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Reddit said on Friday it was banning 61 accounts over suspected Russia-led meddling in the run-up to the U.K.’s Dec. 12 election involving leaked trade documents.
The social platform said the accounts violated its policies against vote manipulation and platform misuse.
Reddit said its investigation occurred after Facebook discovered a Russian campaign on its network earlier this year dubbed “Secondary Infektion.” More recent accounts on Reddit bear similarities to that campaign, “causing us to believe that this was indeed tied to the original group,” the social news and aggregation network said on its website.
“Suspect accounts on Reddit were recently reported to us, along with indicators from law enforcement, and we were able to confirm that they did indeed show a pattern of coordination,” Reddit said.
The banned accounts would be preserved for a time so that they could be scrutinized by researchers and the public, Reddit said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier this week that there were no grounds for the accusations against Russia.
The Reddit accounts were removed after social media research firm Graphika Inc. published a blog on Dec. 2 saying that hundred of pages of leaked documents on trade between the U.S. and U.K. were amplified online ahead of the Dec. 12 U.K. election in a manner “closely” resembling tactics used in the Secondary Infektion campaign.
The U.K. operation appeared to start in October when “a German-language persona” that called itself Max Ostermann posted information about the leaked trade documents to three websites including German subreddit r/de, as well as an Austrian local-news blog and a Berlin-based platform, according to Graphika.
The documents were then amplified using tactics previously seen in Secondary Infektion. These tactics included the use of “burner accounts” — which post once before apparently being abandoned — as well use of a “conspiracy site” called beforeitsnews.com, the Graphika report said.
The documents have been cited by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as evidence that officials of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Tory party had discussed access to Britain’s National Health Service for U.S. pharmaceutical companies and other American corporations.
Labour stood by its accusations after it was reported earlier this week that the documents may have been leaked by people tied to Russia.
”Even before the Reddit post, the big question was how the unredacted U.K. documents ended up online,” said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika. “That question just got bigger.”
(Updattes with details on banned accounts starting in seventh paragraph.)
To contact the reporters on this story: Nathan Crooks in Miami at [email protected];Alyza Sebenius in Washington at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sebastian Toke at [email protected], Andrew Martin
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