Following today’s disappointing vote from the FCC, Alexis and I wanted to take the time to thank redditors for your incredible activism on this issue, and reassure you that we’re going to continue fighting for the free and open internet.

Over the past few months, we have been floored by the energy and creativity redditors have displayed in the effort to save net neutrality. It was inspiring to witness organic takeovers of the front page (twice), read touching stories about how net neutrality matters in users’ everyday lives, see bills about net neutrality discussed on the front page (with over 100,000 upvotes and cross-posts to over 100 communities), and watch redditors exercise their voices as citizens in the hundreds of thousands of calls they drove to Congress.

It is disappointing that the FCC Chairman plowed ahead with his planned repeal despite all of this public concern, not to mention the objections expressed by his fellow commissioners, the FCC’s own CTO, more than a hundred members of Congress, dozens of senators, and the very builders of the modern internet.

Nevertheless, today’s vote is the beginning, not the end. While the fight to preserve net neutrality is going to be longer than we had hoped, this is far from over.

Many of you have asked what comes next. We don’t exactly know yet, but it seems likely that the FCC’s decision will be challenged in court soon, and we would be supportive of that challenge. It’s also possible that Congress can decide to take up the cause and create strong, enforceable net neutrality rules that aren’t subject to the political winds at the FCC. Nevertheless, this will be a complex process that takes time.

What is certain is that Reddit will continue to be involved in this issue in the way that we know best: seeking out every opportunity to amplify your voices and share them with those who have the power to make a difference.

This isn’t the outcome we wanted, but you should all be proud of the awareness you’ve created. Those who thought that they’d be able to quietly repeal net neutrality without anyone noticing or caring learned a thing or two, and we still may come out on top of this yet. We’ll keep you informed as things develop.

u/arabscarab (Jessica, our head of policy) will also be in the comments to address your questions.

—u/spez & u/kn0thing

update: Please note the FCC is not united in this decision and find the dissenting statements from commissioners Clyburn and Rosenworcel.

update2 (9:55AM pst): While the vote has not technically happened, we decided to post after the two dissenting commissioners released their statements. However, the actual vote appears to be delayed for security reasons. We hope everyone is safe.

update3 (10:13AM pst): The FCC votes to repeal 3–2.

We did it, Reddit!

Today, the US Senate voted 52-47 to restore Net Neutrality! While this measure must now go through the House of Representatives and then the White House in order for the rules to be fully restored, this is still an incredibly important step in that process—one that could not have happened without all your phone calls, emails, and other activism. The evidence is clear that Net Neutrality is important to Americans of both parties (or no party at all), and today’s vote demonstrated that our Senators are hearing us.

We’ve still got a way to go, but today’s vote has provided us with some incredible momentum and energy to keep fighting.

We’re going to keep working with you all on this in the coming months, but for now, we just wanted to say thanks!

Hey, Reddit!

It’s been a couple months since the FCC voted to repeal federal net neutrality regulations. We were all disappointed in the decision, but we told you we’d continue the fight, and we wanted to share an update on what you can do to help.

The debate has now moved to Congress, which is good news. Unlike the FCC, which is unelected and less immediately accountable to voters, members of Congress depend on input from their constituents to help inform their positions—especially during an election year like this one.

“But wait,” you say. “I already called my Congressperson last year, and we’re still in this mess! What’s different now?” Three words: Congressional Review Act.

What is it?

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is basically Congress’s downvote. It lets them undo the FCC’s order through a “resolution of disapproval.” This can be formally introduced in both the Senate and the House within 60 legislative days after the FCC’s order is officially published in the Federal Register, which happened last week. It needs a simple majority in both houses to pass. Our friends at Public Knowledge have made a video explaining the process.

What’s happening in Congress?

Now that the FCC order has been published in the Federal Register, the clock for the CRA is ticking. Members of both the House and Senate who care about Net Neutrality have already been securing the votes they need to pass the resolution of disapproval. In fact, the Senate version is only #onemorevote away from the 51 it needs to pass!

What should I do?

Today, we’re calling on you to phone your members of Congress and tell them what you think! You can see exactly where members stand on this issue so far on this scoreboard. If they’re already on board with the CRA, great! Thank them for their efforts and tell them you appreciate it. Positive feedback for good work is important.

If they still need convincing, here is a script to help guide your conversation:

“My name is ________ and I live in ______. I’m calling today to share my support for strong net neutrality rules. I’d like to ask Senator/Representative_______ to use the CRA to pass a resolution of disapproval overturning the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality.”

Pro tips:

-Be polite. That thing your grandma said about the flies and the honey and the vinegar is right. Remember, the people who disagree with us are the ones we need to convince.

-Only call the Senators and Representatives who actually represent YOU. Calls are most effective when they come from actual constituents. If you’re not sure who represents you or how to get in touch with them, you can look it up here.

-If this issue affects you personally because of who you are or what you do, let them know! Local business owner who uses the web to reach customers? Caregiver who uses telemedicine to consult patients? Parent whose child needs the internet for school assignments? Share that. The more we can put a human face on this, the better.

-Don’t give up. The nature of our democratic system means that things can be roundabout, messy, and take a long time to accomplish. Perseverance is key. We’ll be with you every step of the way.

Ellen Pao resigned from reddit today by mutual agreement. I'm delighted to announce that Steve Huffman, founder and the original reddit CEO, is returning as CEO.

We are thankful for Ellen’s many contributions to reddit and the technology industry generally. She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth. She brought a face to reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry. She will remain as an advisor to the board through the end of 2015. I look forward to seeing the great things she does beyond that.

We’re very happy to have Steve back. Product and community are the two legs of reddit, and the board was very focused on finding a candidate who excels at both (truthfully, community is harder), which Steve does. He has the added bonus of being a founder with ten years of reddit history in his head. Steve is rejoining Alexis, who will work alongside Steve with the new title of “cofounder”.

A few other points. Mods, you are what makes reddit great. The reddit team, now with Steve, wants to do more for you. You deserve better moderation tools and better communication from the admins.

