Transparency Report

A transparency report is Reddit's periodic public disclosure of its content-moderation and legal-request activity, covering content removed both by volunteer moderators and by Reddit administrators, account actions, and requests from governments, law enforcement and other third parties to remove content or hand over user data. Reddit has published such reports for roughly a decade, and they are a primary way outsiders can gauge the scale and direction of the platform's enforcement.

The figures the reports disclose have grown markedly over time. Reddit's report for 2018 recorded 752 government requests for user data, more than double the prior year, broken into preservation and production requests with stated compliance rates. The report covering 2020 disclosed about 3.4 billion pieces of content created and 233 million removed, of which the overwhelming majority of administrator removals, around 99.76 percent, were for spam or content manipulation such as brigading and astroturfing, alongside tens of thousands of removals each for harassment, hate and child-exploitation material, and the removal of more than eighty thousand subreddits. Transparency reports matter because they are one of the few structured, longitudinal windows into how a pseudonymous, largely volunteer-moderated platform actually polices itself and how it responds to state and legal pressure.