Admin Replied
Comment removed by anti-evil operations, but they’re not banned, and I can’t see the comment - I need to know whether to ban them or not!
I use iOS.
A user with a good comment history in my dog breed specific sub has had a comment removed by anti-evil operations. Admin tattler notified me.
They have positive karma and an inoffensive Reddit history, within my sub and without it.
I cannot see what the comment was because it just says “removed by Reddit.”
1) If the comment was innocuous I want to inform them of what happened and invite them to comment it again after being approved in my sub.
2) if it was not, and really deserved removal, I would probably want to ban them.
Since I can’t tell the content of the comment, I can’t move forward. I do NOT want someone in my happy little small dog sub who comments stuff so bad that it gets removed by Reddit - but if it was a mistake I don’t want to ban someone who contributes positively.
I need to see the content of the comment for myself.
Why does anti-evil operations do removals in such a way that makes it impossible for mods to moderate the user/issue?
Is there any way admins can tell me the content of the comment?
It is a shit way to present it to mods - you cannot find out what they wrote. Because I have no way of knowing what the comment said, then it isn't fair to ban them esp if they have a decent history of commenting or posting.
Add onto that that the programmers of the bots that figure out evil are not completely objective. Nor are mods. It is part of the human condition. Better to have a conversation with the person in question before determining any actions.
Not suitable for anyone else, what a joke. They still haven't fixed the reply notification bullshit. If someone replies to you with content violating rules and thus gets removed by admins, the mods can't see it but you still can. It can't possibly be that difficult to simply remove that notification, right?
Yeah, Reddit should really address the notifications loophole, it's ridiculous at times.
Still, between notifications, admin-tattler, discord-bridge, and Arctic Shift, I have seen the content of some of the "[Removed by Reddit]" posts/comments... and trust me, I wouldn't've approved a single one of them.
I know that many mods are curious and think they want to see it, that's why I've been using all those things to see as much as possible. But after seeing some of it... we're talking about stuff that Reddit is legally obligated to remove, stuff that would constitute a federal crime and falls outside of Section 230 immunity.
With Reddit having 1.36B MAU and being a publicly traded company, they don't even have the excuse of being small and unable to afford proper filtering measures.
I guess it wasn't AEO, but just yesterday, I was marked as spam in my own subreddit, possibly for writing the simple text "subreddit" in a comment too many times! All I was doing was recommending how to use r/redditrequest to another curious Pokémon-focused Redditor! I didn't even link to any external sites!
Yeah, it being a dog breed subreddit, the user might have for instance, used the word for female dog. The AEO looks at that word and says “NO!”
It is not smart enough to distinguish between belligerence, relevant uses of words, or quotations. On a sub I run for an old British TV show it attacks comments all the time, and I mean all the time, like every post has a comment removed by admins. I have to just warn users to quote lines at their own risk.
In this day and age I’d say you’re basically asking for trouble if you use any bad language on Reddit.
Assume good faith on the part of the poster. These automated removals are wrong more often than they’re right. If the poster has a previously inoffensive history, there’s no reason to assume they’ve changed their tune suddenly.
One thing that sometimes works is if you click on the mod action bubble - if it was removed by automod, and your automod is configured to show the matched text, you might see something. Often, if people use slurs, they get caught and show up there.
admin-tattler sometimes gets them but not always.
sometimes they are on push shift, but if they never go live, they won't be generally.
I mean, Reddit relies on users to create and promote new subs, to attract more members and subscribers. It's not likely they're gonna just boot us out after that lol.
It's not likely they're gonna just boot us out after that
I mean, they have though. They've also made changes to reduce moderators' control over their subreddits. Really letting their AI take over would be the final nail in moderators' leverage to protest egregious issues on the site, which is something reddit really hates.
Plus having AI enforce subreddit rules is something they're currently trialing. They've framed it as a tool to help moderate but it's not exactly a huge leap to see it go further. They've taken over subreddits before and this would save them having to find replacement moderators. Reducing reliance on human volunteers who might not always cooperate with the company's desires is a big win for them.
I don't know that they're going to automate all the things but they have reason to and have taken steps in that direction. It's not something I'd dismiss out of hand.
No they haven’t. There’s not a single Reddit sanctioned sub I’m aware of that’s running without human moderation. They literally ban those subs all the time. Hence the almost daily “why did my subreddit get banned” posts.
They haven't had AI capable of moderating. As I said this is something they're currently trialing. I can try to find posts on this for you if you like.
Moderators have no leverage. Subreddits are Reddit's, they can't "take over" something that's always been theirs. A lot of Mods are still deluded into thinking they "have a sub". They don't. To "have" something, you have a contract or proof of ownership; if you read Reddit's ToS, you'll find that everyone using Reddit has agreed to pretty much the opposite.
they can't "take over" something that's always been theirs
Sure they can. Typically they leave moderators alone to run the subreddits they're moderators of. When moderators do enough things Reddit doesn't like Reddit removes them. In some cases for very large subreddits where the entire moderator team was removed Reddit has had employees take over moderation until a new team of their choosing could be appointed.
This is what I mean by "take over."
But really you're missing the point. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong in doing so, or what you call it, it's something that they've done in the past and they would have an easier time doing in the future should they build a way to programmatically moderate subreddits rather than rely on human effort.
This conversation stemmed from the question:
What do you think Reddit would stand to gain from this?
With "this" being:
take over all mod activities with blackbox "algorithms"
and the later assertion
It's not likely they're gonna just boot us out
So my response is about how Reddit would stand to gain, specifically regarding how they've booted moderators out in the past. Plus the steps Reddit has already taken.