Second, redditors, you deserve clarity about what the content policy of reddit is going to be. The team will create guidelines to both preserve the integrity of reddit and to maintain reddit as the place where the most open and honest conversations with the entire world can happen.

Third, as a redditor, I’m particularly happy that Steve is so passionate about mobile. I’m very excited to use reddit more on my phone.

As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you.

If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.

[1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.

Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.

[2] We were planning to run a CEO search here and talked about how Steve (who we assumed was unavailable) was the benchmark candidate—he has exactly the combination of talent and vision we were looking for. To our delight, it turned out our hypothetical benchmark candidate is the one actually taking the job.

NOTE: I am going to let the reddit team answer questions here, and go do an AMA myself now.

TL;DR – Call your Senators, then join us for an AMA with one.

EDIT: Senator Markey's AMA is live now.

Hey Reddit, time for another update in the Net Neutrality fight!

When we last checked in on this in February, we told you about the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to undo the FCC’s repeal of Net Neutrality. That process took a big step forward today as the CRA petition was discharged in the Senate. That means a full Senate vote is likely soon, so let’s remind them that we’re watching!

Today, you’ll see sites across the web go on “RED ALERT” in honor of this cause. Because this is Reddit, we thought that Orangered Alert was more fitting, but the call to action is the same. Join users across the web in calling your Senators (both of ‘em!) to let them know that you support using the Congressional Review Act to save Net Neutrality. You can learn more about the effort here.

We’re also delighted to share that Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, the lead sponsor of the CRA petition, will be joining us for an AMA in r/politics today at 2:30 pm ET, hot off the Senate floor, so get your questions ready!

Finally, seeing the creative ways the Reddit community gets involved in this issue is always the best part of these actions. Maybe you’re the mod of a community that has organized something in honor of the day. Or you want to share something really cool that your Senator’s office told you when you called them up. Or maybe you’ve made the dankest of net neutrality-themed memes. Let us know in the comments!

There is strength in numbers, and we’ve pulled off the impossible before through simple actions just like this. So let’s give those Senators a big, Reddit-y hug.

We would like to give you all an update on the recent issues that have transpired concerning a specific Reddit employee, as well as provide you with context into actions that we took to prevent doxxing and harassment.

As of today, the employee in question is no longer employed by Reddit. We built a relationship with her first as a mod and then through her contractor work on RPAN. We did not adequately vet her background before formally hiring her.

We’ve put significant effort into improving how we handle doxxing and harassment, and this employee was the subject of both. In this case, we over-indexed on protection, which had serious consequences in terms of enforcement actions.

• On March 9th, we added extra protections for this employee, including actioning content that mentioned the employee’s name or shared personal information on third-party sites, which we reserve for serious cases of harassment and doxxing.

• On March 22nd, a news article about this employee was posted by a mod of r/ukpolitics. The article was removed and the submitter banned by the aforementioned rules. When contacted by the moderators of r/ukpolitics, we reviewed the actions, and reversed the ban on the moderator, and we informed the r/ukpolitics moderation team that we had restored the mod.

• We updated our rules to flag potential harassment for human review.

Debate and criticism have always been and always will be central to conversation on Reddit—including discussion about public figures and Reddit itself—as long as they are not used as vehicles for harassment. Mentioning a public figure’s name should not get you banned.

We care deeply for Reddit and appreciate that you do too. We understand the anger and confusion about these issues and their bigger implications. The employee is no longer with Reddit, and we’ll be evolving a number of relevant internal policies.

We did not operate to our own standards here. We will do our best to do better for you.

TL;DR: A hacker broke into a few of Reddit’s systems and managed to access some user data, including some current email addresses and a 2007 database backup containing old salted and hashed passwords. Since then we’ve been conducting a painstaking investigation to figure out just what was accessed, and to improve our systems and processes to prevent this from happening again.

What happened?

On June 19, we learned that between June 14 and June 18, an attacker compromised a few of our employees’ accounts with our cloud and source code hosting providers. Already having our primary access points for code and infrastructure behind strong authentication requiring two factor authentication (2FA), we learned that SMS-based authentication is not nearly as secure as we would hope, and the main attack was via SMS intercept. We point this out to encourage everyone here to move to token-based 2FA.

Although this was a serious attack, the attacker did not gain write access to Reddit systems; they gained read-only access to some systems that contained backup data, source code and other logs. They were not able to alter Reddit information, and we have taken steps since the event to further lock down and rotate all production secrets and API keys, and to enhance our logging and monitoring systems.

Now that we've concluded our investigation sufficiently to understand the impact, we want to share what we know, how it may impact you, and what we've done to protect us and you from this kind of attack in the future.

What information was involved?

Since June 19, we’ve been working with cloud and source code hosting providers to get the best possible understanding of what data the attacker accessed. We want you to know about two key areas of user data that was accessed:

• All Reddit data from 2007 and before including account credentials and email addresses

  • What was accessed: A complete copy of an old database backup containing very early Reddit user data -- from the site’s launch in 2005 through May 2007. In Reddit’s first years it had many fewer features, so the most significant data contained in this backup are account credentials (username + salted hashed passwords), email addresses, and all content (mostly public, but also private messages) from way back then.

  • How to tell if your information was included: We are sending a message to affected users and resetting passwords on accounts where the credentials might still be valid. If you signed up for Reddit after 2007, you’re clear here. Check your PMs and/or email inbox: we will be notifying you soon if you’ve been affected.

• Email digests sent by Reddit in June 2018

  • What was accessed: Logs containing the email digests we sent between June 3 and June 17, 2018. The logs contain the digest emails themselves -- they look like this. The digests connect a username to the associated email address and contain suggested posts from select popular and safe-for-work subreddits you subscribe to.

  • How to tell if your information was included: If you don’t have an email address associated with your account or your “email digests” user preference was unchecked during that period, you’re not affected. Otherwise, search your email inbox for emails from [email protected] between June 3-17, 2018.

As the attacker had read access to our storage systems, other data was accessed such as Reddit source code, internal logs, configuration files and other employee workspace files, but these two areas are the most significant categories of user data.

What is Reddit doing about it?

