Of all of the tech platforms that Russian trolls infiltrated during the run-up to the 2016 election in the United States, Reddit has been among the least forthcoming. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google have reluctantly testified before Congress and published frequent—if often incomplete—blog posts about the way Russia’s Internet Research Agency abused their services, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman didn't fully fess up about the hundreds of Russian troll accounts the company deleted until just this week, following a Daily Beast investigation that shed new light on Reddit's exposure to Russian propaganda. Even now, a source close to the Senate Intelligence Committee tells WIRED that Reddit has yet to provide the committee with any documentation.

But traces of Russian trolls activity remain on Reddit, providing some hints of their strategy on that platform without the company's help. Columbia University researcher Jonathan Albright has found more than a thousand posts submitted by a small coterie of accounts between the spring and fall of 2016 linking back to phony websites created by the IRA. These posts were still live on Reddit as of Friday morning.

'Reddit is a reaction center of the ecosystem.' Jonathan Albright, Columbia University

Uploaded at a frenetic pace during 2016, the posts link predominantly to the websites DoNotShoot.US and BlackMattersUS.com, both of which are still active and were created by the IRA not only to spread divisive propaganda, but to collect personally identifying information about American citizens who visited the sites. (WIRED doesn't suggest visiting these sites, which still actively use ad trackers.) Several Reddit accounts that submitted the bulk of these links—in some cases at a rate of 25 posts in a single hour—have since been deactivated, presumably as part of Reddit's previously announced purge. Two were deactivated only after WIRED asked Reddit about them Thursday. But the articles they posted—some of which garnered hundreds of upvotes and dozens of comments—remain.

WIRED asked Reddit about these suspicious accounts, why the links remain live, whether Reddit has alerted users who interacted with these accounts or shared these links, and why the company hasn't provided documentation to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In response, Reddit spokesperson Anna Soellner said, "At this time I will need to refer you to Steve's blog post which goes into some detail. Again, we continue to investigate." Huffman's blog post does not provide any answers to those questions. (Advance Publications, which owns WIRED publisher Condé Nast, is a Reddit shareholder).

The Network

Of the top 452 posts that link out to DoNotShoot.us, about 440 were uploaded by just five accounts, including three that were already deactivated when WIRED began investigating: Kevin_Milner, Peter_Hurst, and King_Andersons. Some of the accounts that shared hundreds of links to DoNotShoot.us, including Maineylops and Maxwel_Terry—the two that Reddit deactivated following WIRED's inquiry—had been dormant since 2016.

This same network of accounts was also responsible for sharing the bulk of the top 661 Reddit posts that linked out to BlackMattersUS.com. Several of them were created in the spring of 2016, and have not posted anything in nearly two years. This timing aligns closely with the timeline special counsel Robert Mueller laid out in his indictment of Internet Research Agency trolls, which notes that the Agency began placing election-related ads on social media sites by around April 2016.

The articles these Reddit accounts posted deal largely with police brutality and systemic racism in America, and were submitted strategically to subreddits like r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut and r/copwatch. They included headlines like “Most Cleveland Cops Won’t Be Wearing Body Cams During RNC” and “Police officer is torturing an 8 year-old boy while he is crying in agony.” That post received 332 upvotes and 65 comments. Some links also appeared on anti-Hillary Clinton subreddits like r/HillaryForPrison. One post that received nearly 300 upvotes read, “‘We Won’t Vote For Hillary,’ BLM Protesters Chant.”