See Removed Reddit Posts 2020

An important policy challenge in combating coordinated influence operations is to estimate the size of their operations in real time, which, in turn, requires distinguishing participating accounts or content from that of normal users. Fortunately, the research community has made a great progress in detecting accounts controlled by automated approaches (i.e., bots) through developing machine learning–based tools such as Botometer . This makes it easy to identify less complex influence efforts or promotion campaigns [e.g., ], in which there are few central human-operated accounts and lots of bots surrounding them to spread their content and amplify their visibility. Detecting more complex influence operations composed of many human- or hybrid-operated accounts working in coordination, which sometimes include multiple teams targeting different types of audiences, is substantially harder than finding automation. Because foreign agents are active on multiple social media platforms—including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit—it is important to build detection tools that are not heavily dependent on platform-specific features.

We study how easy it is to distinguish influence operations from organic social media activity by assessing the performance of a platform-agnostic machine learning approach. Our method uses public activity to detect content that is part of coordinated influence operations based on human-interpretable features derived solely from content. We test this method on publicly available Twitter data on Chinese, Russian, and Venezuelan troll activity targeting the United States, as well as the Reddit dataset of Russian influence efforts. To assess how well content-based features distinguish these influence operations from random samples of general and political American users, we train and test classifiers on a monthly basis for each campaign across five prediction tasks. Content-based features perform well across period, country, platform, and prediction task. Industrialized production of influence campaign content leaves a distinctive signal in user-generated content that allows tracking of campaigns from month to month and across different accounts.

Here, we describe a series of experiments using classifiers trained on human-interpretable features to assess whether posts on a given social media platform are part of a previously observed coordinated influence operation. Our unit of analysis is the post-URL pair, making our approach platform agnostic. This, however, does not mean that we ignore platform-specific attributes such as retweets for Twitter or subreddit topics for Reddit. Rather, it means that our approach is generalizable to any platform with post-URL format. Second, we test our classifier on influence operations conducted by three different countries.

Third, in addition to Twitter data, we test our classifier on Reddit posts published by Russian IRA trolls. Fourth, we examine performance on four different out-of-sample tests. Fifth, we introduce new human-interpretable features that are specifically crafted to capture the "coordinated" nature of influence operations. We also use a set of content-based and URL domain–based features to extract more information from each post-URL pair.

We address those gaps by fixing a platform-agnostic supervised machine learning approach and systematically studying performance over time on unseen, out-of-sample data across multiple platforms, campaigns, and prediction tasks. Our unit of analysis is the post-URL pair, an object that exists on almost all social media (a post can be a tweet, Reddit comment, Facebook status update, etc.), making our approach platform agnostic. However, it does not mean that we filter out those social media posts without any URL. If a post does not include a URL, then we capture that as a separate feature (i.e., number of URLs in a post) and put zeros for its URL-related features. Our test data include posts from coordinated influence campaigns and those by random samples of American users and random samples of politically engaged Americans.

Reddit is a treasure trove of information and I browse it daily for getting content, passing time, and contributing to the Subreddits that I follow. If you also love Reddit and browse it every day, you must have encountered deleted or removed comments and posts. Now, most of the time they don't bug me, however, if there's a conversation thread that is mentioning that comment, I do feel the need to read the comment to understand what's going on. And sometimes, I am just plain curious about why a comment or post was deleted.

Well, while there is no foolproof method to get those comments back, there are some steps that you can take to uncover those deleted comments and posts. So, in this article, we are going to show you how you can read deleted Reddit posts and comments. Moving beyond our specific tests, this study shows that content-based prediction of coordinated influence efforts has a wide range of potential uses.

In this hypothetical scenario, the approach we evaluate here can be used to complement existing detection procedures. First, developing approaches to efficiently follow influence campaigns over time should be a priority. This task effectively assesses how consistent troll content is over time by seeing whether troll activity in the previous month distinguishes such activity in the current month.

Unlike our other tasks, the same troll accounts can be present in both training and test data. We therefore remove the only user-level information that we used in feature engineering, account creation date, and features related to it (e.g., days since creation, creation date before 2013, and creation date less than 90 days). We obtained fairly stable prediction performance across campaigns and months (fig. S2), with a minimum average monthly F1 score of 0.81 for Russian operations on Reddit and a maximum of 0.99 for Venezuelan operation on Twitter . Troll activity appears to be fairly predictable month to month. The simple and most easy to read deleted reddit posts and comments is with Removeddit. Overall, the results show that content-based features distinguish coordinated influence campaigns on social media.

They also provide some key insights about what makes these campaigns distinctive. First, content-based classifiers do a pretty good job of identifying posts in most campaigns. This is likely because, to achieve impact, the campaigns need to produce a lot of content, which requires a substantial workforce using templates and standard operating procedures.