Some highlights. We:

• Reported the issue to law enforcement and are cooperating with their investigation.

• Are messaging user accounts if there’s a chance the credentials taken reflect the account’s current password.

• Took measures to guarantee that additional points of privileged access to Reddit’s systems are more secure (e.g., enhanced logging, more encryption and requiring token-based 2FA to gain entry since we suspect weaknesses inherent to SMS-based 2FA to be the root cause of this incident.)

What can you do?

First, check whether your data was included in either of the categories called out above by following the instructions there.

If your account credentials were affected and there’s a chance the credentials relate to the password you’re currently using on Reddit, we’ll make you reset your Reddit account password. Whether or not Reddit prompts you to change your password, think about whether you still use the password you used on Reddit 11 years ago on any other sites today.

If your email address was affected, think about whether there’s anything on your Reddit account that you wouldn’t want associated back to that address. You can find instructions on how to remove information from your account on this help page.

And, as in all things, a strong unique password and enabling 2FA (which we only provide via an authenticator app, not SMS) is recommended for all users, and be alert for potential phishing or scams.

If you’re looking for an opinion on anything — the most underrated TV show of the nineties; the very best drugstore mascara; the most athletic NFL player of all-time — there’s no better place to get honest answers and gauge consensus, than on Reddit.

Today, in an effort to elevate Reddit’s diverse opinion-based content, we’re excited to introduce Polls: a brand new post type that encourages redditors to share their opinion via voting. We’ve been testing Polls with a dozen communities over the past couple months, and have gotten a lot of great feedback. We are excited to now release this post type to everyone!

Why Polls?

It can sometimes be tough for new redditors and lurkers to know where to start on Reddit, , and to feel a sense of community. We believe a simple post type that reduces the posting barrier will make it easier than ever for everyone to contribute to their favorite communities and engage in different ways.

Here’s a look at some of our recent test polls

Platform Support

• iOS: Supports poll creation and voting

• Android: Supports poll creation and voting (EDIT: there is a bug on old versions of Android that cause the app to crash for some redditors when they vote. Updating the app to the new version will fix it.)

• New Reddit (web): Supports poll creation and voting

• Old Reddit (web): Does not support creation. At the bottom of a poll, redditors will see a link to view the poll. Clicking the link will open a new tab where they can view results and vote in the poll

• Mobile web: Supports voting. No plans for poll creation support

And now a poll...

With everything going on in the world, how are you feeling?

In the 11 years that Reddit has been around, we've accumulated a lot of rules in our vote tallying as a way to mitigate cheating and brigading on posts and comments. Here's a rough schematic of what the code looks like without revealing any trade secrets or compromising the integrity of the algorithm. Many of these rules are still quite useful, but there are a few whose primary impact has been to sometimes artificially deflate scores on the site.

Unfortunately, determining the impact of all of these rules is difficult without doing a drastic recompute of all the vote scores historically… so we did that! Over the past few months, we have carefully recomputed historical votes on posts and comments to remove outdated, unnecessary rules.

Very soon (think hours, not days), we’re going to cut the scores over to be reflective of these new and updated tallies. A side effect of this is many of our seldom-recomputed listings (e.g., pretty much anything ending in /top) are going to initially display improper sorts. Please don’t panic. Those listings are computed via regular (scheduled) jobs, and as a result those pages will gradually come to reflect the new scoring over the course of the next four to six days. We expect there to be some shifting of the top/all time queues. New items will be added in the proper place in the listing, and old items will get reshuffled as the recomputes come in.

To support the larger numbers that will result from this change, we’ll be updating the score display to switch to “k” when the score is over 10,000. Hopefully, this will not require you to further edit your subreddit CSS.

TL;DR voting is confusing, we cleaned up some outdated rules on voting, and we’re updating the vote scores to be reflective of what they actually are. Scores are increasing by a lot.

Edit: The scores just updated. Everyone should now see "k"s. Remember: it's going to take about a week for top listings to recompute to reflect the change.

Edit 2: K -> k

Hey Reddit,

We care deeply about protecting the free and open internet, and we know Redditors do too. Specifically, we’ve communicated a lot with you in the past year about the Net Neutrality fight in the United States, and ways you can help. One of the most frequent questions that comes up in these conversations is from our European users, asking what they can do to play their part in the fight. Well Europe, now’s your chance. Later this month, the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee will vote on changes to copyright law that would put untenable restrictions on how users share news and information with each other. The new Copyright Directive has two big problems:

• Article 11 would create a "link tax:” Links that share short snippets of news articles, even just the headline, could become subject to copyright licensing fees— pretty much ending the way users share and discuss news and information in a place like Reddit.

• Article 13 would force internet platforms to install automatic upload filters to scan (and potentially censor) every single piece of content for potential copyright-infringing material. This law does not anticipate the difficult practical questions of how companies can know what is an infringement of copyright. As a result of this big flaw, the law’s most likely result would be the effective shutdown of user-generated content platforms in Europe, since unless companies know what is infringing, we would need to review and remove all sorts of potentially legitimate content if we believe the company may have liability.

The unmistakable impact of both these measures would be an incredible chilling impact over free expression and the sharing of information online, particularly for users in Europe.

Luckily, there are people and organizations in the EU that are fighting against these scary efforts, and they have organized a day of action today, June 12, to raise the alarm.

Julia Reda, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) who opposes the measure, joined us last week for an AMA on the subject. In it, she offers a number of practical ways that Europeans who care about this issue can get involved. Most importantly, call your MEP and let them know this is important to you!

As a part of their Save the Link campaign, our friends at Open Media have created an easy tool to help you identify and call your MEP.

Here are some things you’ll want to mention on the phone with your MEP’s office:

• Share your name, location and occupation.

• Tell them you oppose Article 11 (the proposal to charge a licensing fee for links) and Article 13 (the proposal to make websites build upload filters to censor content).

• Share why these issues impact you. Has your content ever been taken down because of erroneous copyright complaints? Have you learned something new because of a link that someone shared?

• Even if you reach an answering machine, leave a message—your concern will still be registered.

