Reddit identifies nearly 1,000 accounts linked to Russian troll farm

Reddit announced Tuesday that it has found nearly 1,000 accounts suspected to be linked to a Russian troll farm.

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.”

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Reddit also revealed the suspicious accounts, and Huffman said that the accounts and their content will soon be deleted from the platform.

“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.

Special counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians and three Russian entities linked to the Internet Research Agency in February for interfering in the U.S. election.

Reddit’s announcement comes the same day that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress, largely about the revelation that Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed the personal information of as many as 87 million Facebook users.