Hello, redditors!
Today we published our , which shares data and insights about our content moderation and legal requests from July through December 2023.
Reddit’s biannual Transparency Reports provide insights and metrics about content that was removed from Reddit – including content proactively removed as a result of automated tooling, accounts that were suspended, and legal requests we received from governments, law enforcement agencies, and third parties from around the world to remove content or disclose user data.
Some key highlights include:
-
Content Creation & Removals:
-
Between July and December 2023, redditors shared over 4.4 billion pieces of content, bringing the total content on Reddit (posts, comments, private messages and chats) in 2023 to over 8.8 billion. (+6% YoY). The vast majority of content (~96%) was not found to violate our or individual community rules.
-
Of the ~4% of removed content, about half was removed by admins and half by moderators. (Note that moderator removals include removals due to their individual community rules, and so are not necessarily indicative of content being unsafe, whereas admin removals only include violations of our Content Policy).
-
Over 72% of moderator actions were taken with Automod, a customizable tool provided by Reddit that mods can use to take automated moderation actions. We have enhanced the safety tools available for mods and expanded Automod in the past year. You can see more about that .
-
The majority of admin removals were for spam (67.7%), which is consistent with past reports.
-
-
As Reddit's tools and enforcement capabilities keep evolving, we continue to see a trend of admins gradually taking on more content moderation actions from moderators, leaving moderators more room to focus on their individual community rules.
-
We saw a ~44% increase in the proportion of non-spam, rule-violating content removed by admins, as opposed to mods (admins remove the majority of spam on the platform using scaled backend tooling, so excluding it is a good way of understanding other Content Policy violations).
-
-
-
New “Communities” Section
-
We’ve added a new “Communities” section to the report to highlight subreddit-level actions as well as admin enforcement of Reddit’s .
-
-
Global Legal Requests
-
We continue to process large volumes of global legal requests from around the world. Interestingly, we’ve seen overall decreases in global government and law enforcement legal requests to remove content or disclose account information compared to the first half of 2023.
-
We routinely push back on overbroad or otherwise objectionable requests for account information, and fight to ensure users are notified of requests.
-
In one notable U.S. request for user information, we were served with a sealed search warrant from the LAPD seeking records for an account allegedly involved in the of an LA City Council meeting recording that resulted in the resignation of prominent, local political leaders. We fought to notify the account holder about the warrant, and while we didn’t prevail initially, we persisted and were eventually able to get the warrant and proceedings unsealed and provide notice to the redditor.
-
-
You can read more insights in the full document: . You can also see all of our past reports and more information on our policies and procedures in our .
Please let us know in the comments section if you have any questions or are interested in learning more about other data or insights.