Reddit takes on the bots with new ‘human verification’ requirements for fishy behavior
Would-be Reddit competitor Digg just shut down because it couldn’t get a handle on the bots overrunning its site. On Wednesday, Reddit said it’s taking on the challenge itself.
The company will begin labeling automated accounts that are providing a service to users, similar to how the “good bots” are labeled on X, and it will now require accounts that are suspected of being bots to verify if they’re human.
Reddit stresses this is not going to be a sitewide verification requirement, and will only occur if something suggests that the account isn’t human, including its activity on the site or other technical markers. If the account can’t pass the test, it may be restricted, Reddit said.
To identify potential bots, Reddit is using specialized tooling that looks at account-level signals and other factors — like how quickly the account is attempting to write or post content. Using AI to write posts or comments, however, is not against its policies (though community moderators may set their own rules).
To verify an account is human, Reddit will leverage third-party tools like passkeys from Apple, Google, YubiKey, and other third-party biometric services, like Face ID or even Sam Altman’s World ID — or, in some countries, the use of government IDs. Reddit notes this last category may be required in some countries like the U.K. and Australia and some U.S. states, because of local regulations on age verification, but it’s not the company’s preferred method.
“If we need to verify an account is human, we’ll do it in a privacy-first way,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote in the announcement Wednesday. “Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is. The goal is to increase transparency of what is what on Reddit while preserving the anonymity that makes Reddit unique. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other.”
The changes are meant to address the growing problem of bots engaging on social platforms and the web more broadly, where they’re often used to influence politics, spread misinformation, inflate popularity, secretly market products, generate fake ad clicks, and more. According to Cloudflare, the traffic from bots will exceed human traffic by 2027, when you include bots like web crawlers and AI agents in the mix.
Reddit, in particular, has become a popular destination for bots that attempt to manipulate narratives, astroturf to shill for companies or their products, repost links, post spam, drive traffic, conduct research, and more. Plus, because Reddit’s content is used for AI training thanks to lucrative deals with AI model providers, there’s suspicion that bots are even posting questions on the site to generate more training data, particularly in areas where AI is lacking information.
Reddit’s other co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, has also addressed a related problem known as the “dead internet theory,” a conjecture that bots outnumber humans online and that the vast majority of content, interactions, and web activity on the internet is automated or AI-generated, rather than from people. In the age of AI agents, the theory is becoming a reality.
The company announced last year that it would begin to require human verification in response to the growing number of bots and the need to meet “evolving regulatory requirements.” But the company today notes that the current solutions, which Huffman recently discussed on the TBPN podcast, aren’t the best.
“The best long-term solutions will be decentralized, individualized, private, and ideally not require an ID at all,” Huffman wrote in today’s announcement.
Alongside these changes, Reddit said it would continue to remove bots and spam, where it averages 100,000 account removals per day, and rely on reports of suspected bots, with improved tooling still to come. Developers running so-called good bots can learn more about labeling them with the new “APP” label in the r/redditdev community.
