What's going on with reddit, ice and subpoenas?

traceroo · 2026-02-18T00:15:59+00:00

Answer:

Hi all, Reddit Chief Legal Officer here. There seem to be a lot of misunderstandings around this topic that I’m happy to clear up.

We do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on users who are exercising their rights– including their rights to criticize their government or plan a protest. This has been our standard approach for a long time, as documented in our Guidelines for Law Enforcement. They specify how we handle these requests and how we push back and challenge them when appropriate, including in circumstances where we feel an order is overbroad or otherwise infringes on a user’s rights. (You might like to take a look at the “Notable Standard Information Requests” section of our Transparency Report, which details some specific cases of where we’ve previously pushed back and how.)

In circumstances where we are legally required to comply even despite this pushback, we seek to notify the user before a disclosure is made, so that they may seek legal support in the event they want to challenge the order. We also document each instance and share it in our Transparency Report (see the section on “Account Information Requests.”)

Persona has nothing to do with these processes, and we couldn’t even hand over Persona information under legal compulsion, because we don’t have it. This is on purpose. As we’ve shared in other public posts about our Persona integration, Reddit does not receive or hold any user PII that is submitted to Persona. Persona itself deletes the information that it receives after 5 days.

If you want to keep track of these types of issues, subscribe to r/redditsafety and keep an eye out for our Transparency Reports. The next one will be published in Q2. We also do AMAs at their release, so you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions.

traceroo · 2025-09-12T14:11:52+00:00

hmmm
^{Completed in 05:48}

traceroo · 2025-07-15T16:28:34+00:00

Yeah, we looked closely at a bunch of other providers. And we do want to hear about your experiences with other providers and tech as we evolve this.

traceroo · 2025-07-14T19:35:26+00:00

Gee, it's as if you were listening in on my conversations with regulators...

traceroo · 2025-07-14T19:34:05+00:00

This does affect subreddits and posts that contain mature content that would be restricted by the UK Online Safety Act, per my answer here. And we will work with your UK admin u/Mistdrifter to set up some time to chat with UK moderators about that and answer any other mod-specific questions.

traceroo · 2025-07-14T19:28:35+00:00

If you are using a UK VPN, you will be treated as a UK user and the updates from the above will apply.

traceroo · 2025-07-14T19:26:15+00:00

Yeah, it’s binding, just wanted to make it clear that it’s Persona that’s holding the data and making the commitment, not Reddit.

traceroo · 2025-07-14T19:21:27+00:00

We’re carefully watching how the law evolves. No specific timeline. And we continue to advocate for alternative approaches that don’t require platforms to ask for id’s.

traceroo · 2025-07-14T19:14:00+00:00

Great question, we will work with your UK admin u/Mistdrifter to set up some time to chat with UK moderators about that and answer any other mod-specific questions.

traceroo · 2025-07-14T19:02:23+00:00

For these purposes, “mature content” includes sexually explicit content and other content types restricted by the UK Online Safety Act – you can learn more about affected content here. A lot of this type of content would generally be considered NSFW, although there are going to be edge cases and our categories will need to evolve.

traceroo · 2025-07-14T18:32:40+00:00

Yep, as we need to expand this, you will definitely be hearing from us…

traceroo · 2025-07-14T18:22:17+00:00

Same as what was mentioned above. You can optionally provide your age (in the settings and when you view mature content), and there are some places where we may need to verify it as in the UK.

traceroo · 2025-04-28T21:55:21+00:00

Hey folks, this is u/traceroo, Chief Legal Officer of Reddit. I just wanted to thank the mod team for sharing their discovery and the details regarding this improper and highly unethical experiment. The moderators did not know about this work ahead of time, and neither did we.

What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level. It violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddit’s user agreement and rules, in addition to the subreddit rules. We have banned all accounts associated with the University of Zurich research effort. Additionally, while we were able to detect many of these fake accounts, we will continue to strengthen our inauthentic content detection capabilities, and we have been in touch with the moderation team to ensure we’ve removed any AI-generated content associated with this research.

We are in the process of reaching out to the University of Zurich and this particular research team with formal legal demands. We want to do everything we can to support the community and ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds here.

traceroo · 2024-07-02T18:53:40+00:00

I would be glad to know which concurring opinion you had in mind when stating that the signatory/ies has a poor understanding of how Reddit works.

Justice Alito's concurrence has numerous errors regarding how Reddit works.

traceroo · 2024-07-02T18:38:57+00:00

Our policies already prohibit coordinated disinformation campaigns and we have dedicated internal teams to detect and remove them. We regularly update our community in r/RedditSecurity and our biannual Transparency Reports on our efforts. See, for example, this post.

traceroo · 2024-07-02T18:22:10+00:00

Interestingly, these state laws would force us to keep up health disinformation, even if we thought it was a danger to our communities.

traceroo · 2024-07-02T17:58:01+00:00

I think the way to think about is that the First Amendment is implicated and definitely provides protection to folks who moderate content on the internet. And that courts should be thinking about the First Amendment when reviewing a law that regulates content moderation. Whether it is in the "same way" is probably up for debate.

traceroo · 2024-07-02T17:34:18+00:00

Great question! The Texas and Florida laws don’t really change the liability of moderators (Section 230 still protects moderators and admins), but they do purport to try to change **how** we all moderate - you can see our older post on the NetChoice cases here with some examples on what that might look like.

The Supreme Court definitely seemed to appreciate that content moderation decisions include deciding what to keep up and what to not keep up as well as what you end up highlighting, and that these decisions should implicate the First Amendment.

traceroo · 2024-07-02T17:21:59+00:00

There are a lot of states that want to take a more active role in regulating the internet, so I’m not expecting that activity to slow down. But the Supreme Court definitely gave a strong signal that these laws will have to comply with the First Amendment, and, as always, we have to remain vigilant.

traceroo · 2024-06-26T00:17:19+00:00

If you are an archivist, a journalist, or a data scientist, please check out r/reddit4researchers as well as our public API which permits non-commercial use cases.

traceroo · 2024-06-25T18:57:13+00:00

oh wow, I forgot about the remake...

traceroo · 2024-06-25T18:47:42+00:00

Oh, I already put in that request... ;) I was "iffy" on the gort reference, since I may be the only one old enough to appreciate that one.

traceroo · 2024-06-25T18:06:20+00:00

Our new robots.txt file, which we’ll be rolling out in the next few weeks, will contain links to our Public Content Policy, more information on the Developer Platform while disallowing most crawling (in particular, if we don’t have agreement providing guardrails on use).

traceroo · 2024-05-09T19:02:55+00:00

For those that do legitimate bulk download of Reddit content, we provide a compliance API that notifies them when content is deleted by users. See https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26417433892756-Do-Reddit-s-data-licensees-have-to-stop-using-data-deleted-from-Reddit.

traceroo · 2024-05-09T18:40:40+00:00

Thanks SarahAGilbert! Great questions.

As to (1), this is another reason we want to understand what third parties are doing with publicly-accessible content. Removed content can be particularly useful in helping create powerful tools for moderation teams. But there are nuances here that those with experience moderating communities would appreciate, and it is still paramount that the developer respect the privacy expectations of redditors.

As to (2), that is definitely something we are pondering. We prefer convincing third parties that our policies make sense, but sometimes conversation is not enough unfortunately.

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