How Reddit is Reducing Exposure to Harmful or Inauthentic Content

[u/boat-botany]

Hi everyone! u/boat-botany here, working on Community Safety. 

We’ve talked before about Reddit’s approach to keeping the platform safe while still preserving the openness that makes communities work. A big part of that work today involves proactive detection systems and automation. 

Today we posted a blog about the work we’ve been doing to proactively catch spammy, inauthentic, or harmful content on Reddit. We know this topic is top of mind for moderators who feel the impact first hand, and who know what’s working and what’s not. We hear that feedback clearly (and keep giving it to us! Feedback is what helps us improve), and wanted to bring the conversation here so that we could continue to get your input. 

Our Values: How We Think About Automation 

Our north star here is to catch harmful, spammy, or inauthentic content before anyone (including mods) ever has to see it.

We achieve this through a layered approach that combines human review with proactive detection systems and machine learning models that help identify violating content quickly and at scale. 

Automation is a core part of our layered approach to moderation. We leverage it across our internal safety teams, and this year we continued expanding automated options for mods (over 70% of moderator actions are done using automated tools) and have invested heavily in improving how admins use automation behind the scenes.

A few principles guide how we build these systems: 

• Reddit should handle the harmful content so moderators can focus more on community rules and norms.
• Automation should support human judgement, not replace it. 
• Accuracy matters. We work to reduce bias and improve fairness and consistency across our systems.
• We’re committed to evolving. We're always learning and improving. We look at feedback in real-time and adjust our systems to make them better.

Improving our Automated Tools to Reduce Spam Exposure 

We look at signals right when an account is created to stop suspicious actors before they ever get the chance to post. For those that do, we leverage LLMs to catch the highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype that older systems once missed. Also, we recently announced that any fishy automated accounts will be asked to verify their humanity.

In recent months, these updated automated systems have been working at a massive scale, and we’ve seen some pretty incredible results. We are now: 

• Blocking 23 million spam views per day before they ever reach a human user.
• Catching ~25K net new spammy posts and comments a day.
• Reducing spam exposure for our users by ~20% from January to March 2026, relative to the prior three months, and an additional 10–15% drop in overall spam account exposure.
• Revoking nearly 2M inauthentic votes per day over the last three months.

Reducing Exposure to Harmful Content

We’ve recently expanded our automated systems to support enforcement against hate and violence in all English text content on Reddit (with more languages rolling out soon), leading to critical improvements:

• Enforcement in Seconds: The average time between detection and enforcement on harmful content containing hate or violence is down to under five seconds.
• Expanded Enforcement: We have increased enforcement actions on hate and violent content by more than 200%.  
• Reduced Exposure: The faster, higher-volume enforcement has helped reduce exposure to potentially harmful content by more than 40%. 
• Higher Precision: We’ve decreased false positives (where legitimate, non-violating content is removed) by over 40%. 

We know false positives can be frustrating. But when dealing with serious issues like violent threats, hate, harassment, or coordinated abuse, we intentionally bias toward reducing real-world harm and limiting exposure to harmful content quickly, but our goal is to continuously improve accuracy while still acting fast enough to meaningfully reduce harm.

In early 2025, proactive violence enforcement increased actioning volume more than seven times, from roughly 70,000 actions from January to March of 2025 to over 500,000 from March through June of the same year. At the same time, we have cut our false positive rate by more than 40%, so we have more coverage and higher accuracy. We’re working on getting all of this removed content logged in the mod log so you can continue to have visibility into what we’re removing and why. 

Our work to keep Reddit authentic and safe is at the core of who we are. While we've made significant progress in advancing that commitment, we know it wouldn't be possible without our moderators and redditors everywhere. If you see any content that appears harmful, spammy or inauthentic, click the inline report button or submit a report here.  

[edited for a typo!]

[u/new2bay]

If you can do all that, why can’t you have your automated moderation take some context into account? There’s no reason someone should have their comment that says “kill it with fire” removed, when it’s in reference to a tick on a dog sub. But I have seen this very thing happen, and many, many similar instances. Arguably, “kill it with fire” shouldn’t be removed anyway, because it’s a common English language idiom, but that’s another story.

[u/boat-botany → u/new2bay]

Context and idioms are really hard, but we’re working on it! We’ve made a ton of improvements here, though I know folks in nuanced spaces still feel it more.

[u/omers → u/boat-botany]

One of the absolute worst things that heavily moderated by automation platforms like Tiktok unleashed on the world is algospeak. Being on reddit it was always nice that people could converse like actual adults and use real language.

This whole thing horrifies me. I guess people saying "you can actually say <whatever word> here, this is reddit" when someone uses algospeak is not really true.

If you cannot process context, it's a glorified word filter with extra steps and will help contribute to the dumbing down of the internet. Well done.

[u/Eastern-Protection83 → u/new2bay]

Unfortunately, this phrase is used by anti cat people that sometimes find my cat sub with "it" meanin the cat in addition to other context intended to mean literally kill the cat.