From 55 requests to six billion posts: a decade of Reddit transparency reports

In January 2015 Reddit joined the likes of Google and Facebook in releasing its first transparency report. The numbers were tiny by big-platform standards: in 2014 the site had received 55 requests for user information, providing some information in 32 of them, with 78 user accounts named; it also received 218 requests to remove specific content and complied with 68, mostly involving alleged copyright and trademark violations. The report struck a combative posture on user notice, stating that many government requests 'contain demands to withhold notice from users that carry no legal weight' and that 'we actively disregard these non-binding demands.' Reddit said it had successfully challenged two civil subpoenas seeking data on more than a dozen anonymous users, and emphasized that 'real humans' review every takedown request.

The annual reports that followed charted a steady escalation. The 2017 report counted 310 requests from government entities and law enforcement — 79 preservation requests (a 93% increase over 2016) and 231 requests to produce account information, itself a 36% increase over the prior year, affecting 193 users. Production requests had grown from 98 in 2015 to 170 in 2016 to 231 in 2017. The report also disclosed a first: a single Pen Register/Trap and Trace order requiring real-time monitoring of a user's communications, with which Reddit complied to the extent it was able. The 2017 report cycle also carried the disclosures about 944 suspicious Russia-linked accounts, released alongside it in April 2018 — a story covered in its own entry in this archive.

The 2018 report showed the curve steepening: 752 requests for preservation or production of user account information, including 581 production requests — a 151% increase over 2017 — of which Reddit satisfied 77%. Emergency disclosure requests hit 234 globally, with account information disclosed in 162 (69%) of them. Reddit reported refusing all 28 non-emergency production requests from foreign governments, and rejecting the sole US government demand to remove content that year, finding it overbroad and unsupported by valid legal process. Mashable's coverage of the report noted admins had removed 173,347 pieces of content in 2018, excluding spam.

By the mid-2020s the reports had become biannual and their center of gravity had shifted from legal process to content moderation at industrial scale. The July–December 2024 report recorded redditors sharing nearly 6 billion pieces of content in six months, of which 2.66% was removed — 158,960,445 posts, comments, private messages and chat messages taken down by moderators and admins combined, with spam accounting for the majority of admin removals. The report also itemized notable government demands, from a Hamburg Media Authority request over content allegedly promoting illegal organizations — which led to six removals for rule violations and 16 historical World War II memorabilia posts being geoblocked in Germany — to removals sought by Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority. The July–December 2025 report counted over 2.2 billion posts and comments in the half-year (4.4 billion for 2025, up 11.3% over 2024) and 154,198,211 posts and comments removed, 52.7% of them by volunteer moderators and 44.7% by admins.

Taken together, the reports form a continuous public accountability record spanning a decade, and their trajectory tells Reddit's story in miniature: a small company that once litigated individual subpoenas and tallied takedowns in the dozens became a public corporation processing government demands from around the world and moderating content volumes measured in the billions — while the reports themselves remain the primary public evidence for how much of Reddit's content is removed, by whom, and at whose request.