Reddit Ties Leaked UK-US Trade Documents to Russian 'Secondary Infektion' Operation

On December 6-7, 2019, days before the December 12 UK general election, Reddit announced that its security team had linked the upload of a 451-page cache of genuine US-UK trade negotiation documents to a coordinated information operation it attributed to Russia. The cache documented six rounds of trade and investment talks between US and UK officials dating back to July 2017. It had first been posted to Reddit in October 2019 by an account named 'gregoratior,' was reposted by an account named 'ostermaxnn,' and was then amplified by a cluster of accounts engaged in vote manipulation to push it into wider circulation.

The documents had already become a live electoral issue. On November 27, 2019, the UK Labour Party seized on them, with leader Jeremy Corbyn publicly brandishing the cache and alleging it showed Conservative plans to put the National Health Service 'for sale' to US private healthcare firms in any post-Brexit trade deal. When Reddit and analysts later pointed to a Russian-linked origin, Corbyn dismissed the attribution as 'belated conspiracy theories.'

Reddit said the suspect accounts displayed a pattern of coordination matching 'Secondary Infektion,' a long-running Russian operation that Facebook and the analysis firm Graphika had previously documented. Graphika's research found Secondary Infektion produced at least 2,500 pieces of content in seven languages across more than 300 platforms between 2014 and 2020, relied heavily on roughly 250 forged documents, and almost never achieved measurable engagement. Analysts concluded the behavioral similarities were too close to be coincidental while stopping short of conclusive, definitive attribution.

Reddit banned the originating subreddit and 61 associated accounts for violating its policies against vote manipulation and content manipulation, and preserved the accounts for public and researcher scrutiny, mirroring the transparency approach it had taken with the 2018 IRA disclosure.

The episode demonstrated that Reddit had become a seeding ground for state-linked 'leak-and-amplify' operations targeting Western elections. The genuine documents were laundered through an anonymous forum into a national campaign issue with real-world political consequences, illustrating how authentic leaked material and inauthentic amplification can be combined to maximum effect.