Reports Filed vs. Actions Taken: What Reddit's Own Transparency Reports Say About User Reports and Appeals (2018-2025)

Reddit's own transparency reports publish figures on what happens to the reports users file. The 2018 report described itself as reporting such figures for the first time: 'For the first time, we are reporting some baseline numbers regarding takedowns resulting from Content Policy violations.' It gave 'Number of Potential Content Policy Violations Reported Directly to Reddit: 221,116' and said: 'Although we receive a high volume of Content Policy violation reports, most are not “actionable,” meaning a violation has not actually occurred.' The page text introduces the share of actionable reports with the line 'The following represents the % of Actionable reports:' but no figure follows it in the text.

The later reports give a count and a percentage, with wording that changes. The 2019 report counted 793,863 user reports, of which '13.2% of reports resulted in action being taken by Admins.' The 2020 report counted 28,243,095 reports and 3.59% actioned. The count in consecutive reports moved from 793,863 to 28,243,095 and the user-reports section of neither report explains the change or mentions the other year's count, so the 2019 and 2020 percentages are not shown here as a trend and should not be read as one. The 2021 report counted 31,333,033 and 6%; 2022 counted 32,204,886 (posts, comments and private messages, with chats excluded) and 7.7%. From 2023 the reports are half-yearly, and the figures are: 15,611,260 reports and 9.9% in the first half, 14,406,398 and 12.1% in the second. The first half of 2024 counted 16,189,689 reports and 11%, and the second half 16,070,307 and 9.3%. For the first and second halves of 2025 the page text gives no count at all, only that 6.6% and 6.9% of user reports 'were found to be actionable, resulting in removal.' Reddit's explanation of the remainder is that reports can be duplicates, already actioned or about content that did not break its rules, with the 2024 report adding that there are 'many reasons we may not action a user report.' Reddit flags one break in the user-report series itself: the first-half 2024 report said of its new chat-inclusive numbers that they 'can’t be compared against the last half as we are newly including chat messages in the data.' (TechCrunch's February 2021 coverage of the 2020 report made a similar caution about removal counts, not user reports: Reddit had updated its hateful-content policy, so 'the numbers in this report are new and can’t always be directly compared to those from last year.')

Appeals are reported as well, but what is counted changes from report to report, so the counts are not one continuous series. The 2018 report said Reddit administrators received 44,416 appeal requests (of actions against an account or an entire subreddit) and granted 12,881 (29%); 2019 had 54,143 appeals with 10,402 (19%) granted; 2020 had 42,517 with 16,134 (37.95%) granted; 2021 had 79,009 with 19.65% granted; and 2022 had 223,125 appeals of account-level sanctions with 14.5% granted. Reddit said the 2022 figure was a 182% increase on 2021 that was 'largely driven by spam-related appeals,' and that its reversal rate fell 'due to the low actionability of these appeals.' In 2023 Reddit reported account-sanction reversal rates of 14% (118,073 appeals) in the first half and 12.5% (149,858 appeals) in the second, saying that after a native appeal flow launched in September 2023 the appeal rate of account-level sanctions rose to 1.88%. From 2024 the reports separate content-level from account-level appeals: 162,478 and 245,340 in the first half of 2024 (success averaging around 20.8%), 293,331 and 298,388 in the second half (around 18.6%), 426,527 and 438,983 in the first half of 2025 ('on average, 38.7% of appeals were successful'), and 481,416 and 499,515 in the second half of 2025. For that last period the text gives no granted share, only 'a 66.6% decrease in granted appeals.' Over the same years admins reported handing out 821,332 warnings and 4,410,615 temporary and permanent bans in the first half of 2024, 798,681 and 4,101,197 in the second half, 1,055,711 and 2,613,473 in the first half of 2025, and 1,097,979 warnings and 3,181,420 bans in the second half of 2025.

A separate set of figures comes from Reddit's 2025 Digital Services Act package, for the service Reddit Netherlands B.V. and the period 2025-01-01 to 2025-12-31. It records 73,241 complaints to the internal complaints mechanism, with 39,097 decisions upheld and 34,173 reversed; those two rows add up to 73,270, which is 29 more than the stated total, and the file does not explain the difference (its 'partially reversed' row is blank). It records 395 complaints about a decision not to act on an Article 16 notice, of which 373 were upheld and 22 reversed. It also records 35 disputes sent to out-of-court dispute settlement bodies, with 29 decisions upheld and 6 reversed; a separate row adds that 20 disputes had no decision from the body during the period, and since 29 plus 6 already equals 35 the rows do not form a simple breakdown, so no outcome rate is calculated here. It lists 13,630 notices in total with a 'Median time to take action' of 43.66; no unit is stated beside the value. The European Commission summarises the legal duty behind these tables: 'Platforms must respond to your reports and offer options to appeal their decisions.'

The published figures leave gaps. The 2025 page texts give no count of reports, and the page text of the reports states no harassment-specific outcome for user reports. The H2 2025 report says its charts are 'broken out by Reddit Rules violation, volume of user reports or automated flags, and actionability rate,' and Reddit's per-rule charts do include a Harassment row, but the values sit in chart images, not in the page text. Read from Reddit's chart image 'Posts & comments removed by Reddit Rules violation (July - December 2024),' the Harassment row shows 102,950 removals, 44.1% flagged by Reddit automation and 55.9% from user reports, with an 'actionability' figure of 0.8%. Read from the equivalent chart image for July - December 2025, it shows 216,999 removals, 85.5% flagged by automation and 14.5% from user reports, with actionability of 1.8%. The chart legend defines actionability as 'reported/flagged vs. removed,' so it mixes automated flags with user reports and is not a harassment-specific action rate for user reports alone; the charts also cover posts and comments only, not the private messages and chats counted in the overall report totals. The one harassment figure in the H2 2025 text concerns automation: Reddit 'expanded our automated systems to support enforcement against hate and harassment, which led to significant increases (+200%) in related actions.' None of the report texts gives a response time; the DSA file does, with 338 notices under its cyber harassment keyword and a median of 41.11, but only for EU notices and again with no unit stated. Outside research is qualitative. Tabassum and colleagues analysed 115 hate and harassment-related threads from r/ModSupport and r/modhelp for USENIX Security 2024 and reported moderators saying that feedback on reported users who were banned typically carried 'only boilerplate with no details about what action was taken,' that 'mass (false) reporting' fills mod queues, and that the appeal form 'requires an explanation of why it is an error.' Those are moderators' accounts, not measured rates. Engadget, covering the 2022 report in March 2023, wrote that 'Reddit's transparency reports go beyond what most social media companies offer, providing copious data on content moderation and global legal requests.' The figures discussed here are charted year by year on the site's /transparency-reports dashboard.