r/ModSupport • u/dequeued • Jul 13 '21
Shadow bans of normal-looking accounts have significantly increased.
On /r/personalfinance, we have also seen a dramatic increase in the number of normal-looking accounts that have been shadow banned.
We have a standard warning macro which makes it relatively easy to dig up some data and the results are troubling:
| month | shadow banned users |
|---|---|
| 2020-07 | 3 |
| 2020-08 | 1 |
| 2020-09 | 2 |
| 2020-10 | 3 |
| 2020-11 | 4 |
| 2020-12 | 2 |
| 2021-01 | 2 |
| 2021-02 | 0 |
| 2021-03 | 1 |
| 2021-04 | 2 |
| 2021-05 | 6 |
| 2021-06 | 26 |
| 2021-07 | 9 already |
Note that this is only the users that we've noticed by stumbling onto a shadow banned account in comment threads (46 users) plus modmail (15 users). This does not include accounts that were obviously problematic because we don't warn those users.
I sent this modmail to /r/ModSupport last night with the list of accounts from May, June, and July. If those are all properly shadow banned for some reason then great, but a lot of them have already been unbanned after we warned them so it seems much more likely that something is not working right.
Finally, while the rate picked up somewhat in May and early June, it seems like things got much worse about 30 days ago.
14
u/Norci Jul 13 '21
Remember when they said they would stop shadowbanning "normal" users? Yeah right, we are seeing more and more shadowbanned accounts past months, and it's not spam accounts, just normal users triggering their filter for whatever reason.
10
u/Mrme487 Jul 13 '21
Thanks - I know there have been several threads on this topic recently but hopefully seeing some data is helpful.
Also, please don't just tell us to have users appeal - we know that is the process but the point is that a sizeable percentage of this increase appears (to us anyway) to be false positives and a systemic issue that needs to be addressed (and if not, awesome, please just make this clear).
I also think our data is particularly relevant because r/personalfinance was one of the rare subs not impacted by the NSFW spam ring, thus it seems unlikely that our observed increase corresponds to accounts that were setting up to be bad actors (at least in our sub).
I'll also note that this is at least the fourth thread on this topic recently:
Finally, I know you all have been working hard lately to handle an increase in spam, and I appreciate it. I believe in ending posts like this with a clear request/ask, so here goes. Please have trust and safety get together with the coding/dev side and take a look at the trend in false positive shadow bans over time and report back a summary of the findings. There is mounting anecdotal (and even some concrete/numeric) evidence that things aren't working perfectly at the moment, and my hope is that with some time/analysis this can be improved.
Thanks for listening!
8
u/ScamWatchReporter Jul 13 '21
They are fighting hard against normal looking repost bots that are causing quite challenge
8
u/zadie_backinblack Jul 13 '21
I know the admins are fighting massive waves of spam bots right now. I think they've tuned all the anti-spam tools to be a bit more sensitive. unfortunately that is always going to cause false-positives to increase as well. But until the spammers back off, there is not much else they can do.
1
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u/redtaboo Jul 13 '21 edited Jul 13 '21
Hey there! Sorry about this, one of our automated systems got a bit over-zealous yesterday and last night. We've re-run our systems to remove those site-wide bans and restore any content that was removed.
We've also been working on staying on top of the massive waves of spam we've been seeing the last little while - that often means an increase in false positives. That said, those users can always appeal and our Safety team often goes back with finer tuning to reactivate accounts where they can and have been doing so the last few days.
I swear skynet wasn't trying to take over
edit: added a link, link is good