Hi redditors,

I can’t believe it’s summer already. As we look back at Q1 2024, we wanted to dig a little deeper into some of the work we’ve been doing on the safety side. Below, we discuss how we’ve been addressing affiliate spam, give some data on our harassment filter, and look ahead to how we’re preparing for elections this year. But first: the numbers.

Q1 By The Numbers

Combating SEO spam

Spam is an issue we’ve dealt with for as long as Reddit has existed, and we have sophisticated tools and processes to address it. However, spammers can be creative, so we often work to evolve our approach as we see new kinds of spammy behavior on the platform. One recent trend we’ve seen is an influx of affiliate spam-related content (i.e., spam used to promote products or services) where spammers will comment with product recommendations on older posts to increase visibility in search engines.

While much of this content is being caught via our existing spam processes, we updated our scaled, automated detection tools to better target the new behavioral patterns we’re seeing with this activity specifically — and our internal data shows that our approach is effectively removing this content. Between April and June 2024, we actioned 20,000 spammers, preventing them from infiltrating search results via Reddit. We’ve also taken down more than 950 subreddits, banned 5,400 domains dedicated to this behavior, and averaged 17k violating comment removals per week.

Empowering communities with LLMs

Since launching the in Q1, communities across Reddit have adopted the tool to flag potentially abusive comments in their communities. Feedback from mods was positive, with many highlighting that the filter surfaces content inappropriate for their communities that might have gone unnoticed — helping keep conversations healthy without adding additional moderation overhead.

Currently, the Harassment filter is flagging more than 75,000 comments per day in almost 9,000 communities.

We shared more on the Harassment Filter and the LLM that powers it in this. We’re continuing to build our portfolio of community tools and are looking forward to launching the Reputation Filter, a tool to flag content from potentially inauthentic users, in the coming months.

On the horizon: Elections

We’ve been focused on preparing for the many elections happening around the world this year–including the U.S. presidential election–for a while now. Our approach includes promoting high-quality, substantiated resources on Reddit (check out our) as well as working to protect our platform from harmful content. We remain focused on enforcing our rules against content manipulation (in particular, coordinated inauthentic behavior and AI-generated content presented to mislead), hateful content, and threats of violence, and are always investing in new and expanded tools to assess potential threats and enforce against violating content. For example, we are currently testing a new tool to help detect AI-generated media, including political content (such as AI-generated images featuring sitting politicians and candidates for office). We’ve also introduced a number of new to help moderators enforce their subreddit-level rules.

We’re constantly evolving how we handle potential threats and will share more information on our approach as the year unfolds. In the meantime, you can see our for more details on how we’re preparing for this election year as well as our for the latest data on handling content moderation and legal requests.

Edit: formatting

Edit: formatting again

Edit: Typo

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.