Every year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) publishes its annual Who Has Your Back? report on transparency practices across platforms. Last year, we were proud to be among the top-ranked companies, with 4 out of 5 stars. But we wanted that last star. Bad. So a coalition of teams inside Reddit got together to determine how we could do better for this year. And we are delighted to share that the new 2019 ratings came out this week with Reddit in the top spot! Furthermore, not only did we earn all 6 out of 6 stars, but we were the only company to do so! This accomplishment represents the culmination of many people’s work, some of which you may have noticed in the past few months. You might have seen, for example, our newly-expanded Transparency Report, which for the first time this year provided statistics not just on government data and takedown requests, but also information on content that we as Reddit admins removed for sitewide-rule violations. We also included for the first time stats on appeals for these takedowns, earning us that coveted sixth star.

While disclosing these figures might not seem like a big deal, tracking and gathering all of that information is a complex job, and it takes a lot of our small team’s effort to do it. We’re proud that we were able to pull it off, even when companies with literally dozens of times as many employees as us couldn’t.

Values and practices that privilege transparency are important to us, and we know they’re important to Redditors, too. That’s why we made these improvements a priority, and we’ll continue to look for ways to be more transparent with you whenever we can. We’re already examining our practices for next year, in the hopes that we can continue to exemplify practices that set a standard for the industry and are respectful of our users. To that end, if you have some ideas on what statistics you’d like to see in future transparency reports, let us know in the comments!

Finally, a word of thanks to the EFF. Reports like these help pull companies like us (and the entire industry) along in our practices, and we know they’re complex to put together. We’re grateful for the work EFF does, not only on this issue, but on a whole host of issues critical to the open internet. Check out their work on CDA 230, or how they helped us protect this Redditor’s First Amendment right to anonymous speech– legal pushback which, by the way, was made possible by Reddit’s transparency notification processes on government data requests….so yeah, this stuff matters.