Issues Database

A California class action alleged Reddit misclassified roughly 120 workers as exempt and denied them overtime and breaks; Reddit agreed to a $525,000 settlement, with content moderators forming a subclass.

Canada's Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act introduced in February 2024, proposed sweeping duties on social-media operators — covering platforms such as Reddit — before lapsing when Parliament was dissolved.

A former Reddit content moderator, Maya Amerson, sued the company in San Francisco Superior Court alleging that years of reviewing extreme violence and abuse material caused her PTSD and that management ignored her requests to be reassigned, in a case that became part of a wave of moderator-harm litigation against Big Tech.

A recurring Reddit-specific scam sees criminals impersonate moderators or the 'admin team' via private messages and chat, sending fake 'verification' or 'suspension appeal' links to phishing pages that harvest credentials and 2FA codes for account takeover — and sometimes payment.

On a 2024 earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman suggested Reddit might place some new subreddits behind paywalls, prompting moderators to object that they would effectively be charged for — or asked to produce — content they create for free.

Volunteer moderators of r/law and r/SCOTUS, plus Reddit itself, filed amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court to strike down Texas and Florida social-media laws; the Court unanimously vacated the lower rulings and strongly affirmed platforms' editorial discretion.

By July 2024 Reddit's robots.txt changes had blocked Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant and other engines from indexing recent Reddit content, while Google retained access under a reported $60 million annual AI-data deal — making Google effectively the only search engine able to surface fresh Reddit results.

The EU's Digital Services Act imposed new transparency, point-of-contact, and content-moderation obligations on Reddit, which self-reports tens of millions of EU users but has not been formally designated a Very Large Online Platform.

In October 2024 Reddit changed its rules so moderators could no longer switch a community to private or NSFW without first getting administrator approval — a move the company tied to user expectations but which critics saw as a direct curb on the protest tactic that powered the 2023 blackouts.

In February 2024, days before its IPO, Reddit signed a content-licensing deal with Google reported at roughly $60 million per year, giving Google access via Reddit's Data API to train AI models on years of user content. The deal drew user unease over consent and triggered an FTC inquiry.

When Reddit went public on the NYSE (RDDT) in March 2024, it offered a slice of IPO shares to top moderators and users via a Directed Share Program. Many community members rejected the gesture as cynical, noting the volunteer moderators who built Reddit's value still received no compensation while CEO Steve Huffman earned $193 million in 2023.