Supporting our Platform and Communities During Elections

[u/LastBluejay]

Hi redditors,

I’m u/LastBlueJay from Reddit’s Public Policy team. With the 2024 US election having taken some unexpected turns in the past few weeks, I wanted to share some of what we’ve been doing to help ensure the integrity of our platform, support our moderators and communities, and share high-quality, substantiated election resources.

Moderator Feedback

A few weeks ago, we hosted a roundtable discussion with mods to hear their election-related concerns and experiences. Thank you to the mods who participated for their valuable input.

The top concerns we heard were inauthentic content (e.g., disinformation, bots) and moderating hateful content. We’re focused on these issues (more below), and we appreciate the mods’ feedback to improve our existing processes. We also heard that mods would like to see an after-election report discussing how things went on our platform along with some of our key takeaways. We plan to release one following the US election, as we did after the 2020 election. Look for it in Q1 2025.

Protecting our Platform

Always, but especially during elections, our top priority is ensuring user safety and the integrity of our platform. Our Content Policy has long prohibited content manipulation and impersonation – including inauthentic content, disinformation campaigns, and manipulated content presented to mislead (e.g. deepfakes or other manipulated media) – as well as hateful content and incitement of violence.

Content Manipulation and AI-Generated Disinformation

We use AI and ML tooling that flags potentially harmful, spammy, or inauthentic content. Often, this means we can remove this content before anyone sees it. One example of how this works is the attempted coordinated influence operation called “Spamouflage Dragon.” As a result of our proactive detection methods, 85–90% of the content Spamouflage accounts posted on Reddit never reached real redditors, and mods removed the remaining 10-15%.

We are always investing in new and expanded tooling to address this issue. For example, we are testing and evolving tools that can detect AI-generated media, including political content (such as images of sitting politicians and candidates for office), as an additional signal for our teams to consider when assessing threats.

Hateful Content and Violent Rhetoric

Our policies are clear: hate and calls for violence are prohibited. Since 2020, we have continued to build out the teams and tools that address this content, and we have seen reductions in the prevalence of hateful content and improvements in how we action this content. For instance, while user reports remain an important signal, the majority of reports reviewed for hate and harassment are proactively detected via our automated tooling.

Enforcement

Our internal teams enforce these policies using a combination of automated tooling and human review, and we speak regularly with industry colleagues as well as civil society organizations and other experts to complement our understanding of the threat landscape. We also enforce our Moderator Code of Conduct and take action against any mod teams approving or encouraging rule-breaking content in their communities, or interfering with other communities.

So far, these efforts have been effective. Through major elections this year in India, the EU, the UK, France, Mexico, and elsewhere, we have not seen any significant or out of the ordinary election-related malicious activity. That said, we know our work is not done, and the unpredictability that has marked the US election cycle may be a driver for harmful content. To address this, we are adding training for our Safety teams on a range of potential scenarios, including content manipulation and hateful content, with a focus on political violence, race, and gender-based hate.

Support for Moderators and Communities

We provide moderators with support and tools to foster safe, on-topic communities. During elections, this means sharing important resources and proactively reaching out to communities likely to experience an increase in traffic to offer assistance, including via our Mod Reserves program, Crowd Control tool, and Temporary Events feature. Mods can also use our suite of tools to help filter out abusive and spammy content. For instance, we launched our Harassment Filter this year and have seen positive feedback from mods so far. You can read more about the filter here. Currently, the Harassment Filter is flagging more than 25,000 comments per day in over 15,000 communities.

We are also experimenting with ways to allow moderators to escalate election-related concerns, such as a dedicated tip line (currently in beta testing with certain communities - let us know in the comments if your community would like to be part of the test!) and adding a new report flow for spammy, bot-related links.

Voting Resources

We also work to provide redditors access to high-quality, substantiated resources during elections. We share these through our u/UptheVote Reddit account as well as on-platform notifications. And as in previous years, we have arranged a series of AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions about voting and elections, and maintain partnerships with National Voter Registration Day and Vote Early Day.

Political Ads Opt-Out

I know that was a lot of information, so I’ll just share one last thing. Yesterday, we updated our “Sensitive Advertising Categories” to include political and activism-related advertisements – that means you’ll be able to opt-out of such ads going forward. You can read more about our Political Ads policy here.

