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346 issues
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.
Germany's Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) imposed strict 24-hour removal timelines and transparency reporting on large social platforms, with fines up to €50 million, setting an early template for the content-moderation duties now binding on platforms including Reddit.
After Reddit banned its deepfake-pornography community in 2018, the activity migrated off-platform and coalesced into MrDeepFakes, which grew into one of the largest deepfake-abuse sites before its 2025 collapse — a case study in how a ban can displace rather than end harm.
A large-scale study measured how antisemitic rhetoric and imagery escalated after political flashpoints on fringe boards and spread toward mainstream platforms, including Reddit, providing a sourced map of online hate diffusion.
Between June 14–18, 2018, an attacker intercepted SMS-based two-factor authentication codes for several Reddit employees and used the access to download a complete 2007 site backup containing early users' usernames, salted-and-hashed passwords, email addresses, and all of their public and private content.
In its 2017 transparency report, Reddit disclosed it had identified and banned 944 accounts of 'suspected Russian Internet Research Agency origin' that posted over 14,000 times around the 2016 US election.
Reddit shut down r/DarkNetMarkets, the platform's largest discussion-and-review hub for dark-web drug marketplaces, under a new March 2018 content policy banning communities that facilitate transactions in prohibited goods.
On September 12, 2018 Reddit banned r/GreatAwakening — the largest QAnon hub — and roughly 18 related subreddits for inciting violence, harassment, and doxxing.
Reddit banned r/MillionDollarExtreme — the community tied to Sam Hyde's comedy troupe — on September 10, 2018 for violating its violent-content rules, two days before the QAnon sweep.
Reddit removed r/shoplifting, a community of roughly 80,000 members dedicated to discussing theft techniques and posting stolen-goods 'hauls,' as part of its March 2018 content-policy crackdown.