• Be polite and SAY THANKS! Remember the human.

Phone not your thing? Tweet at your MEP! Anything we can do to get the message across that internet users care about this is important. The vote is expected June 20 or 21, so there is still plenty of time to make our voices heard, but we need to raise them!

And be sure to let us know how it went! Share stories about what your MEP told you in the comments below.

PS If you’re an American and don’t want to miss out on the fun, there is still plenty to do on our side of the pond to save the free and open internet. On June 11, the net neutrality rollback officially went into effect, but the effort to reverse it in Congress is still going strong in the House of Representatives. Go here to learn more and contact your Representative.

We’re constantly in awe of what redditors can accomplish when they join forces, from raising money for children’s hospitals to shutting down the “inevitable” SOPA/PIPA. Today, European redditors, along with other concerned EU netizens, helped do the impossible once more. Thanks to the ruckus they raised with their Members of the European Parliament, the flawed EU Copyright Directive has been sent back to the drawing board, ending (for now) the threats to subject all user uploads to automated content filtering, and require licensing fees for all links.

There is no mistake that it was people power that made this happen. Before the vote, MEP Catherine Stihler of Scotland noted that she had received a petition signed by a million people against the changes. Other MEPs noted the deluge of calls and letters that they had received leading up to the vote.

This outpouring of activism about what most people would have considered a dull procedural vote would not have been possible without the awareness and urgency (and, yes, super-dank memes) that members of the Reddit community raised, and we’d like to particularly congratulate r/Europe for leading the way. They hosted informative AMAs with MEP Julia Reda and Europe’s leading independent experts on copyright reform, they kept everyone up to date on vote progress and outcomes (check out their tally of the July 5th vote to see how your MEP voted), and they used megathreads to keep us all in the loop about what was happening and how to help.

What’s Next?

This isn’t over yet. The really important thing about this vote is that it takes what would have been pushed through into law behind closed doors and opens it up to a more public debate process, where citizens have the ability to weigh in, share their views, and build a compromise that protects rightsholders without imperiling free expression.

The next vote will likely be on 10 September, and the coming weeks are critical to ensuring that the MEPs charged with hammering out amendments and drafting that compromise hear from their constituents. To keep informed about the process and learn what you can personally do during this time, be sure to check out the Save Your Internet Campaign.

tl;dr: I fucked up. I ruined Thanksgiving. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. We are taking a more aggressive stance against toxic users and poorly behaving communities. You can filter r/all now.

Hi All,

I am sorry: I am sorry for compromising the trust you all have in Reddit, and I am sorry to those that I created work and stress for, particularly over the holidays. It is heartbreaking to think that my actions distracted people from their family over the holiday; instigated harassment of our moderators; and may have harmed Reddit itself, which I love more than just about anything.

The United States is more divided than ever, and we see that tension within Reddit itself. The community that was formed in support of President-elect Donald Trump organized and grew rapidly, but within it were users that devoted themselves to antagonising the broader Reddit community.

Many of you are aware of my attempt to troll the trolls last week. I honestly thought I might find some common ground with that community by meeting them on their level. It did not go as planned. I restored the original comments after less than an hour, and explained what I did.

I spent my formative years as a young troll on the Internet. I also led the team that built Reddit ten years ago, and spent years moderating the original Reddit communities, so I am as comfortable online as anyone. As CEO, I am often out in the world speaking about how Reddit is the home to conversation online, and a follow on question about harassment on our site is always asked. We have dedicated many of our resources to fighting harassment on Reddit, which is why letting one of our most engaged communities openly harass me felt hypocritical.

While many users across the site found what I did funny, or appreciated that I was standing up to the bullies (I received plenty of support from users of r/the_donald), many others did not. I understand what I did has greater implications than my relationship with one community, and it is fair to raise the question of whether this erodes trust in Reddit. I hope our transparency around this event is an indication that we take matters of trust seriously. Reddit is no longer the little website my college roommate, u/kn0thing, and I started more than eleven years ago. It is a massive collection of communities that provides news, entertainment, and fulfillment for millions of people around the world, and I am continually humbled by what Reddit has grown into. I will never risk your trust like this again, and we are updating our internal controls to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

More than anything, I want Reddit to heal, and I want our country to heal, and although many of you have asked us to ban the r/the_donald outright, it is with this spirit of healing that I have resisted doing so. If there is anything about this election that we have learned, it is that there are communities that feel alienated and just want to be heard, and Reddit has always been a place where those voices can be heard.

However, when we separate the behavior of some of r/the_donald users from their politics, it is their behavior we cannot tolerate. The opening statement of our Content Policy asks that we all show enough respect to others so that we all may continue to enjoy Reddit for what it is. It is my first duty to do what is best for Reddit, and the current situation is not sustainable.

Historically, we have relied on our relationship with moderators to curb bad behaviors. While some of the moderators have been helpful, this has not been wholly effective, and we are now taking a more proactive approach to policing behavior that is detrimental to Reddit:

• We have identified hundreds of the most toxic users and are taking action against them, ranging from warnings to timeouts to permanent bans. Posts stickied on r/the_donald will no longer appear in r/all. r/all is not our frontpage, but is a popular listing that our most engaged users frequent, including myself. The sticky feature was designed for moderators to make announcements or highlight specific posts. It was not meant to circumvent organic voting, which r/the_donald does to slingshot posts into r/all, often in a manner that is antagonistic to the rest of the community.

• We will continue taking on the most troublesome users, and going forward, if we do not see the situation improve, we will continue to take privileges from communities whose users continually cross the line—up to an outright ban.

Again, I am sorry for the trouble I have caused. While I intended no harm, that was not the result, and I hope these changes improve your experience on Reddit.

Steve

PS: As a bonus, I have enabled filtering for r/all for all users. You can modify the filters by visiting r/all on the desktop web (I’m old, sorry), but it will affect all platforms, including our native apps on iOS and Android.

TL;DR: We’re working with mods to change our content policy to explicitly address hate. u/kn0thing has resigned from our board to fill his seat with a Black candidate, a request we will honor. I want to take responsibility for the history of our policies over the years that got us here, and we still have work to do.