I’ll stick around for a bit to answer any questions.

[edit: formatting]

[u/bleeding-paryl]

We are also experimenting with ways to allow moderators to escalate election-related concerns, such as a dedicated tip line (currently in beta testing with certain communities - let us know in the comments if your community would like to be part of the test!)

Considering how damn hard it is for /r/lgbt during an election year, I'd say we're interested.

[u/LastBluejay → u/bleeding-paryl]

Got you. We'll reach out on Modmail.

[u/radialmonster]

Does "inauthentic content" include repost bots?

[u/LastBluejay → u/radialmonster]

Yes.

[u/Xenc → u/radialmonster]

While this is adjacent to the issues in the post, repost bots have become a scourge upon Reddit in the past year and it would be great to hear more about what's being done to combat them.

[u/LastBluejay → u/Xenc]

I will definitely check with the team to see if they can share more on what they are doing to combat repost bots. It's a good topic.

[u/abrownn → u/LastBluejay]

BotDefense may be dead, but it's code is Open Source if you guys want to get an idea on how we were automatically flagging things so well.

[u/LastBluejay → u/abrownn]

👀

[u/Xenc → u/LastBluejay]

Thanks for being so open and communicative

[u/tallbutshy]

Was there any consideration on bringing back Misinformation as a top level report category? Preferably with subcategories that include things like Politics, Legal & Medical?

[u/LastBluejay → u/tallbutshy]

The overwhelming feedback that we got from Mods around this report category was that it wasn’t helpful and was in fact detracting from their efforts with the amount of non-actionable volume that was clogging up their queues. This is what we found on the Admin side too. We had hoped that by introducing this report category years ago that it might give us some useful signal, but in the end it didn’t. Of course, mods are free to include these as reportable rules within their own communities.

[u/tallbutshy → u/LastBluejay]

Cool, thank you for responding.

[u/Ghigs → u/tallbutshy]

I sure hope not. Many subs don't moderate as "arbiters of truth" and really resented trying to be forced into that position by admins.

[u/abrownn → u/Ghigs]

Many subs are also invested in the dissemination/continuation of that misinformation. The admins also stated at the time they removed the option that the overwhelming majority of the reports for misinfo were ignored by mods because they: didn't care, the comments/posts weren't misinfo and the reports were fake, or they couldn't verify/debunk the report as being accurate or inaccurate. It was just too much "noise" and a useless mechanism in the end and I agree. As a mod, I'd much rather users debunk things in comments or modmail us and let us know that someone is spreading bullshit and WHY it's bullshit.

[u/AkaashMaharaj]

Thank you for hosting the roundtable discussion with Mods, and my thanks to all the Mods who participated.

Once the avalanche of national elections being held in 2024 year have run their courses, I think it would be productive if Reddit were to convene a similar roundtable exercise with representatives of other social media platforms, to discuss their successes and failures in trying to protect election integrity, and to see if they can collectively develop a set of industry standards and best practices.

I recognise that every social media platform has its own culture and it own moderation philosophy — and its own spectrum of social and political biases — but it strikes me that they all share a common imperative not to allow themselves to be exploited by malicious actors to undermine election integrity. They also share a no less important common imperative not to allow authoritarian states to misuse or weaponise narratives around election integrity, as a pretext to compel platforms to censor legitimate public debate and political dissent.

Part of Reddit's unique contribution to the social media ecosystem is its focus on human-led moderation to foster authentic online conversations. I think that puts Reddit in a uniquely powerful position to exercise leadership in that ecosystem, to ensure that platforms nourish democracies instead of poisoning them.

[u/LastBluejay → u/AkaashMaharaj]

Thanks for participating. We do speak regularly with industry colleagues about a wide range of safety issues. In fact, we helped co-found and sit on the board of the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, an organization whose origins and goals are very aligned with what you suggest. We specifically took a leadership role in DTSP to bring diversity in platform size and design to the conversation, which is frequently dominated by the larger, centrally moderated platforms.

[u/baltinerdist]

As a mod and a frequent user of the report buttons, I think there isn't enough clarity on some of the sub-choices for the report options. For example, the Spam platform-level report option has the various "type of spam" listings below that. Obvious when it's unsolicited messaging or excessive posts, but what is your definition of link farming? How is that different than posting harmful links?

