Issues Database

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.

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.

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.

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 August 2018 Reddit removed roughly 143 accounts linked to an Iran-aligned inauthentic news network exposed as 'Liberty Front Press,' which had seeded Iran-friendly content into political subreddits.

Federal prosecutors convicted four men — Ryan Collins, Edward Majerczyk, George Garofano and Emilio Herrera — for phishing schemes that compromised celebrities' iCloud and Gmail accounts; the stolen nude photos were mass-distributed on Reddit's r/TheFappening in 2014.

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.

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.

Reddit became a primary hub for the 2014 'Fappening' celebrity nude-photo leaks via the r/TheFappening subreddit, removing it only under DMCA and child-imagery pressure; nearly six months later, on February 24, 2015, Reddit announced a privacy-policy change banning the posting of explicit images of anyone without their consent.