After watching people across the country mourn and demand an end to centuries of murder and violent discrimination against Black people, I wanted to speak out. I wanted to do this both as a human being, who sees this grief and pain and knows I have been spared from it myself because of the color of my skin, and as someone who literally has a platform and, with it, a duty to speak out.

Earlier this week, I wrote an email to our company addressing this crisis and a few ways Reddit will respond. When we shared it, many of the responses said something like, “How can a company that has faced racism from users on its own platform over the years credibly take such a position?”

These questions, which I know are coming from a place of real pain and which I take to heart, are really a statement: There is an unacceptable gap between our beliefs as people and a company, and what you see in our content policy.

Over the last fifteen years, hundreds of millions of people have come to Reddit for things that I believe are fundamentally good: user-driven communities—across a wider spectrum of interests and passions than I could’ve imagined when we first created subreddits—and the kinds of content and conversations that keep people coming back day after day. It's why we come to Reddit as users, as mods, and as employees who want to bring this sort of community and belonging to the world and make it better daily.

However, as Reddit has grown, alongside much good, it is facing its own challenges around hate and racism. We have to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the role we have played. Here are three problems we are most focused on:

• Parts of Reddit reflect an unflattering but real resemblance to the world in the hate that Black users and communities see daily, despite the progress we have made in improving our tooling and enforcement.

• Users and moderators genuinely do not have enough clarity as to where we as administrators stand on racism.

• Our moderators are frustrated and need a real seat at the table to help shape the policies that they help us enforce.

We are already working to fix these problems, and this is a promise for more urgency. Our current content policy is effectively nine rules for what you cannot do on Reddit. In many respects, it’s served us well. Under it, we have made meaningful progress cleaning up the platform (and done so without undermining the free expression and authenticity that fuels Reddit). That said, we still have work to do. This current policy lists only what you cannot do, articulates none of the values behind the rules, and does not explicitly take a stance on hate or racism.

We will update our content policy to include a vision for Reddit and its communities to aspire to, a statement on hate, the context for the rules, and a principle that Reddit isn’t to be used as a weapon. We have details to work through, and while we will move quickly, I do want to be thoughtful and also gather feedback from our moderators (through our Mod Councils). With more moderator engagement, the timeline is weeks, not months.

And just this morning, Alexis Ohanian (u/kn0thing), my Reddit cofounder, announced that he is resigning from our board and that he wishes for his seat to be filled with a Black candidate, a request that the board and I will honor. We thank Alexis for this meaningful gesture and all that he’s done for us over the years.

At the risk of making this unreadably long, I'd like to take this moment to share how we got here in the first place, where we have made progress, and where, despite our best intentions, we have fallen short.

In the early days of Reddit, 2005–2006, our idealistic “policy” was that, excluding spam, we would not remove content. We were small and did not face many hard decisions. When this ideal was tested, we banned racist users anyway. In the end, we acted based on our beliefs, despite our “policy.”

I left Reddit from 2010–2015. During this time, in addition to rapid user growth, Reddit’s no-removal policy ossified and its content policy took no position on hate.

When I returned in 2015, my top priority was creating a content policy to do two things: deal with hateful communities I had been immediately confronted with (like r/CoonTown, which was explicitly designed to spread racist hate) and provide a clear policy of what’s acceptable on Reddit and what’s not. We banned that community and others because they were “making Reddit worse” but were not clear and direct about their role in sowing hate. We crafted our 2015 policy around behaviors adjacent to hate that were actionable and objective: violence and harassment, because we struggled to create a definition of hate and racism that we could defend and enforce at our scale. Through continual updates to these policies 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 (and a broader definition of violence), we have removed thousands of hateful communities.

While we dealt with many communities themselves, we still did not provide the clarity—and it showed, both in our enforcement and in confusion about where we stand. In 2018, I confusingly said racism is not against the rules, but also isn’t welcome on Reddit. This gap between our content policy and our values has eroded our effectiveness in combating hate and racism on Reddit; I accept full responsibility for this.

This inconsistency has hurt our trust with our users and moderators and has made us slow to respond to problems. This was also true with r/the_donald, a community that relished in exploiting and detracting from the best of Reddit and that is now nearly disintegrated on their own accord. As we looked to our policies, “Breaking Reddit” was not a sufficient explanation for actioning a political subreddit, and I fear we let being technically correct get in the way of doing the right thing. Clearly, we should have quarantined it sooner.

The majority of our top communities have a rule banning hate and racism, which makes us proud, and is evidence why a community-led approach is the only way to scale moderation online. That said, this is not a rule communities should have to write for themselves and we need to rebalance the burden of enforcement. I also accept responsibility for this.

Despite making significant progress over the years, we have to turn a mirror on ourselves and be willing to do the hard work of making sure we are living up to our values in our product and policies. This is a significant moment. We have a choice: return to the status quo or use this opportunity for change. We at Reddit are opting for the latter, and we will do our very best to be a part of the progress.

I will be sticking around for a while to answer questions as usual, but I also know that our policies and actions will speak louder than our comments.

Thanks,

Steve

Today, a horrible tragedy unfolded in France. Reddit would like to thank the contributors to the live thread that was featured on the front page, along with all of the other mods, contributors, and community members across the site involved in posting updates in other live threads and subreddits. They did their viewers — and Reddit as a whole — a huge service by giving their time and energy to keep us up to date with all of the breaking news happening at a seconds notice.

Our thoughts are with our neighbors in France.

