Reddit Releases List of Banned Accounts Linked to Russian Propaganda, With Posts Intact
Online trolls linked to Russian propaganda really got around, even hitting up Reddit to spread their materials to the communities on the news website. The platform has just released its annual transparency report, and in it, Reddit has named all 944 users that it caught.
Early in March, Reddit chief Steve Huffman posted on the website to let users know how their investigation into users promoting Russian propaganda has been going along. In this respect, there's not much for Huffman to hold back — unlike the case with Facebook or Twitter, the extent by which Russian trolls have rallied support in Reddit has been relatively minimal, according to their announcement.
"We don't see a lot of ads from Russia, either before or after the 2016 election, and what we do see are mostly ads promoting spam and ICOs," Huffman noted, referring to Initial Coin Offerings for new cryptocurrency tokens, many of which turned out to be scams.
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In any case, any ads from Russia are now blocked on Reddit. There have been reports of Facebook leaving some of their ad reviews to machine learning — over at Reddit, all ads are reviewed by humans, as Huffman confirmed.
Over the course of their investigation, Reddit has found 944 "suspicious accounts" that were suspected to be linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency, which is now considered to be a group specializing in operating online troll farms.
On Reddit, the karma system is a sort of participation score and is also a good metric to see if a user has posted links that other people have upvoted.
Out of the 944 accounts, a vast majority of them, 662 usernames or about 70 percent, had zero karma. These likely had little visible impact on any Reddit community they have embedded themselves in, and the same with the eight accounts that had negative karma and the 203 that had less than a thousand karma.
There are at 13 accounts out of the 944, however, that did manage to stir up some notoriety for themselves at Reddit before they were banned. These accounts have more than 10,000 karma points, and one of them was a regular at "The Donald," a pro-Trump community on Reddit, as Engadget pointed out.
The same user was also a frequent poster over at "Hillary for Prison," another pro-Trump group on the website.
All 944 accounts have been banned on Reddit, even if Huffman did note that "few" of them were able to leave a "visible impact on the site." Huffman has also referred readers to a list of all 944 accounts for good measure, and Reddit will be keeping their posts available for a period of time.
Eventually, Reddit plans to remove all these accounts and their content from the platform, after community moderators and investigators have a good look at the posts they've put up.
"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," Huffman acknowledged the users at the end.
