Reddit’s 2017 transparency report and suspect account findings

Hi all,

Each year around this point, we tend to share Reddit’s latest transparency report and a couple of highlights from our Legal team’s efforts to safeguard user privacy. This year, our annual post happens to coincide with one amongst the most important national discussions of privacy on-line and therefore the integrity of the platforms we tend to use, thus I needed to share a a lot of in-depth update in an endeavor to be as clear with you all as potential.

First, here is our 2017 Transparency Report. This details government and law-enforcement requests for personal data regarding our users. the kinds of requests we tend to receive most frequently ar subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, and emergency requests. we tend to need all of those requests to be lawfully valid, {and we tend to|and that we} chase away against those we don’t take into account lawfully even. In 2017, we tend to received considerably a lot of requests to provide or preserve user account data. the share of requests we tend to deemed to be lawfully valid, however, minimized slightly for each varieties of requests. (You’ll realize a full breakdown of those stats, additionally as non-governmental requests and DMCA takedown notices, within the report. you'll be able to realize our transparency reports from previous years here.)

We conjointly participated in a very range of amicus briefs, connection different school firms in support of problems we tend to care regarding. In Hassell v. Bird and Yelp v. judicature (Montagna), we tend to argued for the proper to defend a user's speech and namelessness if the user is sued. And this year, we've advocated for upholding cyber web neutrality rules (County of urban center v. FCC) and defensive user namelessness against exposure before a cause (Glassdoor v. Andra cluster, LP).

I’d conjointly prefer to offer associate update to my last post regarding the investigation into Russian makes an attempt to take advantage of Reddit. I’ve mentioned before that we’re cooperating with legislative assembly inquiries. within the spirit of transparency, we tend to’re planning to share with you what we shared with them earlier today:

In my post last month, I represented that we tend to had found and removed a couple of hundred accounts that were of suspected Russian web analysis Agency origin. I’d prefer to share with you a lot of totally what which means. At now in our investigation, we've found 944 suspicious accounts, few of that had a noticeable impact on the site:

seventieth (662) had zero destiny
1 Chronicles (8) had negative destiny
twenty second (203) had 1-999 destiny
one944|6 June 1944} (58) had 1,000-9,999 karma
1 Chronicles (13) had a destiny score of ten,000+

Of the 282 accounts with non-zero destiny, over [*fr1] (145) were illegal before the beginning of this investigation through our routine Trust & Safety practices. All of those bans passed off before the 2016 election and of course, almost eight of them passed off back in 2015. This general pattern conjointly command for the accounts with important karma: of the thirteen accounts with ten,000+ karma, half-dozen had already been illegal before our investigation—all of them before the 2016 election. Ultimately, we've seven accounts with important destiny scores that created it past our defenses.

And as i discussed last time, our investigation didn't realize any election-related advertisements of the character found on different platforms, through either our self-serve or managed advertisements. I conjointly need to be terribly clear that none of the 944 users placed any ads on Reddit. we tend to conjointly didn't notice any effective use of those accounts to interact in vote manipulation.

To give you a lot of insight into our findings, here may be a link to all or any 944 accounts. we've determined to stay them visible for currently, however when a amount of your time the accounts and their content are aloof from Reddit. we tend to do this to permit moderators, investigators, and every one of you to visualize their account histories for yourselves.

We still have loads of space to enhance, and that we will stay argus-eyed. Over the past many months, our groups have evaluated our site-wide protections against fraud and abuse to visualize wherever we are able to create those enhancements. however i'm happy to mention that these investigations have shown that the efforts of our Trust & Safety and Anti-Evil groups ar operating. It’s conjointly an incredible testament to the work of our moderators and therefore the healthy skepticism of our communities, that create Reddit a troublesome platform to control.

We know the success of Reddit depends on your trust. we tend to hope still depend on that by communication brazenly with you regarding these subjects, currently and within the future. Thanks for reading. I’ll stick around for a touch to answer queries.