Numbers to Paris embassies in case you are in need of assistance or are trying to contact loved ones:

Australia: +33 1 40 59 33 00

Belgium: +33 1 47 54 07 64

Brazil: +33 1 45 61 63 00

Britain (if you are a British national in France) : +33 1 44 51 31 00

Britain (if you are in the UK and concerned about a British national in France): 020 7008 1500

Canada: +33 1 44 43 29 00

Canada (Canadians looking for info on loved ones): 613-996-8885 or 1-800-387-3124 toll free in Canada/US

Denmark: +33 1 44 31 21 21

Ireland: +33 1 44 17 67 00

India: +33 1 40 50 70 70

Germany: +33 1 53 83 45 00

The Netherlands: +33 1 40 62 33 00

Norway: +33 1 53 67 04 00

Poland: +33 1 43 17 34 00

Russia +33 1 45 04 05 50

Spain (for nationals trying to contact the embassy): 0033 615 938 701

Sweden: +33 1 44 18 88 00

United States: +33 1 43 12 22 22

United States (for Americans in France that need assistance): 1-202-501-4444

United States (for Americans concerned about loved ones in France): 1-888-407-4747

New Zealand: +33 1 45 01 43 43

TL;DR: Today we published our 2019 Transparency Report. I’ll stick around to answer your questions about the report (and other topics) in the comments.

Hi all,

It’s that time of year again when we share Reddit’s annual transparency report.

We share this report each year because you have a right to know how user data is being managed by Reddit, and how it’s both shared and not shared with government and non-government parties.

You’ll find information on content removed from Reddit and requests for user information. This year, we’ve expanded the report to include new data—specifically, a breakdown of content policy removals, content manipulation removals, subreddit removals, and subreddit quarantines.

By the numbers

Since the full report is rather long, I’ll call out a few stats below:

ADMIN REMOVALS

• In 2019, we removed ~53M pieces of content in total, mostly for spam and content manipulation (e.g. brigading and vote cheating), exclusive of legal/copyright removals, which we track separately.

• For Content Policy violations, we removed

  • 222k pieces of content,

  • 55.9k accounts, and

  • 21.9k subreddits (87% of which were removed for being unmoderated).

• Additionally, we quarantined 256 subreddits.

LEGAL REMOVALS

• Reddit received 110 requests from government entities to remove content, of which we complied with 37.3%.

• In 2019 we removed about 5x more content for copyright infringement than in 2018, largely due to copyright notices for adult-entertainment and notices targeting pieces of content that had already been removed.

REQUESTS FOR USER INFORMATION

• We received a total of 772 requests for user account information from law enforcement and government entities.

  • 366 of these were emergency disclosure requests, mostly from US law enforcement (68% of which we complied with).

  • 406 were non-emergency requests (73% of which we complied with); most were US subpoenas.

  • Reddit received an additional 224 requests to temporarily preserve certain user account information (86% of which we complied with).

• Note: We carefully review each request for compliance with applicable laws and regulations. If we determine that a request is not legally valid, Reddit will challenge or reject it. (You can read more in our Privacy Policy and Guidelines for Law Enforcement.)

While I have your attention...

I’d like to share an update about our thinking around quarantined communities.

When we expanded our quarantine policy, we created an appeals process for sanctioned communities. One of the goals was to “force subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivize moderators to make changes.” While the policy attempted to hold moderators more accountable for enforcing healthier rules and norms, it didn’t address the role that each member plays in the health of their community.

Today, we’re making an update to address this gap: Users who consistently upvote policy-breaking content within quarantined communities will receive automated warnings, followed by further consequences like a temporary or permanent suspension. We hope this will encourage healthier behavior across these communities.

If you’ve read this far

In addition to this report, we share news throughout the year from teams across Reddit, and if you like posts about what we’re doing, you can stay up to date and talk to our teams in r/RedditSecurity, r/ModNews, r/redditmobile, and r/changelog.

As usual, I’ll be sticking around to answer your questions in the comments. AMA.

Update: I'm off for now. Thanks for questions, everyone.

Redditors of all stripes spend a lot of time talking about politics, and today is the day to take those views straight to the ballot box. It’s Election Day here in the US, and we want to help make sure that all registered voters get to the polls and make their voices heard. We’ve compiled some resources here to help you cast your ballot.

Where do I vote?

Your polling place is based on the address at which you registered. Polling places can be looked up through your state’s elections office (find yours here). These state websites are the most complete resources for all your voting needs.

There are also numerous quick lookup tools to find your polling place, voting hours, and even information about what’s on the ballot in your area. The Voting Information Tool is one of the easiest to use.

Do I need to already be registered to vote? And how can I see if I’m registered?

It depends on your state. Some states allow for same-day registration, so you may still be able to vote even if you haven’t registered. You can check your state’s registration requirements here. In most cases you’ll also be able to check your registration status on the same page.

What do I need to bring with me?

Some states require you to bring identification with you to the polls and some states don’t. You can see what your state’s requirements are here. If your state requires identification and you don’t have it, you may still be able to vote, so still go to the polls. Depending on your local laws, you may be able to cast a provisional ballot, show ID later, sign a form attesting your identity, or another method. Don’t assume that you can’t vote!

What am I going to be voting on?

Some people are surprised to find out when they get to the polls the sheer number of offices and issues they may be voting on. Don’t be caught unprepared! You can look up a sample ballot for your area to find out what you’ll be voting on, so that you’re informed when you head into the voting booth. You can even print out your sample ballot and take it to the poll with you so you can keep track of how you want to vote.

I have a disability or language barrier. Can I still vote?

Yes! There are federal laws in place to ensure that all eligible Americans can vote. You can learn more about your rights and the accommodations you are entitled to here.

Someone is trying to prevent me from voting or is deliberately spreading disinformation about voting. What should I do?

Intimidating voters, trying to influence votes through threats or coercion, or attempting to suppress voters, including through misinformation campaigns, is against the law. If you witness such behavior, report it to your local election officials (look up their contact info here). If you see suspected voter suppression attempts on Reddit (eg efforts to deliberately misinform people about voting so that they won’t vote, or so that their vote might not count), report it to the admins here.

I have more questions about voting!

DoSomething.org is back doing a marathon AMA today with their experts in r/IAmA starting at 11am ET to answer all your additional voting questions. Head on over and check it out.

Happy voting, Reddit!

Edit: added link for the DoSomething.org AMA, which is now live.

You asked for it, and we’re delivering! Today, all Reddit users have the option to enable two-factor authentication for an additional layer of account security.