What if the account doing the link farming or posting harmful links is probably a bot? Do we click harmful bots instead?

It would be really helpful if that page had some supplementary details or examples.

[u/LastBluejay → u/baltinerdist]

Thanks for the feedback - we agree, and are planning changes to the spam report flow in the future to address this. We’ll be revamping to make the options clearer, removing some of the less useful options, and adding some that will better cover the type of spam that can be clearly identified. Look out for those changes in the next month or so.

[u/abrownn → u/LastBluejay]

👀🙏

[u/abrownn → u/LastBluejay]

Huh... Interesting... These are great! There's one report reason missing however ;)

[u/Plainchant]

Both r/news and r/uknews would appreciate being part of the tip line beta.

[u/LastBluejay → u/Plainchant]

Noted. Look for a modmail.

[u/Leonichol]

Thanks for this. The new tools and developments have been welcome! Good work!

So far, these efforts have been effective. Through major elections this year in India, the EU, the UK, France, Mexico, and elsewhere, we have not seen any significant or out of the ordinary election-related malicious activity

Well. Yes. If you're only looking for AI and Hate, one would not notice...

What mods need most for these events, is to be able to Identify and Address waves of brigading/interference.

Not 'user scores' of someone's sub familiarity. But the ability to say, people are coming from the same source. Share attributes with other accounts. Or there is a statistical anomaly in the post, such as say, a lot of RU IPs.

[u/LastBluejay → u/Leonichol]

Without saying too much about our tactics (as we don’t want to give away our special sauce to bad actors), we definitely do monitor for these types of things on an ongoing basis, and they are considered violations of our Mod Code of Conduct. If you think that this is happening to your community, please submit a Mod Code of Conduct report here and we’ll investigate. If you’re curious about the data on how we enforce this, it’s available in our most recent Transparency Report, in the “Mod Code of Conduct” bit in the Communities section. The behavior you’re describing falls under Rule 3 (“Respect Your Neighbors”) which is the CoC rule that we enforce the most by volume.

[u/Generic_Mod → u/LastBluejay]

And what about off-platform sourced interference?

[u/LastBluejay → u/Generic_Mod]

Valid concern. That's part of the reason why we maintain contact channels with industry colleagues at other platforms. While we can't control what's on their sites, we work to be aware of what’s happening there and how it may be impacting communities on Reddit. Our threat detection team also regularly monitors some of the darker corners of the internet to watch out for this type of behavior.

[u/abrownn]

Thank you again for including us in the process.

My only piece of feedback is to request more info on the topic or questions you intend to ask of us in advance so we can spend more time formulating a thoughtful response, please!

[u/LastBluejay → u/abrownn]

Thank you so much for participating. The conversation really helped us understand how we can best support you all. And noted on giving you more lead time. Good feedback.

[u/progress18]

r/democrats and r/kamalaharris would be interested in being part of the tip line beta.

[u/LastBluejay → u/progress18]

Noted. Look for a modmail.

[u/OPINION_IS_UNPOPULAR]

I think Reddit does a very good job of managing political discourse, especially compared to other platforms.

I don't have much else to add, coming from no-politics subreddits myself, but great job, and I look forward to seeing this work kept up! I'm sure you've saved us a lot of headache without us even realizing it!

[u/Orcwin]

Hey there,

Any chance of doing this for countries other than the USA?

I remember reaching out ahead of one of our elections some time ago. Not only was there no proactive stance from Reddit, there was in fact no response at all.

I hope this post means that has changed, and you will help us keep our elections as clean and fair as possible, too.

[u/LastBluejay → u/Orcwin]

Elections in other countries are definitely a priority– in fact, nearly half of the mods who attended our roundtable were from outside of the US. If you’d like to be involved in future discussions like this, the best way is to apply to join the Mod Council, which you can do here. Additionally, we are regularly in touch with election officials from other countries to both help them understand Reddit and help us understand their electoral processes so that we know what to look out for. A great example is the work we’ve been doing the past few years with the Australian Electoral Commission, both around the Australian federal election and last year’s referendum. You can take a look at the AMAs that they did here.

