Reddit transparency report, 2014

https://www.reddit.com/wiki/transparency/2014

by soundsop • 11 years ago

158 77 11 years ago

secfirstmd• 11 years ago

Glad to see they put up a fight as much as possible (or say they do atleast).

ipsum2• 11 years ago

"As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed."

Is this the warrant canary? Has this been around before?

doughj3• 11 years ago

Has this been around before?

I would imagine not, considering this is their first transparency report.

thesimon• 11 years ago

Nope https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2fser0/shou...

danielweber10• 11 years ago

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/whispersystems.org/issues/...

Moxie saying "Every lawyer we've spoken to has confirmed that [having a warrant canary] would not work." Which isn't surprising. When the government tells you not to communicate something, you aren't allowed to communicate it. Not not not not communicating it isn't some clever loophole.

nacs• 11 years ago

In that same issue you linked, there's a link to the EFF's Warrant Canary FAQ ( https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq ) that disagrees with what Moxie/WhisperSystems is saying.

I'd take the EFF's word over WhisperSystems'.

duaneb2• 11 years ago

Wouldn't this essentially translate to the government forcing the company to mislead the public? This is different from forcing the company to be silent—that is perhaps understandable. But I would love to understand the rationale behind the government forcing a company to post a false notice with no benefit to anyone but the government itself.

click170• 11 years ago

Instead of not communicating it. What if you block people from viewing something else as a consequence of receiving a request.

Eg there is a public mailbox folder that can be checked by anyone online and there is an email filter that directs all mail with keywords typically found in requests to that folder. When a request is received you would of course be forced to block access to the mailbox as soon as you were aware of the takedown, but losing the ability to check that the mailbox is clean is the warrant canary. There would always be a small window between when the email arrived and was visible and when the company saw the request and blocked access.

ikeboy• 11 years ago

Apple disagrees. http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-omits-warrant-canary-from...

And I think they have at least one lawyer.

Angostura• 11 years ago

How does the government prove that you're communicating something when you've never explicitly said 'this is a warranty canary, it's ommission next year means that something is up'.

Take Apple. It had something that was assumed to be a warranty canary. It's no longer there. People made assumptions. Has Apple done anything wrong?

Lawtonfogle• 11 years ago

If they act in such a way that they must continue to act the same way to prevent knowledge from being transferred then I could see the courts ruling they must continue to act in such a way even if it would involve lying.

The only ways around this is for the information that a warrant was received to be sent before it is received (to give an example that doesn't violate causality, a person stream 100% of everything they see/hear, so that between the time of receiving such a warrant and realizing what the warrant actually is the information that it has been received was already sent out). And even then I see the courts ruling against them because the courts will argue the spirit of the law was violated.

cryoshon• 11 years ago

Ah, I am glad that my comment to one of the administrators a couple of years ago regarding NSLs finally landed in the right place.

RankingMember2• 11 years ago

Perhaps one situation where spam could be the solution. Notify everyone that contacts your main contact email that all emails received and sent are also copied to some watchdog organization. That way, when your already-in-place system copies an NSA info request, your culpability is lessened. That's my theory for how to deal with this kind of shadiness anyways - infinite sunshine.

sp332• 11 years ago

Pretty sure the NSA doesn't just send you an email.

danielweber10• 11 years ago

How do you think requests to keep things secret are sent? If it's important enough to order you to keep it secret, they aren't going to send it via email.

sixothree• 11 years ago

That statement to me reads like the canary has died.

patrickfl• 11 years ago

awesome, would love to know what sub-reddits received the illegitimate takedown requests. Can anyone take a stab at which ones?

Kalium2• 11 years ago

This is limited to data Reddit HQ legal has dealt with. The subs in question may not even be aware. The admins often play their cards close.

a_bonobo• 11 years ago

This is correct - the top question in reddit's comments to this post asks this [1], and the admins answer that the mods could report these takedown requests as reddit Inc. does not collect them.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2u3sqp/reddits_first_t...

noobface• 11 years ago

Spacedicks had all of them

samspot• 11 years ago

I'm willing to bet video-game emulation communities are in that list.

m3rc2• 11 years ago

The celebrity leaked nude stuff had a lot of DMCA flying around, pretty sure they even nuked a couple subreddits to comply with some of it

sesutton• 11 years ago

I imagine a lot of them were for image thumbnails since reddit actually hosts those.

Kalium2• 11 years ago

And then the CEO wrote a hypocritical blog post about it. Pretty rich.

Raphmedia• 11 years ago

Yes, but those were subreddits that popped up and were dedicated to sharing those pictures. I doubt any genuine community was affected.

b0t• 11 years ago

some /r/hacking subscribers had some odd PMs. Maybe some of them?

baseten• 11 years ago

There is little need for government takedown requests when the moderators of many subreddits are paid shills of various stripes. There are a few subs like r/undelete and r/undeleteshadow and r/longtail dedicated to snapshotting this sort of thing. Among the duplicate submissions that are legitimately deleted you can find some real gems.

motbob• 11 years ago

When one views reddit moderation decisions through an anti-corporate/governmental lens, circumstantial evidence of mods being paid off seems to be everywhere. But there is not a single piece of direct evidence to suggest that mods are being paid by large organizations (corporate or otherwise) to manipulate reddit content.

