Issues Database

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.

A 404 Media investigation documented a commercial industry built to covertly promote products on Reddit — buying aged high-karma accounts, deploying bots like 'ReplyGuy' to plant product mentions, and exploiting Reddit's Google ranking through 'parasite SEO.'

Reddit let users and moderators buy IPO shares with no lock-up, free to sell on day one, while warning investors that its own r/WallStreetBets community could whip the stock into meme-stock volatility — an unusually self-aware set of risk disclosures.

A 2024 feud between YouTuber Ethan Klein and the pop-culture subreddit r/Fauxmoi escalated into harassment and doxxing threats against its moderators, with at least two forced to delete their accounts.

After splitting from r/GME in 2021, r/Superstonk became the center of a self-reinforcing belief system organized around the 'Mother of All Short Squeezes' (MOASS) and a mass share-registration campaign, with skeptics dismissed as paid 'shills'.

As US sports betting legalization spread, researchers examined whether Reddit communities like r/sportsbook normalize risky gambling — and tracked a measurable rise in problem-gambling support activity on r/problemgambling.

Researchers documented a surge in advertising for AI 'nudify' apps — services that fabricate non-consensual nude images from ordinary photos — across social platforms including Reddit, which said it had banned several domains in response.

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.

In a series of copyright cases, movie distributors subpoenaed Reddit to unmask anonymous users who had commented about piracy, but federal magistrate judges in the Northern District of California repeatedly quashed the subpoenas, holding the First Amendment right to anonymous speech outweighed the studios' need.

A Moscow court fined Reddit two million rubles in August 2023 — its first such penalty in Russia — for failing to remove content the authorities deemed illegal, including material about the war in Ukraine.

Reddit's decision to charge punitive prices for API access killed popular third-party apps like Apollo and triggered the largest protest in the site's history — followed by the removal of protesting moderators.