Reddit Bans 944 Accounts Tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency

On April 10-11, 2018, alongside Reddit's annual transparency report, CEO Steve Huffman published a post disclosing that the company had identified 944 accounts it believed were linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the St. Petersburg 'troll farm' indicted by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018 for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election. The accounts collectively made more than 14,000 posts. Reddit published the full list of usernames so that moderators, researchers, and the public could examine the account histories directly, and it preserved the account activity rather than scrubbing it, in part to share with congressional investigators probing election interference.

Reddit characterized the operation's measurable impact as limited. By the company's own accounting, roughly 70% of the 944 accounts had a karma score of zero, meaning their content gained little to no traction, and only about 13 accounts accumulated more than 10,000 karma. Huffman stated none of the accounts had purchased advertising on the platform, a deliberate point of contrast with Facebook, which had sold IRA-linked ads during the same period. The accounts posted across a wide spread of communities, from general-interest subreddits such as r/funny and r/gifs to overtly political forums including r/The_Donald.

The disclosure built on an earlier acknowledgment: on March 5, 2018, Huffman had conceded in a separate post that Russian propaganda had circulated on Reddit, after users surfaced examples including a Russia-linked account that pushed a fabricated story about Hillary Clinton. Reddit noted that a subset of the 944 accounts (roughly 145) had been caught and banned by routine Trust & Safety enforcement before the company's targeted review, with most of those removed back in 2015 and all before the 2016 vote.

The episode placed Reddit alongside Facebook and Twitter as a major US platform forced to publicly account for IRA exploitation of its service. Unlike some peers, Reddit chose maximal transparency, releasing a named, browsable list that journalists, academics, and ordinary users could audit, an approach widely praised as a model even as it underscored how a state-backed operation had operated undetected for years.

The 944-account disclosure became a recurring reference point in later debates over platform manipulation, foreign influence, and the limits of self-policing, and it foreshadowed Reddit's subsequent attribution of the 2019 Secondary Infektion activity to Russia.