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r/CryptoMoonShots, a subreddit dedicated to surfacing tiny new tokens, became a recurring funnel for rug pulls and 'honeypot' contracts — including the notorious SQUID token — where promoters used bot-driven engagement to lend fake credibility.
In February 2019 Chinese tech giant Tencent invested $150 million as part of a $300 million Reddit funding round, triggering a site-wide protest in which users flooded Reddit with content banned in China — Tiananmen 'Tank Man' images and Winnie the Pooh — over fears of CCP-aligned censorship. The episode amplified longstanding concerns about coordinated pro-Beijing activity.
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.
BitConnect, a ~$2.4 billion cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme that promised guaranteed returns from a fictitious trading bot, was heavily promoted within an active Reddit community (r/bitconnect) until its January 2018 collapse; U.S. authorities later indicted its founder and convicted its top U.S. promoter.
In its 2017 transparency report, Reddit disclosed it had identified and banned 944 accounts of 'suspected Russian Internet Research Agency origin' that posted over 14,000 times around the 2016 US election.
In August 2018 Reddit became inaccessible in mainland China, joining Google, Facebook, and Twitter behind the Great Firewall, with the platform remaining blocked into the 2020s.
Russia's Internet Research Agency staged a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' through fake Black-activist front sites, then answered questions largely posed by its own accounts — even copying queries a Daily Beast reporter had sent in advance to fill out the thread.
After Reddit banned r/SanctionedSuicide in March 2018, its founders launched a standalone forum that journalists and regulators later linked to dozens of deaths and the spread of a specific poisoning method.
The subreddit r/deepfakes coined the term and pioneered AI face-swapped non-consensual celebrity pornography before Reddit banned it and related communities in February 2018 under its involuntary-pornography policy.
Network-measurement research by the Open Observatory of Network Interference found reddit.com blocked by Iranian ISPs as part of the country's centralized filtering regime, a block that has persisted for years.
After r/CreepShots was shut down in 2012, near-identical communities — r/CandidFashionPolice (covert photos reframed as 'fashion critique') and r/PhotoPlunder (nudes scraped from misconfigured photo-host accounts) — persisted for years, exposing how slowly Reddit enforced its own non-consensual imagery rules.
Reddit hosted a cluster of communities built around sharing images of women obtained without consent — including r/photoplunder, which scraped private photos from Photobucket, and r/CandidFashionPolice — curbed largely by outside legal pressure rather than Reddit policy.