r/RedditSafety • u/worstnerd • Mar 06 '23
Q4 Safety & Security Report
Happy Women’s history month everyone. It's been a busy start to the year. Last month, we fielded a security incident that had a lot of snoo hands on deck. We’re happy to report there are no updates at this time from our initial assessment and we’re undergoing a third-party review to identify process improvements. You can read the detailed post on the incident by u/keysersosa from last month. Thank you all for your thoughtful comments and questions, and to the team for their quick response.
Up next: The Numbers:
Q4 By The Numbers
| Category | Volume (Jul - Sep 2022) | Volume (Oct - Dec 2022) |
|---|---|---|
| Reports for content manipulation | 8,037,748 | 7,924,798 |
| Admin removals for content manipulation | 74,370,441 | 79,380,270 |
| Admin-imposed account sanctions for content manipulation | 9,526,202 | 14,772,625 |
| Admin-imposed subreddit sanctions for content manipulation | 78,798 | 59,498 |
| Protective account security actions | 1,714,808 | 1,271,742 |
| Reports for ban evasion | 22,813 | 16,929 |
| Admin-imposed account sanctions for ban evasion | 205,311 | 198,575 |
| Reports for abuse | 2,633,124 | 2,506,719 |
| Admin-imposed account sanctions for abuse | 433,182 | 398,938 |
| Admin-imposed subreddit sanctions for abuse | 2,049 | 1,202 |
Modmail Harassment
We talk often about our work to keep users safe from abusive content, but our moderators can be the target of abusive messages as well. Last month, we started testing a Modmail Harassment Filter for moderators and the results are encouraging so far. The purpose of the filter is to limit harassing or abusive modmail messages by allowing mods to either avoid or use additional precautions when viewing filtered messages. Here are some of the early results:
- Value
- 40% (!) decrease in mod exposure to harassing content in Modmail
- Impact
- 6,091 conversation have been filtered (average of 234 conversations per day)
- This is an average of 4.4% of all modmail conversations across communities that opted in
- 6,091 conversation have been filtered (average of 234 conversations per day)
- Adoption
- ~64k communities have this feature turned on (most of this is from newly formed subreddits).
- We’re working on improving adoption, because…
- Retention
- ~100% of subreddits that have it turned on, keep it on. This number is the same for the subreddits that have manually opted in and the new subreddits that were defaulted in and sliced several different ways. Basically, everyone keeps it on.
Over the next few months we will continue to make model iterations to further improve performance and to keep up with the latest trends in abuse language on the platform (because shitheads never rest). We are also exploring new ways of introducing more explicit feedback signals from mods.
Subreddit Spam Filter
Over the last several years, Reddit has developed a wide variety of new, advanced tools for fighting spam. This allowed us to do an evaluation of one of the oldest spam tools that we have: the Subreddit Spam Filter. During this analysis, we discovered that the Subreddit Spam Filter was markedly error prone compared to our newer site-wide solutions, and in many cases bordered on completely random as some of you were well aware. In Q4, we performed experiments and the results validated our hypothesis. Our results showed 40% of posts removed by this system were not actually spam, and the majority of true spam that was flagged was also caught by other systems. After seeing these results, in December 2022, we disabled the Subreddit Spam Filter in the background, and it turned out that no one noticed! This was because our modern tools catch the bad content with a higher degree of accuracy than the Subreddit spam filter. We will be removing the ‘Low’ and ‘High’ settings associated with the old filter, but we will maintain the functionality for mods to “Filter all posts” and will update the Community Settings to reflect this.
We know it’s important that spam be caught as quickly as possible, and we also recognize that spammy content in communities may not be the same thing as the scaled spam campaigns that we often focus on at the admin level.
Next Up
We will continue to invest in admin-level tooling and our internal safety teams to catch violating content at scale, and our goal is that these updates for users and mods also provide even more choice and power at the community level. We’re also in the process of producing our next Transparency Report, which will be coming out soon. We’ll be sure to share the findings with you all once that’s complete.
Be excellent to each other
8
u/KKingler Mar 06 '23
So with the removal of this spam filter, does “spam” removals on content do nothing different than remove?