Reddit joins the ranks of other tech giants by sharing details regarding content removal requests
Popular social media website Reddit just released its first transparency report. This annual report comes after the website promised its first one a few weeks ago. The new report gives more details on user stats and takedown requests from last year.
In the report, Reddit revealed that it received a total of 55 requests for data based on 78 users. The website handed over some of its information based on account registration data, logs and uploaded content for 32 requests. Reddit also revealed that it received government requests with demands to withhold notices from users, but these demands carry zero legal weight.
A look at Reddit’s report
The report also claims the site accrued 218 requests for content removal, and about 176 of those requests were for alleged copyright violation while nine were for alleged trademark violations, and 33 were marked as other violations. Reddit complied with about 31% of those requests. The report claimed a large percentage of take-down requests were for user-submitted URLs of content hosted by other websites. Since links don’t fall under copyright laws, they require more scrutiny before they will be taken down. Reddit added that its overall goal was to give users all the necessary information before reaching out for legal guidance.
There was not a single request from the United States government to take down user content.
Tech companies choose transparency
Reddit is a huge site boasting over 174 million users, and the number of take-down requests is relatively low. Compared to Google’s recent transparency report, Reddit’s report is not as significant. During the latter half of 2013, the search giant received a total of 3,105 requests from the government to remove 14,637 pieces of content.
The release of transparency reports was initially started by Google four years ago. Other big companies, including Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Twitter, have since joined in by releasing their own transparency reports in the past few years.
