https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/8bb85p/reddits_2017_transparency_report_and_suspect/
created by spez on 10/04/2018 at 20:46 UTC*
19180 upvotes, 55 top-level comments (showing 25)
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[1]. 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[2]. (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[3].)
1: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/transparency-report
3: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/transparency/
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[4]. 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:
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[5]. 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.
5: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/suspiciousaccounts
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[6]. 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!
Comment by Snoos-Brother-Poo at 10/04/2018 at 20:52 UTC*
1048 upvotes, 2 direct replies
How did you determine which accounts were “suspicious”?
Edit: shortened the question.
Comment by aznanimality at 10/04/2018 at 20:47 UTC
3881 upvotes, 3 direct replies
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.
Any info on what subs they were posting to?
Comment by CarioGod at 10/04/2018 at 22:16 UTC
505 upvotes, 2 direct replies
What is stopping these guys from doing this again? Like can't they just make 944 new accounts?
Comment by [deleted] at 10/04/2018 at 21:26 UTC*
90 upvotes, 1 direct replies
So y'all averaged 21 DMCA takedown notices per day? How much time does that realistically leave to review these claims, and what poor souls ~~are~~were tasked to handle the 7,825 notices received in 2017?
Comment by mostoriginalusername at 10/04/2018 at 20:49 UTC
592 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Why is reddit.com using 10-20% CPU when all of my other 10-20 tabs combined are using 1-2%?
Comment by AskAboutMyDumbSite at 10/04/2018 at 21:57 UTC
313 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Spez,
How good, legitimately, do you think the reddit user base is at identifying suspicious accounts? These don't just include Russian bots/accounts but also marketing accounts etc.
As such, if as a whole, we're bad at it, what can we do to improve?
Comment by jumja at 10/04/2018 at 21:27 UTC*
3319 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Hey /u/spez, on a scale of 1 to 944, how happy are you to not be Mark Zuckerberg today?
A more serious note, thank you for your openness in this. It was already much appreciated in earlier years, but the current events really reminded me how amazing it really is that you’re doing this.
Edit: whooaah gold?! Within a minute!? Thanks totally completely anonymous giver!
Edit: triple gold?! Y’all are crazy and I love you. Have an amazing day.
Comment by [deleted] at 10/04/2018 at 22:08 UTC
29 upvotes, 1 direct replies
So the privacy policy since the begining of 2016 has been vague.Can you guys please clarify what information you collect is stored permanently, beyond 100 days besides the IP address used to create my account? u/spez mentioned previously only creation IP's and e-mails were stored in a previous transparency report post, and that if only if your accounts shared IP addresses, it was possible to link reddit throwaway/main accounts together.
My question is, has that changed? Like regardless of the IP Ive used to create an account, does reddit know what exact device/browser(based on whatever canvas fingerprinting/pixel tracking fingerprinting) was used to create each and every one of my throwaway accounts permanently?
Can somebody please clarify? Also the pixel tracking was removed from the privacy policy years ago, but looking at the page source shows 3 pixels. destiny, delight & diversity I believe. What are they used for now?
Comment by gihorn13 at 10/04/2018 at 21:11 UTC
665 upvotes, 2 direct replies
And yet I doubt any of these accounts betrayed others' circles - a valuable lesson in who we can truly trust.
Comment by [deleted] at 10/04/2018 at 21:06 UTC*
82 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by FreedomDatAss at 10/04/2018 at 21:06 UTC*
762 upvotes, 2 direct replies
It seems like ads targeting people do just as much harm as posts triggering people.
Have you (as Reddit) seen or been monitoring ad purchases originating outside the US? Aka Russia purchasing ad space to push their own messages/etc.
Comment by adpen12 at 10/04/2018 at 20:57 UTC
135 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I think the canary is still gone
Comment by [deleted] at 10/04/2018 at 22:03 UTC
75 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Reddit recently shut down subs related to sex work & other subs that may have discussed facilitation of illegal activity such as r/sanctionedsuicide.
What are the potential implications for Reddit that made you decide to shut down the subs, or were you directly ordered to do so?
Comment by peekaayfire at 10/04/2018 at 21:57 UTC
279 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Reddit isnt dependent on our trust, we never trust anything. Reddit is dependent on our skepticism.
Comment by [deleted] at 10/04/2018 at 20:49 UTC
958 upvotes, 6 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by Friendlyindividual at 10/04/2018 at 20:47 UTC
527 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Question, when the fuck is the Reddit search engine being overhauled? You keep saying it's in the works, but when the hell is it happening?
Comment by youareadildomadam at 10/04/2018 at 20:55 UTC*
1096 upvotes, 12 direct replies
There's recently been a LARGE increase in the number of pro-Russian, pro-Assad posts & comments in /r/syriancivilwar.
Maybe that's normal or maybe not. How can **YOU** tell if they are actually Russian agents trying to sway western public opinion?
...I suppose the same is true about all the pro-China green posts that seem to spam certain subs. ...or the pro-Saudi reform posts that seem to oddly make the front page.
There's not way for *us* to know if they are posted from China - but can *you* tell? ...or are you in the dark like the rest of us?
EDIT: /u/spez, you should go into politics, because you did not answer the fucking question.
