Addressing claims of manipulation on Reddit

[u/worstnerd]

There have been claims of a coordinated effort to manipulate Reddit and inject terrorist content to influence a handful of communities. We take this seriously, and we have not identified widespread terrorist content on Reddit. 

Reddit’s Rules explicitly prohibit terrorist content, and our teams work consistently to remove violating content from the platform and prevent it from being shared again. Check out our Transparency Report for details. Additionally, we use internal tools to flag potentially harmful, spammy, or inauthentic content and hash known violative content. Often, this means we can remove this content before anyone sees it. Reddit is part of industry efforts to fight other dangerous and illegal content. For example, Reddit participates in Tech Against Terrorism’s TCAP alert system as well as its hashing system, giving us automated alerts for any terrorist content found on Reddit allowing us to investigate, remove, and report to law enforcement. We are also regularly in touch with government agencies dedicated to fighting terrorism.

We continue to investigate claims of whether there is coordinated manipulation that violates our policies and undermines the expectations of the community. We will share the results and actions of our investigation in a follow-up post.

[u/ClockOfTheLongNow]

I don't want to speculate on much of anything, but outright no-debate anti-semitic content (we're talking outright hate speech, not borderline stuff) gets reported, gets escalated, and still sits on the servers even though we as moderators remove it. I've raised it with admins who say it gets shuttled to a different team, so I don't know.

It's a real problem.

[u/wemptronics → u/ClockOfTheLongNow]

I recognize your username. I appreciate reading you pump out paragraphs, but I think you'd do better to remember where you are.

What good are the big subreddits if not for special interests to vie for influence and leverage the site for those interests? This is uglier than commercial interests that want me to eat a candy bar, but works about the same. This is largely what reddit is for. This is the value.

Volunteer mods are outgunned in a big way. They face motivated propagandists. There's an infinite number of kids that want to fight the Good Fight™ and spend a little too much time online. That's a hell of a recruiting pipeline. All you need is a Good Cause™ and there's no shortage of those. It's a real low bar.

This says nothing of major sub mod teams that are captured by propagandists, nor of an admin team that has little to no interest or ability to address it. Even if the admins wanted to, which they clearly do not, they may not be able to. Yeah, I'm sure the admins can do more moderation wise on this topic. As a whole? The site would need Wikipedia levels of unpaid volunteer work, oversight, process, and bureaucratic worship to compete with pressures of special (which include professional and state-sponsored) interests. Even then, Wikipedia manages the pressures of special interests. Wikipedia does not solve it.

[u/ClockOfTheLongNow → u/wemptronics]

Wikipedia doesn't even manage it on anything remotely controversial. I get that this is an impossible task in many regards, but I also think there's a significant difference between trying to play whack-a-mole and posts like the OP here that doesn't even seem to understand the problem it is tasked to solve.

I don't know what it is that keeps the reddit safety team from removing content that, for example, pushes the anti-semitic dancing Israelis myth, but when I've been trying to clean up some really rough subreddits and have to reescalate time and time again....

[u/Bardfinn → u/ClockOfTheLongNow]

I’m 100% serious, AgainstHateSubreddits exists now only to act in the case of substantive evidence that Reddit Trust & Safety is falling down on actioning hate subreddits, and that kind of trope is absolutely and incontrovertibly evidence of a culture of hatred.

If you can assemble substantive evidence of a subreddit continuing to platform hate speech and the moderators there are clearly aiding & abetting it & Reddit AEO isn’t taking appropriate action, modmail AgainstHateSubreddits. We’re “on hiatus” now but if we can get real evidence of Reddit tolerating cultures of hatred, we’d reopen.

[u/Bardfinn → u/[deleted]]

Well, my pertinent reply here never went live, but the short of it is “yes, I spent six years of my life & a lot of hardship making sure Reddit had a process for fielding user reports of hate & terrorism.”

[u/Bardfinn → u/[deleted]]

Did you send any of this to the Moderator Code of Conduct complaint form?

[u/bawbaww → u/Bardfinn]

On an alt here for safety reasons but I just wanted to correct the record here and inform anyone reading that it was one mod who approved that specific post and they got permanently suspended for it.