r/RedditSafety • u/outersunset • Oct 16 '24

Reddit Transparency Report: Jan-Jun 2024

Hello, redditors!

Today we published our Transparency Report for the first half of 2024, which shares data and insights about our content moderation and legal requests from January through June 2024.

Reddit’s biannual Transparency Reports provide insights and metrics about content moderation on Reddit, including content that was removed as a result of automated tooling and accounts that were suspended. It also includes legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties around the world to remove content or disclose user data.

Some key highlights include:

  • ~5.3B pieces of content were shared on Reddit (incl. posts, comments, PMs & chats) 
  • Mods and admins removed just over 3% of the total content created (1.6% by mods and 1.5% by admins)
  • Over 71% of the content removed by mods was done through automated tooling, such as Automod.
  • As usual, spam accounted for the majority of admin removals (66.5%), with the remainder being for various Content Policy violations (31.7%) and other reasons, such as non-spam content manipulation (1.8%)
  • There were notable increases in legal requests from government and law enforcement agencies to remove content (+32%) and in non-emergency legal requests for account information (+23%; this is the highest volume of information requests that Reddit has ever received in a single reporting period) compared to the second half of 2023
    • We carefully scrutinize every request to ensure it is legally valid and narrowly tailored, and include the data on how we’ve responded in the report
    • Importantly, we caught and rejected a number of fraudulent legal requests purporting to come from legitimate government and law enforcement agencies; we subsequently reported these bogus requests to the appropriate authorities.

You can read more insights in the full document: Transparency Report: January to June 2024. You can also see all of our past reports and more information on our policies and procedures in our Transparency Center.

Please let us know in the comments section if you have any questions or are interested in learning more about other data or insights. 

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-8

u/[deleted] Oct 16 '24

It never improves. 

5

u/baltinerdist Oct 16 '24

This report is literally proof that it improves. You want these numbers to be going up. The volume of content posted to reddit increases month over month, but if you didn't see these "stuff removed" numbers also going up, that would mean you are being delivered more spam, more abuse, more crap. The higher that number goes, the more stuff is eliminated before the servers ever serve it up to you.

3

u/Bardfinn Oct 16 '24

And also, the percentage of Stuff Removed as compared to Absolute Stuff continues to go down. Which is good.

2

u/lesserweevils Oct 17 '24

To be honest, I'm not sure that's good. The amount of removals may have decreased but that's not the same as less spam. Users may be catching/reporting less, tools like BotDefense have shut down, spammers may have improved their tactics, and so on.

2

u/Bardfinn Oct 17 '24

I'm not sure that's good.

I know exactly where you’re coming from. Every improvement Reddit has made to the sitewide rules / content policy / acceptable use policy / sitewide enforcement / moderator code of conduct, I’ve been completely skeptical of.

There’s an adage, “Trust, but verify”. I didn’t. I distrusted until verified.

The vast majority of spam — unsolicited content, unsolicited commercial communications, inauthentic engagement — has long been automatically detected and actioned by Reddit’s own algorithms, using signals only Reddit’s own systems have access to.

Only a few years ago, we were still relying on volunteer moderators to do a significant amount of spam detection. BotDefense was one of their tools. Ten years ago, it was almost all volunteer moderators efforts, across subreddits. Now the teams I work with usually only encounter spam as already-flagged, removed content.

It never should have been up to the volunteer moderators, and it might swing back to being a necessity that volunteer mods step up to handle an unbalance in the cold war shifting towards spammers - but as of this past 18 months, there are people whose whole reason for being a Reddit moderator - fighting spam - who’ve found that they suddenly have a great deal of free time, and have re-evaluated their priorities accordingly. They’re not human cogs any longer. And that’s wonderful.

2

u/lesserweevils Oct 17 '24

My experience as a random Redditor (not a mod) is that there were plenty of organized spam rings, say 300 accounts, that engaged in blatant vote manipulation and other rule-breaking across multiple subs. The mods of smaller subs are not equipped to deal with these things. Apparently, some actions would screw up their sub's filters. So I'd either report the accounts to Reddit, which meant the accounts might continue to function for months or years, or to BotDefense which took action much sooner.

I hope Reddit continues to improve its automated detection. However, this sort of thing likely continues. I am one of those people who re-evaluated their priorities last year. But not because I couldn't find spam.

2

u/dt7cv Oct 17 '24

they don't like the numbers because it means their unpopular opinion is left unstated

1

u/Oh-dang-its-me-again Oct 23 '24

Funny coming from a guy who deletes posts and bans people who say or mention things that THEY don’t agree with. If you wanna talk like you do here you wouldn’t be in power of deleting posts you don’t agree with dork…. But like they say. You can’t fix…. You can’t fix… well what’s the point? You won’t get it anyway 😏

1

u/dt7cv Oct 24 '24

I'm praising the admins. if only we all could read!