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346 issues
In May 2016 an attacker using the handle 'TehBVM' hijacked the moderator accounts behind dozens of large subreddits — including r/pics, r/gameofthrones, and r/books — and defaced them by altering CSS and banners, demonstrating how reused passwords and absent 2FA let one person seize control of major communities.
Academic research documented how 'pop-up' campaign communities like r/SandersForPresident and r/The_Donald reshaped Reddit during the 2016 US election, while a Data & Society study found visitors to Republican-oriented subreddits became up to 1,600% more likely to see links to controversial news sources — even as Reddit escaped the congressional scrutiny aimed at Facebook, Google and Twitter.
In May 2016, after the 2012 LinkedIn breach was revealed to have exposed roughly 117 million credentials, Reddit detected a surge in account takeovers driven by password reuse and forced password resets on about 100,000 accounts.
In late November 2016, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (u/spez) used his admin database access to silently rewrite comments from r/The_Donald users who had insulted him, replacing his own username with the names of the subreddit's moderators. He admitted it after users noticed and later issued a formal apology.
Reddit's 2015 transparency report quietly dropped its 'warrant canary' — a standing statement that it had never received a National Security Letter or other classified surveillance demand. The canary's removal signaled that Reddit had likely been served a secret government request it was legally gagged from disclosing.
In January 2016 the founder of the roughly 100,000-subscriber r/Frisson sold full moderator control of the community for about $1,000 to the operator of a frisson-themed website, in plain violation of Reddit's rules against selling communities.
After r/The_Donald repeatedly dominated Reddit's front page, the company changed the r/all ranking algorithm in June 2016 and later launched r/popular — moves praised by some as fixing manipulation and condemned by others as targeted suppression.
A 2016 AMA meant to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Fugees' 'The Score' collapsed when Redditors flooded musician Wyclef Jean with questions about his shuttered Haiti charity, Yéle Haiti; he answered a few, then deleted his account.
Reddit hosted r/pizzagate, where the false 'Pizzagate' conspiracy was incubated and named individuals and a D.C. pizzeria were targeted; weeks after Reddit banned it for doxxing, a gunman fired a rifle inside the restaurant.
In 2016 r/The_Donald exploited Reddit's moderator 'sticky' feature and coordinated upvoting to flood r/all and dominate the front page, prompting Reddit to change its ranking algorithm and later replace r/all with r/popular.
During the breaking-news aftermath of the June 12, 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, r/news moderators removed thousands of comments and banned many users, triggering mass accusations of censorship and a wave of unsubscriptions. Some moderators later acknowledged they handled it poorly.
A young man killed in a 1995 Virginia car crash went unidentified for two decades as 'Grateful Doe'; a Reddit community devoted to the case, working with other volunteers, helped renew attention that led to his 2015 identification through DNA as Jason Callahan. No crime was involved.