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Around Taiwan's January 2024 election, Google's threat researchers reported that the pro-Beijing Dragonbridge network flooded platforms — Reddit among them — with pro-PRC and anti-US narratives, including AI-generated material.
Reddit's 'delete' is a soft delete: removed posts and comments vanish from public view but persist in Reddit's systems, in third-party archives that captured them at posting time, and in users' own GDPR data exports — a gap between user expectation and reality that became a documented privacy concern.
Reddit was one of nine companies ordered by the FTC to disclose its data practices for a sweeping 6(b) study; the 2024 staff report found pervasive surveillance of users and weak protections for children and teens across the industry.
As Reddit signed AI data-licensing deals worth over $200 million ahead of its March 2024 IPO, the FTC opened a non-public inquiry into Reddit's sale and licensing of user-generated content to train AI models, amid a broader backlash over monetizing users' posts without compensation or meaningful consent.
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.
Weeks after Reddit's $60M/year data-licensing deal with Google, Google's new AI Overviews feature repackaged satirical and dangerous Reddit posts — telling users to glue cheese to pizza and eat rocks — as authoritative search answers.
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.
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.
In May 2024 Reddit licensed its user-generated content to OpenAI in a deal reportedly worth tens of millions annually, raising conflict-of-interest concerns because OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was Reddit's third-largest shareholder.
Reddit disclosed in 2024 that it had signed data-licensing deals worth hundreds of millions to let AI firms train on user posts — content created by users who were neither asked for consent nor offered any share of the proceeds.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into Reddit and more than a dozen other companies over compliance with the state's SCOPE Act and data-privacy law, focusing on the collection and targeting of minors' data.
In August 2023 Meta disclosed the largest covert influence operation it had ever found — the China-origin 'Spamouflage' network — and named Reddit among more than 50 platforms where operators seeded pro-Beijing content.