Reddit Account Suspensions and Appeals: Reversal Rates, One Acknowledged Error and Moderators' False-Report Claims (2019–2024)

Reddit's transparency reports describe an appeals process in which sanctions can be challenged and 'are evaluated by Reddit admins, and are either granted (resulting in the reinstatement of the account/content) or denied.' The figures Reddit publishes show how often appeals succeed. For 2020, Reddit said admins received 42,517 appeals across content, accounts and communities, of which 16,134 (37.95%) were granted. For 2021 it reported 79,009 appeals, 19.65% granted. In the second half of 2023 it reported 149,858 appeals of account-level sanctions, noting that in September 2023 it 'made improvements to user appeal options and launched a native appeal flow in the Reddit mobile app,' after which the appeal rate rose to 1.88% of account-level sanctions while the reversal rate edged down to 12.5%. In the first half of 2024 it reported 162,478 appeals of content-level and 245,340 of account-level sanctions, with a success rate averaging around 20.8%; in the second half it reported 293,331 and 298,388 and a combined rate of around 18.6%. The reports' scope changes from year to year (the earlier ones pool content, account and community actions; later ones separate them), so the numbers are not a clean time series, and the figures do not say why individual sanctions were reversed. A reversal is not by itself proof that the first decision was wrong.

Beyond the aggregate, a handful of episodes are documented. On 9 January 2019, BleepingComputer reported that accounts of some Reddit users had been 'locked out or suspended due to irregular behavior that could suggest unauthorized access.' It called the lock a 'precautionary measure,' gave a credential stuffing attack as the suspected cause, said Reddit's security team planned to let affected users reset their passwords, and quoted a Reddit administrator referring to 'a large group of accounts'; it also noted that some users doubted the explanation, saying their credentials were unique and strong. These precautionary locks are covered in the entry 'Reddit 2019 Account Lockouts and Forced Resets Over Credential Stuffing.' BleepingComputer also reported that one user stated he had first been given a note that his account had been permanently suspended for breaking the rules, before the password notification arrived, and that he claimed he had done nothing wrong; the article does not say whether that note was part of the lock. In March 2021 a Reddit administrator wrote that an automated moderation rule set up after an employee was doxxed 'was too broad, and this week it incorrectly suspended a moderator who posted content that included personal information,' adding: 'we reinstated the moderator the same day.' That episode is covered in the entry 'The Aimee Challenor hiring backlash.' In May 2021 a moderator of a small subreddit wrote in r/ModSupport that a member's account had been suspended since about late February or early March, which the moderator attributed to the account's frequent VPN use, and that repeated appeals through the appeals form and the standard reports flow had received no response. A Reddit administrator replied on 30 May that the matter 'has been re-escalated to our safety teams,' and added that moderators can modmail the administrators to review an action they feel was incorrect. That the suspension was a mistake, and that appeals had gone unanswered, is the moderator's account.

Moderators have also described the report system being used against them. TIME's January 2022 investigation, which rests on moderators' accounts, wrote that 'one of the most common tactics is for zealous users to band together and report moderators for invented reasons in an effort to get them suspended or banned by unsuspecting admins,' and said one moderator of r/AgainstHateSubreddits says such tactics have led to his suspension at least seven times. In June 2023, during the moderator protests against Reddit, The Verge reported that moderators who had marked their subreddits not safe for work had been suspended by Reddit and that some were then reinstated; a moderator of r/MildlyInteresting told The Verge that the entire mod team had been reinstated by a different administrator than the one who removed them, and that the moderator's 7-day suspension had been reversed too. Reddit's spokesperson said that marking a community NSFW incorrectly violated the Content Policy and the Moderator Code of Conduct, and, asked to confirm the reinstatement, said: 'I'm not going to set a precedent of confirming with The Verge every action we do or don't take.' The removals and the reinstatements are covered in the entry 'Reddit's Post-Blackout Crackdown: Mod Removals, the Code of Conduct, and the NSFW Malicious-Compliance War'; a reinstatement is a reported reversal, not a finding that the removals were wrong.

The pattern the sources support is narrower than a claim that Reddit suspends innocent people at scale. What they show is that Reddit runs a large appeals system whose reported reversal rates have ranged from about an eighth to nearly two fifths of appeals; that Reddit has acknowledged at least one automated rule that wrongly suspended a moderator; that BleepingComputer reported the 2019 account locks as a precautionary measure while one user stated he had first been sent a note that his account was permanently suspended for breaking the rules; that a moderator says coordinated false reporting has led to repeated suspensions; and that one moderator said appeals went unanswered until an administrator re-escalated the case. None of the sources gives the number of suspensions that were mistaken.