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Every documented issue, searchable and filterable by category, year, and keyword. Toggle between grid and timeline views, and export the filtered set to CSV.
343 issues
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman testified before a House Energy & Commerce subcommittee hearing on October 16, 2019, arguing that weakening Section 230 was an 'existential threat' to Reddit — drawing the platform directly into the political fight over platform liability for user content.
Reddit banned one subreddit and 61 accounts after concluding that a cache of leaked US-UK trade documents — weaponized in the 2019 UK general election — was posted as part of a coordinated Russian influence campaign.
After cyclist Susan Rainwater was killed in a 2018 hit-and-run in Washington State, a trooper posted a photo of a broken plastic fragment to Reddit's r/WhatIsThisThing; a user identified it as a part from a 1980s Chevrolet pickup, helping narrow the search to a suspect who later pleaded guilty.
In 2019 BuzzFeed News reported that Reddit users were observing apparently coordinated pro-China activity, with new accounts swarming threads on Tiananmen, Huawei, and Falun Gong, amid heightened scrutiny after Tencent's investment.
In February 2019 Chinese tech giant Tencent invested $150 million as part of a $300 million Reddit funding round, triggering a site-wide protest in which users flooded Reddit with content banned in China — Tiananmen 'Tank Man' images and Winnie the Pooh — over fears of CCP-aligned censorship. The episode amplified longstanding concerns about coordinated pro-Beijing activity.
In January 2019, Reddit forced the ~425,000-subscriber r/soccerstreams — a hub for illegal live match streams — to cease user activity after repeated copyright complaints, amid intensifying Premier League legal action against piracy.
Brian Parker ran internet research-chemical operations selling synthetic opioids and used a Reddit presence for customer contact; after a 2016 shipment of U-47700 was tied to an overdose death, he and a co-defendant were charged in 2017 and pleaded guilty in 2018.
In July 2018 Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told a 17-year-old user in private messages that banning hate speech was 'not really done' and that Reddit was 'not the thought police' — and after the teenager published the exchange, his account was suspended for a week.
A 2018 Vice investigation detailed a for-hire Reddit astroturfing operation run by a user called 'Aaron,' who orchestrated paid upvote campaigns and networks of dummy accounts — each on its own proxy IP — to artificially pump cryptocurrency projects on r/CryptoCurrency and beyond.
A 2018 academic study analyzed 7,426 paid campaigns and over 1.8 million microtasks on a crowdsourcing marketplace, cataloguing an industrialized trade in bought upvotes, fake comments, and vote manipulation across social platforms including Reddit-style voting.
BitConnect, a ~$2.4 billion cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme that promised guaranteed returns from a fictitious trading bot, was heavily promoted within an active Reddit community (r/bitconnect) until its January 2018 collapse; U.S. authorities later indicted its founder and convicted its top U.S. promoter.
Hours after the U.S. Senate passed FOSTA in March 2018, Reddit banned several long-running sex-work communities and revised its content policy, in a move sex workers said deplatformed harm-reduction and community spaces, not just advertising.