We have been slowly rolling this feature out, starting with beta testers, moderators, and third-party app developers, to ensure a positive experience across devices. Your feedback has been incredibly valuable, from pointing out bugs to recommending features. Thank you to everyone involved in testing.

Two-factor adds more security to your Reddit account by requiring a second step to sign in. In this case, if you opt into 2FA, you’ll access a 6-digit verification code generated by your phone after a new sign-in attempt.

With two-factor enabled, even if someone else obtained your Reddit username and password, they still could not log in as you.

You can enable two-factor by selecting the password/email tab under your preferences on desktop. Select enable under two-factor authentication and follow the steps given to you. And make sure to generate your backup codes in the event your phone is unavailable! You can find more help in our Help Center.

Two-factor is supported across desktop, mobile, and third-party apps. It requires an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Authy, or any app supporting the TOTP protocol) to generate your 6-digit verification code.

A few handy security reminders:

• Choose a strong and unique password. We recommend at least 8 characters. And don’t reuse the same password on Reddit as other sites!

• Add a verified email address. Email is the only way for us to reset your account. (We do require a verified email for setting up two-factor authentication since the account can be lost if, for example, you lose your phone).

• Check your account activity for recent logins. It’s a good idea to look at this page from time to time to make sure there’s nothing fishy going on.

Thanks!

Voting is embedded in the Reddit experience. Yet offline, 1 in 4 eligible US voters isn’t registered. Even the most civically-conscious among us can unexpectedly find our registration lapsed, especially due to the wide variation in voter registration laws across the US. For example, did you know that you have to update your voter registration if you move, even if it’s just across town? Or that you also need to update it if you’ve changed your name (say, due to a change in marital status)? Depending on your state, you may even need to re-register if you simply haven’t voted in a while, even if you’ve stayed at the same address.

Taken together, these and other factors add up to tens of millions of Americans every election cycle who need to update their registration and might not know it. This is why we are again teaming up with Nonprofit VOTE to celebrate National Voter Registration Day and help spread the word before the midterms this November.

You’ll notice a lot of activity around the site today in honor of the holiday, including amongst various communities that have decided to participate. If you see a particularly cool community effort, let us know in the comments.

We’d also love to hear your personal stories about voting. Why is it important to you? What was your experience like the first time you voted? Are you registering to vote for the first time for this election? Join the conversation in the comments.

Also check out the AMAs we have planned for today as well, including:

• A bipartisan tag-team AMA with the Secretaries of State of Washington and Minnesota in r/politics from 10am-12pm ET

• An AMA about the weird quirks and history of American voting laws with DoSomething.org’s Head of Campaigns in r/IAmA at 11am ET.

• You can also see the AMA that National Voter Registration Day’s Executive Director did yesterday.

Finally, be sure to take this occasion to make sure that you are registered to vote where you live, or update your registration as necessary. Don’t be left out on Election Day!

EDIT: added in the AMA links now that they're live

Dearest Redditors,

We have been hard at work the past few months adding features, improving our ads business, and protecting users. Here is some of the stuff we have been up to:

Hopefully you did not notice, but as of last week, the m.reddit.com is powered by an entirely new tech platform. We call it 2X. In addition to load times being significantly faster for users (by about 2x…) development is also much quicker. This means faster iteration and more improvements going forward. Our recently released AMP site and moderator mail are already running on 2X.

Speaking of modmail, the beta we announced a couple months ago is going well. Thirty communities volunteered to help us iron out the kinks (thank you, r/DIY!). The community feedback has been invaluable, and we are incorporating as much as we can in preparation for the general release, which we expect to be sometime next month.

Prepare your pitchforks: we are enabling basic interest targeting in our advertising product. This will allow advertisers to target audiences based on a handful of predefined interests (e.g. sports, gaming, music, etc.), which will be informed by which communities they frequent. A targeted ad is more relevant to users and more valuable to advertisers. We describe this functionality in our privacy policy and have added a permanent link to this opt-out page. The main changes are in 'Advertising and Analytics’. The opt-out is per-browser, so it should work for both logged in and logged out users.

We have a cool community feature in the works as well. Improved spoiler tags went into beta earlier today. Communities have long been using tricks with NSFW tags to hide spoilers, which is clever, but also results in side-effects like actual NSFW content everywhere just because you want to discuss the latest episode of The Walking Dead.

We did have some fun with Atlantic Recording Corporation in the last couple of months. After a user posted a link to a leaked Twenty One Pilots song from the Suicide Squad soundtrack, Atlantic petitioned a NY court to order us to turn over all information related to the user and any users with the same IP address. We pushed back on the request, and our lawyer, who knows how to turn a phrase, opposed the petition by arguing, "Because Atlantic seeks to use pre-action discovery as an impermissible fishing expedition to determine if it has a plausible claim for breach of contract or breach of fiduciary duty against the Reddit user and not as a means to match an existing, meritorious claim to an individual, its petition for pre-action discovery should be denied." After seeing our opposition and arguing its case in front of a NY judge, Atlantic withdrew its petition entirely, signaling our victory. While pushing back on these requests requires time and money on our end, we believe it is important for us to ensure applicable legal standards are met before we disclose user information.

Lastly, we are celebrating the kick-off of our eighth annual Secret Santa exchange next Tuesday on Reddit Gifts! It is true Reddit tradition, often filled with great gifts and surprises. If you have never participated, now is the perfect time to create an account. It will be a fantastic event this year.

I will be hanging around to answer questions about this or anything else for the next hour or so.

Steve

u: I'm out for now. Will check back later. Thanks!

UPDATE 9/12/18: Unfortunately the vote didn't go our way, with both Articles 11 and 13 passing. We're going to have to assess what this means for Reddit, and determine what next steps might be. While this isn't the result that we hoped for, I'd still like to thank all the redditors who contacted their MEPs about this. We'll keep you updated about what comes next. For those interested in the details of how individual party blocks and MEPs voted, Julia Reda has more details here.

Hey Everyone!

(And a very special bonjour, hola, hallo, ciao, hej, sveiki, ahoj, buna, and the rest to our European redditors in particular.)

It’s September, which means Europe’s back from vacation and we have an update for you on the EU copyright saga and its implications for the open Internet.

