Reddit infiltrated by Russian propaganda in run-up to US election

Reddit has become the latest social network to admit that it was infiltrated by Russian misinformation actors in the run-up to the 2016 US election.

In a post on the social news site, Reddit’s chief executive Steve Huffman said that the company has “found and removed a few hundred accounts” which it suspects are of Russian origin, or which were linking directly to “known propaganda domains”.

“The vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015–2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally,” Huffman added.

Reddit has been silent on Russian misinformation efforts on its site for months, despite being viewed as a likely target as far back as September 2017, when the US senator Mark Warner suggested that an investigation into Russian misinformation should expand beyond the initial focus on Twitter and Facebook.

The company appears to have been prompted to speak by a leak from the Internet Research Agency, a notorious “troll farm” which was behind many of the misinformation efforts to date.


Source : theguardian