Reddit has published its 2022 Transparency Report, which outlines all of the actions the platform took to enforce its rules, or comply with government orders throughout the year, while Reddit’s also launched a new Transparency Center mini-site to help provide more insight into its various enforcement activities and tools.
Reddit’s Transparency Center will be ‘a central source for Reddit safety, security, and policy information’. The mini-site will include all of Reddit’s Transparency Reports, along with other notes on its moderation and content management initiatives, as well as links to its Bug Bounty program, terms and policies, its Help Center, and more.
Reddit’s 2022 Transparency Report, meanwhile, provides an overview of the expanding use of Reddit, and how that relates to content takedowns and removals.
As per Reddit:
“2022 was the biggest year of content creation on Reddit to date. Our passionate and increasingly global users created an eye-popping 8.3 billion posts, comments, chats, and private messages on the platform. The overwhelming majority – over 96% – of content shared across Reddit in 2022 respected Reddit’s Content Policy and individual community rules. The remaining ~4% of content was removed by moderators or admins for violating community rules or the Content Policy, with the overwhelming majority of admin removals (79.6%) being due to spam (e.g., karma farming, scams).”
That’s some interesting perspective on Reddit activity, and how active chats and comments are in the app, in comparison to Reddit posts.
More and more people are turning to private messaging to engage via social apps, a trend that’s been most specifically notable on Facebook, where users are posting fewer feed updates, but are still engaging with others via DMs. That shift is present on all apps, and clearly, Reddit is seeing the same, based on this chart.
In terms of content removals, Reddit’s army of volunteer mods and admins does the majority of work in this respect.
As Reddit notes, the majority of these removals related to spam messaging, with ‘hateful conduct’, ‘harassment’ and ‘minor sexualization’ also topping the list.
The last element is a key concern for all online platforms, and Reddit is doing more to combat CSAM content.
“Between July and December of 2022, Reddit removed 31,574 pieces of content due to CSAM violations and filed 40,243 CyberTipline reports to NCMEC. Several factors contributed to the significant increase in the removal of CSAM content and NCMEC CyberTipline reports in 2022. We hired more staff dedicated to combating child sexual exploitation, and continued our ongoing investments into tooling and proactive detection methods. Additionally, we added new ways to share media (such as images in chat and comments) on the platform.”
Reddit says that it remains committed to addressing this element, along with hateful and abusive content, via a range of evolving means.
Reddit also received 212 requests for content take-downs via government and law enforcement agencies in the second half of 2022, with the most requests coming from India, followed by South Korea and Russia. Reddit complied with 82% of these requests.
Finally, Reddit also notes that a lot more subreddits were created in 2022, as opposed to those being removed.
That’s only significant due to the fact that Reddit actually removed thousands of subreddits in 2020, as a result of its evolving policies around hate speech, which caused a big dent in its user count. Steadily, Reddit’s getting back on its feet, as more users discuss a broader set of topics in the app.
Which can only be good for marketers looking to reach people around specific focus subjects. The more specific, niche communities that Reddit serves, the more you can use insights from them to fuel your market knowledge, while Reddit ads also enable you to get your brand messaging in front of specific subreddit communities.
It still may be a minor consideration for many brands, but it is worth keeping in mind, and these insights provide some more perspective on the evolving Reddit experience.
You can check out Reddit’s full 2022 Transparency report here.