When we last left you on July 5 (aka Meme Day), a truly disastrous version of the EU Copyright Directive was defeated, thanks primarily to the outpouring of concern from netizens rightfully worried about its implications for free expression. You’ll remember that because of the way the draft eliminated copyright liability protections for platforms, the proposed law would have radically changed how sites like Reddit work. It would have forced us to either cut off usage in Europe or install error-prone copyright filters on your posts, resulting in a machine-censored user experience and striking a huge blow to the concept of the open Internet.

The July 5th “no” vote kicked the draft Directive back to the drawing board, and now a flurry of amendments have surfaced. Some are good, but some are just as bad as the original. For anyone who is interested in the nitty-gritty of the amendments, MEP Julia Reda has a pretty good rundown of them here (note, this issue is fast-moving and amendments are changing daily).

The bottom line is most of the amendments, short of the proposal to delete Article 13 all together, don’t make an appreciable difference from the last draft in terms of how they would force us to filter your posts (our friends at EDRi break down why that is here).

The good news is, this measure—including whatever amendments are adopted—will go to a vote of the FULL European Parliament on September 12. This means that Every. Single. MEP. will have to vote on the record on this issue, and be accountable for that vote come election time. That’s why we’re participating in A©tion Week to spread the work and help people contact their MEPs. If you live in Europe, you can let your MEP know that this is an issue that you care about, and urge them to reject Article 13. The good folks at SaveYourInternet.eu have put together a wealth of resources for you to see how your country voted on July 5, look up your MEP, and share your views with them.

Check it out, and after you’ve called, let us know in the comments what your MEP office said!

EDIT: r/Europe has an awesome megathread going on the vote, with lots of background information on the process itself. They have been THE place on Reddit to go for information on this whole process.

In the past couple of weeks, Reddit has been mentioned as one of the platforms used to promote Russian propaganda. As it’s an ongoing investigation, we have been relatively quiet on the topic publicly, which I know can be frustrating. While transparency is important, we also want to be careful to not tip our hand too much while we are investigating. We take the integrity of Reddit extremely seriously, both as the stewards of the site and as Americans.

Given the recent news, we’d like to share some of what we’ve learned:

When it comes to Russian influence on Reddit, there are three broad areas to discuss: ads, direct propaganda from Russians, indirect propaganda promoted by our users.

On the first topic, ads, there is not much to share. We don’t see a lot of ads from Russia, either before or after the 2016 election, and what we do see are mostly ads promoting spam and ICOs. Presently, ads from Russia are blocked entirely, and all ads on Reddit are reviewed by humans. Moreover, our ad policies prohibit content that depicts intolerant or overly contentious political or cultural views.

As for direct propaganda, that is, content from accounts we suspect are of Russian origin or content linking directly to known propaganda domains, we are doing our best to identify and remove it. We have found and removed a few hundred accounts, and of course, every account we find expands our search a little more. The vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015–2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally.

The final case, indirect propaganda, is the most complex. For example, the Twitter account @TEN_GOP is now known to be a Russian agent. @TEN_GOP’s Tweets were amplified by thousands of Reddit users, and sadly, from everything we can tell, these users are mostly American, and appear to be unwittingly promoting Russian propaganda. I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.

I wish there was a solution as simple as banning all propaganda, but it’s not that easy. Between truth and fiction are a thousand shades of grey. It’s up to all of us—Redditors, citizens, journalists—to work through these issues. It’s somewhat ironic, but I actually believe what we’re going through right now will actually reinvigorate Americans to be more vigilant, hold ourselves to higher standards of discourse, and fight back against propaganda, whether foreign or not.

Thank you for reading. While I know it’s frustrating that we don’t share everything we know publicly, I want to reiterate that we take these matters very seriously, and we are cooperating with congressional inquiries. We are growing more sophisticated by the day, and we remain open to suggestions and feedback for how we can improve.

Hello Everyone!

It’s been a few months since I last did one of these, so I thought I’d check in and share a few updates.

It’s been a busy few months here at HQ. On the product side, we launched Reddit-hosted video and gifs; crossposting is in beta; and Reddit’s web redesign is in alpha testing with a limited number of users, which we’ll be expanding to an opt-in beta later this month. We’ve got a long way to go, but the feedback we’ve received so far has been super helpful (thank you!). If you’d like to participate in this sort of testing, head over to r/beta and subscribe.

Additionally, we’ll be slowly migrating folks over to the new profile pages over the next few months, and two-factor authentication rollout should be fully released in a few weeks. We’ve made many other changes as well, and if you’re interested in following along with all these updates, you can subscribe to r/changelog.

In real life, we finished our moderator thank you tour where we met with hundreds of moderators all over the US. It was great getting to know many of you, and we received a ton of good feedback and product ideas that will be working their way into production soon. The next major release of the native apps should make moderators happy (but you never know how these things will go…).

Last week we expanded our content policy to clarify our stance around violent content. The previous policy forbade “inciting violence,” but we found it lacking, so we expanded the policy to cover any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against people or animals. We don’t take changes to our policies lightly, but we felt this one was necessary to continue to make Reddit a place where people feel welcome.

Annnnnnd in other news:

In case you didn’t catch our post the other week, we’re running our first ever software development internship program next year. If fetching coffee is your cup of tea, check it out!

This weekend is Extra Life, a charity gaming marathon benefiting Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, and we have a team. Join our team, play games with the Reddit staff, and help us hit our $250k fundraising goal.

Finally, today we’re kicking off our ninth annual Secret Santa exchange on Reddit Gifts! This is one of the longest-running traditions on the site, connecting over 100,000 redditors from all around the world through the simple act of giving and receiving gifts. We just opened this year's exchange a few hours ago, so please join us in spreading a little holiday cheer by signing up today.

Speaking of the holidays, I’m no longer allowed to use a computer over the Thanksgiving holiday, so I’d love some ideas to keep me busy.

-Steve

update: I'm taking off for now. Thanks for the questions and feedback. I'll check in over the next couple of days if more bubbles up. Cheers!