UPDATE: Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued the following statement on Reddit's revelation:
“I welcome Reddit’s announcement, nearly a year and a half after election day, that it has taken action to investigate and suspend hundreds of Russian-backed accounts responsible for interfering in the U.S. political system.
“While I recognize that Reddit is fairly distinct among social media platforms in that its users are largely responsible for moderating content, I also believe that all the platform companies have a responsibility to do everything in their power to prevent foreign adversaries like Russia from interfering in our elections. As the 2018 elections approach, I will continue pressing the nation’s intelligence leaders and social media companies to be far more aggressive and proactive in responding to this threat.
“It’s clear that the Kremlin will use any means at its disposal to spread propaganda and misinformation, and we each bear some responsibility for exercising good judgment and a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to the things we read and spread on social media.”
Statement of U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner on Reddit’s IRA Announcement
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified Tuesday and addressed his social network's role in Russian election interference, another online community revealed it has identified close to 1,000 Kremlin-linked troll farm accounts currently in circulation on its site.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, writing under the username spez, wrote that the platform had identified 944 accounts suspected to be created by the Russian Internet Research Agency, “few of which had a visible impact on the site.”
Huffman wrote that of the accounts that had gained “karma,” or the site’s metric for activity, more than half had already been banned ahead of the site’s investigation into Russian accounts.
He said that seven accounts with a significant amount of activity “made it past our defenses.”
Huffman posted the names of the suspicious accounts and said they and their content soon will be removed.
“And as I mentioned last time, our investigation did not find any election-related advertisements of the nature found on other platforms, through either our self-serve or managed advertisements,” Huffman wrote. “I also want to be very clear that none of the 944 users placed any ads on Reddit. We also did not detect any effective use of these accounts to engage in vote manipulation.”
Huffman had announced in March that the platform had removed “a few hundred accounts” linked to Russian propaganda, but provided few specifics at the time.
Reddit identifies nearly 1,000 accounts linked to Russian troll farm (The Hill)