Second, meta-content, how a given piece of content relates to what others are saying at that time, is an important complement to primary content. Third, as troll tactics change, the features that distinguish their activity do as well. This should make us cautious about the promise of generic unsupervised solution to the challenge of detecting coordinated political influence operations. Fourth, there is massive variation in the level of skill across campaigns.

A key scientific question is how the content of coordinated influence campaigns is different from that of other users. The experiments above provide valuable evidence on what distinguishes this activity because random forest classification algorithms provide the importance of each feature in terms of a real number. These variable importance measures give us a way to assess the importance of different features for detection of social media influence operations. Here, we review the key features across campaigns for task 3 and report the top 10 features that most often have monthly variable importance of 0.1 or greater in table S5.

Long known as a darker corner of the web, where anything goes within discussions, in more recent years, the platform has sought to clean up its act, in order to maximize the revenue potential of its now 430 million monthly active users. If Reddit's seen as a lawless slanging match for web trolls, advertisers won't want any part of it - which is also why Reddit recently removed 2,000 controversial subreddits after updating its rules around hate speech. Probably the hardest test for a supervised classifier in this space is identifying activity by previously unseen accounts that are part of a previously observed effort. We simulate this challenge by training classifiers on all available troll social media posts in month t − 1 and testing on social media posts in month t by trolls who were not active in t − 1 (fig. S3). The duration of analyses in these tests is shorter than for task 1 or 2 because of the low number of new users in some periods.

In reporting average results, we restrict attention to months with at least 1000 troll tweets, or 500 Reddit posts, in the test set . WaybackMachine is an internet archiving service that takes snapshots of internet web pages and caches them so that you can find anything which has been deleted. This was created to preserve the history of the internet so people can go way back in time to see what the internet looked like at specific dates.

The good thing is that you can use this tool to read deleted posts and comments. Since the website saves a screenshot every day, you have a high chance of finding the deleted post. There are some cases in which removed posts don't have accessible images. If users delete their own content , the images seem to truly disappear from the site, including any comment history.

If a user doesn't take this action, there's not much moderators can do to truly delete content that breaks Reddit's rules, other than report it to Reddit. Moderator-removed reposts, like this one from r/goldenretrievers, are still visible on the site in moderators' comment histories. To better understand how easy it is to distinguish such activity from that of normal users, we developed a platform-agnostic supervised learning approach to classifying posts as being part of a coordinated influence operation or not.

To assess variation in the predictability of industrialized influence operations, we evaluate the system's performance on a monthly basis across four different influence campaigns on two platforms in four distinct tests . Although the differences between normal users and trolls are quite dynamic, we focus on monthly results for several reasons. First, we want to set a lower bound on content-based detection. Second, there are relatively few weeks with enough posts by new troll accounts to make task 3 meaningful. Third, in practice, weekly retraining would require weekly deliveries of annotated troll data from the platforms or other sources, which is unrealistic given the investigative process. Across 14 experiments on tasks 1 to 4 , an out-of-the-box random forest classifier applied to a rich vector of human-interpretable content-based features performs well at distinguishing influence operation activity from normal users.

The features that distinguish coordinated influence operation's content are quite dynamic, suggesting that any application of machine learning to this detection challenge must involve frequent retraining. These are the best 6 ways to read deleted posts and comments on Reddit. These are the most popular ways and should work each time you wish to read deleted posts and comments on Reddit. Does anyone has ever wondered about to view deleted reddit posts and comments? Then don't worry because it can be solved with the help of third-party websites.

Because our goal is to assess the basic scientific question of how well content-based features predict social media influence operations over time and across campaigns, we do not optimize the machine learning stage of our process. This ensures that we have the same parameters for all classifiers, making our tests apples-to-apples and oranges-to-oranges comparisons. Instead, we use an out-of-the-box random forest algorithm, learn only on 1 month of training data, use the default classification threshold of 0.5, and do no hyperparameter tuning. The results in this section therefore represent a lower bound on the performance of content-based classifiers. Unreddit is another chrome extension that fits the best alternative to the Un-delete Reddit comments extension.

It works similar to Un-delete, but you can also read deleted Reddit posts along with deleted comments. This feature is limited to comments on "Un-Delete" chrome tools. Unreddit is another Chrome extension that can help you to read deleted Reddit comments and also show removed Reddit posts. To use this extension, Go to the Chrome extension store and type "Unreddit" in the search box. Click the first option and click the "Add to Chrome" button.