RyJones• 11 years ago

I got stickers and a certificate of moderate appreciation from reddit itself for moderating /r/answers. You should know I'm totally beholden to corporate interests now - those stickers were very nice.

colordrops3• 11 years ago

Reddit has both explicit ads, such as paid placement at the top, and side bar ads, as well as Reddit Gold, but these are not extensive enough to support costs and make a decent profit. Reddit has nearly 200 million users and has taken almost 50 million in investment, and there is a lot of pressure to utilize the user base for marketing purposes.

Along with traditional explicit advertising models, internet marketing usually involves more subtle techniques such as seamless paid content interleaved with user content, as you see on Facebook and elsewhere. Subtle and invisible marketing is especially important on Reddit, as forum users are not tolerant of paid content, as evidenced by the collapse of Digg, so the operators of Reddit have to keep up the impression of Reddit being pristine and untouched by marketers.

But Reddit has to make revenue, as they are a business and not a charity. Reddit employees are mods of many of the default subreddits, and often post content to those boards that bubbles to the top of the front page. The evidence trail is direct, as you can directly view an employee's posts on their profile page. It would be absurd for Reddit to not use modern internet marketing techniques to generate revenue.

Not only does Reddit support marketing through posts, but they also control the narrative of Reddit. Just live television before it, advertisers are very sensitive to the content carried on the medium that their advertisements are part of, and use their dollars to influence what can and can't be said in that channel. The same goes for Reddit.

rodgerd• 11 years ago

The paid shills probably do less damage to reddit than the way e.g. one neo-Nazi has managed to take over mod duties in about 80 subreddits by gaming the moderation rules - including /r/holocaust!

oafitupa• 11 years ago

Sonds like the biggest reddit drama ever. Do you have a link?

mahranch7• 11 years ago

here is little need for government takedown requests when the moderators of many subreddits are paid shills of various stripes.

As someone who is a mod of one or more default subreddits, I promise you, this is certainly not the case.

I can't "prove" it, but I work with these people every single day and have for years. I'm intimately familiar with the "power mods". We even have our own semi-private subreddit, /r/DefaultMods, where we actually talk about things like this. We discuss how the conspiracy wackos will accuse us of being reptilian shills for Pepsi today, then tomorrow turn around and accuse us of being shills for Coke. Next week we're shills for the U.S government, the week after we're shills for the KGB or the PRC. This is not an exaggeration. I personally have been accused of being all of those things on numerous occasions over the years. Truth is, I'm just a welder here in Chicago. Let me tell you how fun it is coming home from a long day at work only to be called a government shill by some teenage neckbeard who thinks aliens did 9/11.

At some point, you just get tired of it, ignore it, and you have to laugh at the situation. It's why some mods make fun/light about the whole thing. If you start taking it seriously, you're going to go crazy. Modding a large subreddit is a lot like babysitting, except you're not babysitting infants, you're babysitting high school kids.

The only real evidence that "mods are shills" is a minimal and extremely exaggerated. Years ago there was a mod who was busted for spamming links to their own stuff. SEO type spam. I think his name was SolInvictus. The admins caught him and shadowbanned his account immediately. There's also examples of other mods catching and busting mods for spamming (like the quickmeme guy). These things don't go left unchecked. If you think the admins aren't paying attention and catching/busting mods, then you'd be naive. They are, and have been. If there was someone working to systematically undermine their subreddit, the evidence to the admins and even to the other mods would be overwhelming and obvious.

By the way, /r/Undelete is populated and run by people from /r/Conspiracy. Overwhelmingly so. Mods will show up to explain why a submission was removed (which rule it broke and why) and the conspiracy crowd will blatantly ignore it and downvote the helpful mod. That place was nice in the very beginning, now it's as toxic as any stormfront forum. No exaggeration. You'll actually probably find more level headed people in a stormfront forum.

driverdan• 11 years ago

He didn't say all mods are shills, just that there are mods who are shills. You gave two examples yourself. Admins take action when there's irrefutable evidence.

grecy• 11 years ago

We know for sure people with strong reputation are paid for Wikipedia edits... so I have to ask, have you ever been offered money to moderate favorably?

shard972• 11 years ago

As someone who is a mod of one or more default subreddits, I promise you, this is certainly not the case.

/r/technology?

Did everyone just forget?

hackuser• 11 years ago

Does Reddit allow anonymous users (e.g., via Tor)?

thissideup• 11 years ago

This is worthless as social sites, like Reddit, are one of the most heavily propagandized and manipulated places on the internet.

It's a tool for disseminating information and talking points.

Reddit transparency report, 2014

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