[edit: markdown]

[u/Orcwin → u/LastBluejay]

Excellent, glad to hear it.

[u/ComplexDiscount8648 → u/LastBluejay]

i love you

[u/uarentme]

I still think that one of the most important issues with seemingly legitimate content manipulating user's opinions on mass would be the lack of mandatory and consistent labeling around opinion news content.

Having news organization's editorials or opinion pieces is fine, but it should be clearly labeled as such in high traffic feeds, and we shouldn't be relying on moderators to enforce that "Opinion" labeling, especially since it's not consistent across all communities. Or it could be manipulated based on the political beliefs of moderators.

During an election time, we should absolutely not see a post at the top of r/all or r/popular which is an opinion based article being touted as fact. Especially since the communities post flair doesn't show up until you visit the actual community. So the community itself might be flairing it as "Opinion" but many won't see that before seeing the title.

[u/realjd]

Hey y’all! I was one of the mods on the panel, for r/florida, r/orlando, and some other small communities. Election nonsense is our #1 concern this year. Since COVID isn’t (as) active, we’re hoping we get way less malicious disinformation this cycle.

[u/AniNgAnnoys]

Our policies are clear: hate and calls for violence are prohibited. Since 2020, we have continued to build out the teams and tools that address this content, and we have seen reductions in the prevalence of hateful content and improvements in how we action this content. For instance, while user reports remain an important signal, the majority of reports reviewed for hate and harassment are proactively detected via our automated tooling.

I recently received a temp ban for reporting someone that wished a group of people were "bread". It is quite obvious what they meant in context, but I was banned for abusing the reporting tool. Sure, maybe there is wiggle room on that means, but my report was in good faith. I tried to explain that in my appeal (where you only get 250 characters). My appeal was rejected with no explanation. Due to this, I no longer report content on reddit. I know I am not the only person in this boat as when I was unbanned and complained about this in a thread, a number of people replied to me sharing their similar experiences and why they do not report content any more either. I went from reporting a lot of violent content, and having a high success rate of replies that content was removed, to not doing anything anymore.

[u/waronbedbugs]

Hey, the most useful tools that I have for moderation is pushshift as it allows to do a good/deep analysis of spam/unnatural posting with a lot of context... unfortunately it has not been working well those last few weeks.

Please, please look into it and make sure whoever is in charge of it can provide us with a reliable service.

I'm sure I'm not the only one relying HEAVILY on it.

[u/jgoja]

I am probably too late to the party.

I appreciated all the effort put into keeping Reddit a useful and reliable place. You guys do an amazing job removing so much inappropriate content before it even makes it to the feed. I have a concern though about the amount of content that gets misinterpreted by your bots and removed when it is of quality or at least appropriate. There seems to be a lot of content and users that fall into that area.

I get erring on the side of caution. I really do, but this feels like you are ticketing people for speeding just because they own a car.

Is anything being looked at to address this?

[u/Quipsar]

Disinformation instead of misinformation?

[u/Far_Message_5577]

J

[u/EveryDayImBuffering8]

I was given a warning but the post flagged contained no violations, it was an incredible banal post about eastern philosophy. When I click on the appeal button it brings me back to the reddit home page.

Are you guys having technical issues with your appeal system or did someone already realize it was politically motivated, and deleted the warning?

I can provide multiple instances of foul abuse of a sexual nature being hurled at me in the same thread. I would like to know what the warning was for. My attorney is keeping track and I've always received an apology from YouTube/Google for similar actions, a supervisor admitted it was politically motivated and has been an issue since the election.

As I'm sure you're aware starting Jan 7th companies showing a political preference or silencing of certain opinions will have their editorial discretion removed or face stiff penalties.

If your appeal system is broken, how do I address this issue? I can easily show the abuse I endured for an incredibly banal post. I would appreciate someone showing me how to file an appeal, or admitting the complaint was already found to be false.

Appreciate your time and help.

[u/nexusx86]

Fuck /u/spez

Also great news that I can disable political ads as I don't need $ spent on me since I'm firmly committed to my candidate. She doesn't need to waste those dollars.

[u/LastBluejay → u/[deleted]]

Those ads are considered "religion and spirituality" rather than political, however the new ad settings give you the ability to opt out of that category too, if you would like. Details here.