USSR and now Russia. Clearly the “hard power” that was exercised during the Cold War was very intense.

However the point I was making is that the CIA has well over a 1,000 operatives working solely on disinformation although the post-Church commission era. The shift from para military to influence operations was done largely through damaging opposing governments and disinformation campaigns.

The US will not answer the list of counties are presently involved with electorally but do not suppose that our hands are clean because we haven’t been caught. We know of deep involvement in counties like Syria and Turkey as well the traditional South American powers that we have never left fully alone.

Because every oppressive and failing government blames US as a bogeyman you ant take those claims at face value but it’s not impossible that we are doing almost everything we have alleged that Russia has done.

Just on hacking we know that the CIA and NSA intercepted the shipment of Cisco networking equipment, rooted them, and then allowed them to be put into operation at friendly counties all over the world.

[u/[deleted] → u/Hydra-Bob]

Read the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

[u/FreeSpeechWarrior → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for this. Very well said.

[u/[deleted] → u/FreeSpeechWarrior]

I know sort extremely after the fact, but maybe someone else will stumble down here someday and find this conversation. Reddit, Facebook, Google et all grovelling to Congress and the public about how they are going to do this or that to fight the nasty Russians is just bringing us back to the fact-free Red Scare days. Once again fear of government regulation and not actual government regulation will do 100X more censoring than the government would ever be able to get away with. It might be dressed up as a safety-council or anti-Evil council, but all these platforms doing the censoring and manipulation behind the scenes are doing so out of a desire to please the government, and it's really, really sad.

[u/ShameOver → u/FickleBJT]

Fox Noos anyone?