Comment by istillgetreallybored at 10/04/2018 at 20:46 UTC
1872 upvotes, 6 direct replies
I'm gay
Comment by [deleted] at 10/04/2018 at 21:06 UTC
390 upvotes, 4 direct replies
The top 3 (in terms of karma scores) have their top-rated posts on these subs:
Comment by LeVentNoir at 10/04/2018 at 20:58 UTC
357 upvotes, 2 direct replies
It's actually really honest and open of administration to be posting such detailed information about state propoganda actors.
The very interesting part is how only 7% had more than 1,000 karma, a relatively trivial amount for a real person to access.
Of course, the actions of those accounts are the same kind of low grade pot stirring expected, but with large enough, and echoy enough pots, stirring them only makes the nutty clumps hold together more.
Comment by masteranonime at 10/04/2018 at 21:44 UTC
13 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I see you. Sorting by New. Good on you. Keep surfing, my dudes.
Comment by [deleted] at 10/04/2018 at 20:48 UTC
620 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Thanks for the transparency reddit it's very much appreciated.
Comment by xtagtv at 11/04/2018 at 01:11 UTC*
57 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I've categorized every account above 2000 karma based on what their posting interests were. I did this by skimming the first few pages of their submissions. Some of the accounts were hard to categorize. At the bottom i posted some more specifics about what I read.
┌───────────────────────┬───────┬────────────────┐ │ User │ Karma │ Interests │ ╞═══════════════════════╪═══════╪════════════════╡ │ u/rubinjer │ 99493 │ Conservative │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/shomyo │ 48619 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/Kevin_Milner │ 42752 │ Liberal │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/WhatImDoindHere │ 33095 │ Conservative │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/BerskyN │ 32979 │ Cryptocurrency │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/King_Andersons │ 27144 │ Liberal │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/erivmalazilkree │ 21971 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/Peter_Hurst │ 20830 │ Liberal │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼───────────��────┤ │ u/Margas_Granidor │ 18313 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/MasiusShadowshaper │ 16279 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/DeusXYX │ 15541 │ Conservative │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/Maxwel_Terry │ 14869 │ Liberal │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/Maineylops │ 12783 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼��───────────────┤ │ u/dopplegun │ 9049 │ Conservative │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/SinmoonYggbandis │ 7270 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/toneporter │ 6905 │ Conservative │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/TedarYozshujin │ 5671 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/elsie_c │ 5497 │ General │ ├─────────────────────��─┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/deusexmachina112 │ 5485 │ Liberal │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/AlsagelvBuriron │ 5349 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/reggaebull │ 5238 │ Liberal │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/clackie │ 4943 │ Islam │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/AriutusMokazahn │ 4463 │ General │ ├──────────��────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/mandeyboy │ 4171 │ Conservative │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/BeazerneMem │ 3672 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/FoshantBloodstone │ 3639 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/uelithelandagelv │ 3593 │ Conservative │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/MiraranaMogra │ 3545 │ General │ ��───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/fungon │ 3518 │ Cryptocurrency │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/alice_boginski │ 3512 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/GrisidaColak │ 3512 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/dandy1crown │ 3500 │ Cryptocurrency │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/KiririelCebandis │ 3487 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/gordon_br │ 3447 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/NualvCordalace │ 3444 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/LalhalaGavinradwyn │ 3401 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/kanyebreeze │ 3392 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────��� │ u/MananaraGralsa │ 3085 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/NitaurMaull │ 3032 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/ThontriusBanos │ 2997 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/ironzion17 │ 2706 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/ThonisIshnlen │ 2612 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼─────���──────────┤ │ u/keklelkek │ 2,591 │ Empty │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/GavinraraFonara │ 2589 │ Liberal │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/peter_stevenson1986 │ 2401 │ Conservative │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/laserathletics │ 2387 │ Cryptocurrency │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/toffeeathletics │ 2330 │ Cryptocurrency │ ├───────────────────────┼──���────┼────────────────┤ │ u/TojasHellwarden │ 2221 │ General │ ├───────────────────────┼───────┼────────────────┤ │ u/chereese │ 2000 │ General │ └───────────────────────┴───────┴────────────────┘
I tried to be unbiased. Some of the accounts are full conservative while others are full liberal. I only said they were liberal or conservative if most their political posts aligned with one side of typical american left/right politics. However, most of the accounts ("general") are harder to categorize. They post things from both sides of the aisle, but usually with a tone critical of America. Some common themes with these accounts include student loan debt, cost of living, warmongering, gun violence, drug abuse, police brutality, or criticisms of both parties. All the accounts in this list made political posts, there are none that are solely focused on hobbies or conversation or anything. Well, a few are really interested in specific topics like cryptocurrency or islam but aren't interested in American politics as much. Some accounts, probably bots, spend a lot of time farming karma with animal pictures before getting started on generic political posts, then they stop posting soon after they link to a news article on butthis dot com which is probably how they got flagged and banned.
For me, (this is my opinion) the key takeaway is that this list of users does not represent just one political perspective, but are trying to play all sides against each other, and promote feelings of cynicism and tribalism. It isnt just targeted at liberals and conservatives, but the "third party" types as well.
Comment by [deleted] at 10/04/2018 at 23:40 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
People here should know that Reddit removed its warrant canary, they are almost certainly communicating *somewhat* with the US government. (Not their fault).
Comment by vikinick at 10/04/2018 at 20:56 UTC
23 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I wish there was a way to add back another warrant canary that's more specific. Like updated daily. 'We have not been requested by a secret court to provide user data this week/today.'