On the following popup box, Click "Add Extension" and wait until the extension is added. The extension will automatically retrieve all the deleted comments for that post and show them to you. Turning to Chinese operations, content-based features provide an average monthly F1 score of 0.89 for identifying activity by new Chinese trolls over the 36-month period from January 2016 to December 2018 (fig. S3D). The predictive performance of the classifiers shows cycles of gradually decreasing over 6-month intervals to approximately 0.7 and then increasing to greater than 0.9.

This pattern matches the regular cycles of new account creation in the Chinese influence operations evident in the lower panel of fig. You will find replicas of all the most sought-after sneaker brands. Photos, unboxings, videos and reviews with tips and tricks on where to buy them. One technique is for users to share their instant messaging ID in the comments section of the post for redditors to get in touch directly. The fact that you can private message any user makes this rule impossible to monitor. In addition to this, the product pictures often have the seller's number and website in the background.

They may eventually get taken down by a moderator, but by that time it has caught the attention of many users. If a reddit member gets blocked, all they have to do is create a new anonymous account and start over. Reddit has millions of posts and comments, and it's easy to stumble across ones that were removed or deleted. That can leave you wondering what happened, and it's frustrating to feel like you missed out on something. Fortunately, there is a way to see deleted posts and comments without too much hassle. We will give you a list of the best third-party options designed to reveal content that was already removed from Reddit.

Ceddit works similar to Reddit and allows you to read deleted posts and comments by replacing the URL. At times, you might see this tool down or non-operable, but it is the best alternative to removeddit. Reddit is an online discussion website that gets hundreds of questions and comments posted on the platform on a daily basis and a lot of people use this website daily for discussion, Gain knowledge, or just to pass their time.

These design choices enable fuller anonymization of potential input data (important, e.g., if one wanted to extend the approach to Facebook data) and minimize compute requirements. In addition, as much as we would like to use Botometer score as a feature, unfortunately, it is not possible to obtain bot score for troll accounts. The reason is that Botometer uses Twitter API to fetch public profile and tweets of an account, and because these troll accounts have already been removed by Twitter, Botometer cannot work and yields error message. Because of space limit, we only demonstrate the results for Russian Twitter campaign in this section and report the rest in table S6.

We also excluded task 5 because it is based on a reduced set of features and therefore not comparable to others tasks. Compared to baseline, adding meta-content features on average increases the F1 score by 6.5 percentage points across our four tests. Content-level timing features are not effective and add little to the performance (after accounting for other aspects of the content they produced, the fact that many IRA trolls worked St. Petersburg hours in 2016 does not appear to be important). Account-level timing, however, increases the F1 score by 4.3 percentage points, on average, across various tests.

Similar patterns can be observed in results from the other campaigns . Last, including network features (e.g., various attributes of the co-shared and co-occurring hashtags network) has mixed effects on the prediction performance. In some cases, it leads to better performance, but in most of the cases, it has zero or negative effects; hence, their exclusion from the results above . Even in this test, detecting Venezuelan troll activity is relatively easy. Our approach produces an average monthly F1 score of 0.92 for the 10-month period between October 2016 and January 2018, with new users in this campaign. The performance drop in October 2016 is due to a sudden increase in the number of newly created accounts.

Similarly, the drop in July 2017 is a function in part of the addition of 190 new accounts in that month. When a large number of new accounts become active, that likely represents a shift into topically new content, making the classification task harder than if a small number of new accounts are being activated to comment on previously discussed topics. The ban was on the grounds that some posts incited violence, and the community had engaged in harassment on other subreddits. It will have removed hundreds of thousands of posts, and millions of comments going back many years. Though Reddit is sometimes criticized for its short list of rules, the company has in some respects given itself more enforcement latitude than the other big platforms. Reddit prohibits not just individual users from trying to create new accounts and get back on the site after they've been kicked off, but also entire communities.

If a subreddit is shut down, the same people can't create a new subreddit discussing the same topic. So in effect, even though Reddit has never come out and said, "QAnon is against the rules," once the major QAnon communities broke the rules, re-creating them became against policy. That's not something Facebook has ever attempted, or that Twitter realistically could. The most obvious—and least replicable—factor in Reddit's success is its timing. Reddit's QAnon problem started several years ago, before QAnon became as much a part of offline culture as it was a part of online culture. Reddit was able to isolate QAnon's influence on its platform before the community grew too large to control.

Now Facebook has to deal with QAnon as a full-fledged social movement. It reemerges on the site, over and over, because it has such life off the site, James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told me. "It's a problem on Facebook because it's a problem in society," he said. The mostly boring, basic facts of Reddit's infrastructure play a role too, says Robyn Caplan, a platform-governance researcher and doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. Though conversations on Reddit are open to all users, they are somewhat siloed in that they have to occur in a specific subreddit. So those were the 4 methods that you can use to read deleted comments and posts on Reddit.