About these figures
Every figure names its source, links to it and gives its period. Reddit publishes its transparency report twice a year, and its audience figures each quarter in its SEC filings, so newer numbers may exist at the source. Where a figure comes from a third party (Pew Research Center, SISTRIX, BrightLocal) it is labelled as such.
How to cite this page
Please cite the original source shown on each card rather than this page. If you spot an error or an out-of-date figure, email reddit@joeloya.com and we will check it against the source.
Reading Reddit's transparency report
Twice a year Reddit publishes a transparency report. It is the most useful public record of how moderation on the site actually works, and it is where most of the figures on this page come from. The report is organised around a handful of questions: how much content is removed, and by whom; how many user reports lead to action; how many sanctions are appealed and overturned; how many legal demands Reddit receives from governments and private parties; and how many copyright and trademark notices arrive.
Two habits make the numbers easier to read. First, always note the reporting period. The figures used here are mostly from the July to December 2024 report, with newer copyright figures from the July to December 2025 report where they are available. Second, remember that each figure describes Reddit as a whole. None of them predicts what will happen to one post, one comment or one community.
How much content is removed, and by whom
In the second half of 2024 people posted roughly six billion pieces of content on Reddit. Moderators and administrators together removed 2.66% of it. The split matters: 1.42% was removed by community moderators and 1.24% by Reddit administrators. In other words, volunteer moderators remove more than Reddit's own staff, and the two are closer than many people expect.
Applied to the six billion total, 2.66% is very roughly 160 million pieces of content. That is an enormous amount of removal, and it is still a small share of what is posted. The great majority of content is never touched.
Why most admin removals are spam
Among removals made by administrators, 63.2% were for spam. A further 36.1% were for other violations of the Reddit Rules, and 0.7% were for content manipulation and other reasons. This explains something people find surprising: the content that administrators remove most often is not the content that individuals complain about. It is spam, at industrial scale.
For anyone trying to have a post or comment removed, the lesson is practical. Reports about a single person's content compete with huge volumes of automated and spam enforcement. A report that is precise and rule-based is far more likely to be handled as it deserves than one that is long, emotional or vague.
What happens to user reports
In the same period Reddit received 16,070,307 user reports of possible Rules violations. Administrators took removal action on 9.3% of them. That is about 1.5 million reports leading to action, and it also means that more than nine in ten reports did not.
There are several ordinary reasons for that. Many reports concern content that does not break a rule, such as disagreement, criticism, or content someone simply dislikes. Some are duplicates of the same item. Some concern content that a moderator has already dealt with. And some describe a genuine problem but do not show the reviewer what rule applies or where to look.
- A report is more likely to succeed when it names the specific rule and quotes the lines that break it.
- It helps to give the permalink of each post or comment, not just the link to the post above it.
- Reporting the same item repeatedly does not improve the odds and can look like misuse of the tool.
- Content that is merely critical, even harshly, is generally allowed.
Appeals to administrators
Reddit also reports what happens when people challenge its decisions. Administrators decided 293,331 appeals of content-level sanctions and 298,388 appeals of account-level sanctions in the period. These were about 10.5% and 3.2% of all sanctions in each category. The average success rate for appeals to Reddit administrators was 18.6%.
Two things stand out. Most sanctions are never appealed, and most appeals do not succeed. An appeal is therefore worth preparing carefully, because it is a real process with a real chance of being decided either way. Appeals to community moderators are a separate matter, and Reddit does not publish statistics about them.
Legal demands from private parties
Reddit receives requests to remove content on legal grounds from governments, courts and private parties. In the second half of 2024 it received 126 legal demands from private parties to remove content. It removed 41% of the content identified as breaking the Reddit Rules and declined to act on 58%. Most of these demands came from the United States (44), the United Kingdom (28) and Germany (11).
The pattern is the same as the one in the user-report data. Reddit first asks whether the content breaks its own rules. A legal label on a request does not change that. Where content breaks the Reddit Rules, Reddit may act; where it is lawful criticism, Reddit tends to say no, and it has publicly explained that position in several cases described in its reports.
Copyright and trademark notices
Copyright is the most formal route and the one with the clearest numbers. In the second half of 2024 Reddit received 54,110 copyright notices and actioned 40,527 of them in whole or in part, which is 74%. The notices asked for 459,697 pieces of content to be removed; 229,226 were removed.
Newer reporting for July to December 2025 describes a similar picture. According to press coverage of Reddit's report, rights holders sent 69,154 notices identifying 425,471 pieces of content, and Reddit removed 217,787 of them, an actionability rate of about 51% on all reported content. The same coverage reports that Reddit banned 1,595 user accounts and 563 subreddits for repeat copyright violations in that half of the year.
Trademark claims look different. Reddit rejected 596 invalid trademark takedown notices, declining to remove 5,380 pieces of content, for example where the content made fair use of the mark. The message across both data sets is the same: formal notices work when they are accurate and well founded, and fail when they are not.
Audience and visibility
The scale of the platform explains why content on Reddit can matter so much for a person or business. In its results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, Reddit reported 514.6 million weekly active uniques, including 53.2 million daily in the United States, and 130.3 million daily active uniques overall.
Reddit also shows up prominently in search. The search-visibility firm SISTRIX has tracked reddit.com among the most visible domains in Google's U.S. results since 2024. And consumers do read what is written about businesses: one widely cited survey found that 87% of consumers read online reviews of local businesses. That figure is general consumer behaviour, not a Reddit statistic, but it explains why a single visible discussion can affect how people judge a company before they ever contact it.
Harassment in context
Reddit's rules on harassment sit within a wider social problem. A Pew Research Center survey of 10,093 U.S. adults, published in January 2021, found that 41% had experienced online harassment, and that about a quarter had experienced more severe forms such as physical threats, stalking, sexual harassment or sustained harassment.
The data does not say how much of that happens on Reddit. What it does show is why platforms treat sustained, targeted behaviour differently from a single harsh remark, and why documenting a pattern with dates, usernames and links is the foundation of a harassment report.
How to use these numbers well
- Do not treat an average as a forecast. A 9.3% action rate on reports or an 18.6% appeal success rate says nothing about the merits of your own case.
- Compare like with like. Figures from different reporting periods, or from different sources, are not directly comparable.
- Expect change. Reddit publishes new reports twice a year, so newer numbers may already exist.
- Use the numbers to set expectations. They show that most reports and most appeals do not succeed, and that precision and evidence matter.
If you notice a figure that is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source.