On December 6th, 2019, Reddit released a list of 61 accounts that had been banned under suspicion of affiliation with an online influence campaign originating in Russia.
These accounts appeared connected to a high-profile leak of UK documents on the platform. These accounts reportedly shared commonalities with past accounts they had removed following their investigation into the "Secondary Infektion" influence campaign, leading Reddit staff to attribute the action to Russia.
From the official release:
We were recently made aware of a post on Reddit that included leaked documents from the UK. We investigated this account and the accounts connected to it, and today we believe this was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia.
[...]
As a result of this investigation, we are banning 1 subreddit and 61 accounts under our policies against vote manipulation and misuse of the platform. As we have done with previous influence operations, we will also preserve these accounts for a time, so that researchers and the public can scrutinize them to see for themselves how these accounts operated.
-- /u/worstnerd
This repository provides code to collect the preserved information from the removed Reddit accounts, as well as a json archive of the resulting data.
The data collected by this script can be found in data/author_activity.json.
The results are stored as a JSON list, according to the following format:
[
{
"author": "gregoratior",
"submissions": [...],
"comments": [...]
},
...
The resulting data is not edited, augmented, or filtered in any way.
No special software is required for downloading and viewing the JSON data under /data (though you may want to avail yourself of pandas.read_json if you're using Python).
To re-run the collection code, you will require psaw which can be installed by typing:
pip install psaw