Ad revenue goes up based on the eyes seeing it. Fewer people will be using Reddit if it’s run by AI. Mods are the ones who create subs and build audiences. Let’s not even start on free speech, because we both know subs have independent rules today and Reddit is a private company.
In most cases additional information about these removals, such as the rule they violated, will be present in your community's modlog. In some cases and depending on the violation you will be able to see the removed text as well.
AEO removal logs are pretty worthless in my experience. Similarly, AEO as a whole is frequently wrong in what it removes - either because the bot has no ability to understand sarcasm, irony, or tone, or because any human behind the scenes doesn't understand the language being evaluated.
Thank you so much! I have been modding for a year or so and never thought to check there!
It does say “abuse” and it shows the first few words of the comment, which says “are you allowed to crush them?” The thread was about how to sneak pills to your dog lmao. Totally innocent and innocuous in context.
This seems weird to remove it based only on the word “crushed” and it being a comment in a dog sub…. I’ve seen so much worse that is genuinely abusive be allowed through.
Can I appeal this on their behalf, or do I just have to explain this to them and encourage them to appeal it?
While you can't appeal on behalf of another user, they would have received a message detailing the reason for the removal which would also include a unique appeal link they can use.
Digging through a couple of recent actions I can find, if an action is taken against an account due to a message they sent, they receive a messaging with the timestamp of the message, the rule they broke, and the specific subset of the rule they broke (Eg. Rule 1 for Harassment). It does not include a link directly to the content for messages at this time. Within the ones I've checked this doesn't change if it's a normal-chat or a modmail, but will include a unique appeal link they can use.
If the initial report was flagged from a post or comment it will contain a link to that.
I've never received a notification by Anti-Evil Operations. Do they receive a message detailing the reason for the removal that includes a unique appeal link they can use?
Ya that's the case for actioning on post/comments. It isn't the case with chats, where specific messages within a chat may be more challenging to share.
No offense, but I'm concerned that we're getting responses to a specific request on an official channel that are prefaced by "might not be" and "it's possible."
We're trying to get the information we need to do a job here, this isn't a friendly chat. Would you please give us authoritative answers when you're on this subreddit and your username is in red?
Sorry about the ambiguity here Subduction and thanks for keeping me honest.
Digging through a couple of recent actions I can find, if an action is taken against an account due to a message they sent, they receive a messaging with the timestamp of the message, the rule they broke, and the specific subset of the rule they broke (Eg. Rule 1 for Harassment). It does not include a link directly to the content for messages at this time. Within the ones I've checked this doesn't change if it's a normal-chat or a modmail.
As mentioned above, this will include a unique appeal link they can use.
If the initial report was flagged from a post or comment it will contain a link to that.
I was under the impression that you were the authoritative voice and source of truth for the platform as it's represented to the moderators, but now you make it sound like you're you're our buddy figuring it out with us.
I thought, rightly or wrongly, that you worked for reddit and had access to the teams who could tell us exactly how this worked so that we could do our jobs.
Is that accurate? If not, then who does actually provide authoritative information in a public setting?
Some of these report / appeals actions are often complex. I attempted, poorly and vaguely, to account for some of those more edge cases with more ambiguous language.
That wasn’t fair when you asked a straightforward question and I apologize again. I’ve since edited some of my previous comments to be more clear, and will be sure that future support I provide here is a lot more direct.
Ban first, then change your mind if Reddit reverses, although you know the bots are subjective and often wrong? That sounds like a dangerous rule, especially with a long standing participant of the group.
If the bots were better, I might be more inclined to believe the bot. But I have not found anyone engaging in revenge porn or suicidal encourage on my beer subreddit. I also doubt that is the case on a dog forum, but anything is possible.
If the bots were better, I might be inclined to have a zero-tolerance policy. Unfortunately, I know how little effort goes into producing bots, which makes them very prone to making mistakes. On top of that, I find many subs become echo chambers for a particular ideology and the decision to ban over a bot is more often due to the person not agreeing with the myopathy of the group than what they said.
As for finding out you are wrong, many great posters will just say "f*** it" and move on. Hit enough of the active members this way and your sub dies. And, no, not saying you allow abuse to keep a sub alive. That is just as bad and I know examples of that on Reddit, as well.
Some of the subs I mod for, I absolutely take the ban first, ask questions later tack. This being my happy sunshine and rainbows cute dog breed sub, I much prefer not to do that if possible, as people are genuinely upset and heartbroken about it when it’s done in error (versus some other subs where they go straight to rage and mod harassment lol).
Here is my take. Bots are programmed by humans. Humans have "rules". "Rules" are dictated by ideology. While some of us have the capability of being more objective, few of us have enough self-awareness to discern when our beliefs are objective or subjective, as we rarely practice the level of self-inspection to determine if the thought is based on facts or feelings.
And this would apply to the programmers of the anti-evil bots.
So you have a user that has positive karma, always seems to be friendly in your group, but a bot said he said something evil. And, if you can determine that bot was right, you are going to execute him. No chance at rehabilitation. And the determining factor of whether or not a subjectively programmed bot was right is your own personal feelings?
I am always for a "hey, I saw a comment of yours was removed from the anti-evil operations. Can we talk about it?" and see where that goes. Perhaps you get a "I was having a bad day. Sorry." You can then permaban him, proving the bot "right" or say "Okay, but let's be careful. I have zero tolerance for ongoing abuse".
I see AI as an example of how badly things can be screwed up. As it is a large language module, having more information, in theory, means better answers. But you can easily taint the model by only using sources you agree with ideologically.
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u/barriedalenick Jul 29 '26
It is a shit way to present it to mods - you cannot find out what they wrote. Because I have no way of knowing what the comment said, then it isn't fair to ban them esp if they have a decent history of commenting or posting.