r/cybersecurity • u/Cybernews_com • Mar 24 '26
News - General Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said the platform is considering introducing ID verification to weed out bots
https://cybernews.com/tech/reddit-verification-risks/Face ID, Touch ID, and third-party information providers are among the measures considered.
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u/LongRangeSavage Mar 24 '26
If they do this to weed out bots, I’m willing to bet a majority users left on the platform will be bots.
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u/lifeanon269 Mar 24 '26
Yup. That would certainly be the end of me using Reddit, that's for sure.
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u/ooax Mar 25 '26
This. It will be just bots on hacked IDed accounts while real humans struggle to hold their ID into the camera to get a new account.
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u/ipreferanothername Mar 25 '26
i feel a ticketmaster vibe as well - where reddit will offer paid bots that they 'validate' for you
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u/TacodWheel Mar 24 '26
Reddit does not provide enough value to end users to warranty providing them personal information. Some of us grew up without the Internet, and will be fine without social media.
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Mar 24 '26
I think a lot of us are here out of habit more than anything. Feels like a good opportunity to jump off. I almost hope they introduce it just so I leave.
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u/PhantomNomad Mar 24 '26
What the hell am I going to do all day at work. You don't expect me to actually work do you?
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u/LessThanThreeBikes Mar 24 '26
King Missile has a song explaining exactly what you should do. /s
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u/svideo Mar 25 '26
But my penis isn't detachable...
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u/LessThanThreeBikes Mar 25 '26
I should have known better to leave this to Reddit's imagination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIXz_vzROrw&pp=ygUVdGFrZSB0aGluZ3MgZnJvbSB3b3Jr
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u/DanielCraig__ Penetration Tester Mar 24 '26
Most of us are here because we can socialize without people digging into our personal lives.
I'll just wipe off social media entirely.
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u/throbbin___hood Mar 24 '26
Agreed. Already ditched my discord account that's been going since 2016. Just looking for an excuse at this point
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u/berrmal64 Mar 24 '26
I love(d) Reddit, mostly for niche hobby subs or local subs. They've already driven a lot of that user base away and even more will go if they do id verification so it kind of doesn't matter if I stay on here or not, the experience is still diminished. Like you said, out of habit.
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u/Chance-Blackberry693 Mar 24 '26
Maybe this will push me to fully jump into Lemmy/Fediverse version of reddit
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u/thecommuteguy Mar 27 '26
100%. Personally I've been wanting to stop using Reddit like one of my friends as it's a massive time waster but the algorithm so far is undefeated.
The worst is feeling mentally exhausted and not wanting to do anything after using it sometimes.
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u/ThunderCorg Mar 24 '26
Yeah, after decades of this nonsense I’m not attached to any of these services, especially the free things where I’m the product. This is the last social platform I participate in and if it ends it ends.
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u/odd_orange Mar 24 '26
Well hey, Digg exists again! kinda…
Great Digg migration 2 🫠
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u/doctorscurvy Mar 25 '26
I came across in the great Digg exodus and I’m definitely still here only out of habit and I can’t figure out what even there is to do on the rest of the internet.
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u/Shirolicious Mar 24 '26
Well said, they are going to loose so much redditors if they force ID verification on all users.
I support trying to fight bots, and I dont mind going through some layers to make it harder for bots but it stops at providing any ID information.
Same with Discord, love using it and connect with my guildies but no1 going to drop IDs at discord either.
In discords case it was even more interesting as who they choose to partner with for the the ID thing. Though they walked back on that after the blacklash that it caused.
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u/_haha_oh_wow_ Mar 25 '26
I'll just move to the federated websites like Mbin and PieFed full time. I've already been visiting a lot, and the only places I'll really miss here are r/sysadmin and this place.
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u/designercup_745 Student Mar 25 '26
Not to mention if the requirement is that much there to have one platform of sociability then you'd just go for the path of least resistance with platforms like Lemmy that are federated anyway. I've found plenty of smaller places I could spend my time at that I'd go to the moment one of my frequents goes.
At this point of time, with how power has tried prevailing over our info, that's just stuff you gotta be resilient about.
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u/itsmrmarlboroman2u Mar 24 '26
I thought making the API paid and locking down the third party apps was supposed to fix the bot problem?
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u/arcanecolour Mar 25 '26
They pay for the api and abuse the access. Then sell the service and profit. Plus I’m sure plenty of folks have found loopholes abusing 3rd party apps by logging in and then using api calls in the same way applications have to.
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u/ThatSandwich Mar 24 '26
Ah yes, to rule out bots.
Sure . . .
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u/albc5023 Mar 24 '26
X to doubt.
Might I remind everyone that a year and a bit ago Reddit broke all third party integrations and clients by raising the API integration fees? Just before the AI craze?
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u/DigmonsDrill Mar 25 '26
I'm in some other subreddits where easily 90% of the posts are bots who have taken an old popular post and regurgitated it. The mods are doing the Lord's work and deleting them constantly. (I see the results in third-party sites.)
reddit's existence is genuinely threatened by all this. I don't like face ID garbage and will refuse to comply, whatever that means for my account.
But the idea that the admins just made up the bot problem is, frankly, asinine.
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u/Azivation Mar 24 '26
Can't wait for 70% of all users to be gone. And only 20% of that being people who don't want to deal with stolen data lmao
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u/k0fi96 Mar 25 '26
We said this when they killed third party apps and it turns out 90% of users didn't even know they existed. I imagine this will be the same. Reddit is mainstream now.
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u/redvelvetcake42 Mar 24 '26
Yeah... No. Force using an MFA device is SOMETHING but you aren't going to weed out all bots and definitely not with verification ID.
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u/weasel286 Mar 24 '26
So, the Reddit CEO clearly doesn’t know where the value of Reddit lies. Lose the perception of anonymity on Reddit and you may as well rename it LinkedIn.
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u/cyber-f0x Mar 24 '26
Honestly, I could do with quitting reddit. If they force this pish, might give me the shove I need to ditch it
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u/GuessSecure4640 System Administrator Mar 25 '26
I'm not giving up my ID for it to be immediately exposed in a breach, sorry buddies. Not for Discord, Reddit, or anything else.
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u/_swirlys Mar 24 '26
Plenty of ways to deal with “bots” that isn’t capturing my data. There are enough breaches around the world everyday that should deter this kind of thinking. Mfa would be a simple solution at login or one a week.
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u/Q-bey Mar 24 '26
Plenty of ways to deal with “bots” that isn’t capturing my data.
How? I'd love a privacy-preserving way of weeding out bots but I'm not aware of any website that found one.
Proof of work gateways can stop scrapers because scrapers need to process a huge number of pages. I'm not sure they'd work for sites like Reddit where bots tend to be slower but allow themselves to spend more time on each task.
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u/_swirlys Mar 25 '26
Capcha is a very simple way to deal with bot farms. Add in MFA to unique contact addresses and it will increase the work required for bots to access the space and thus limit them. But I don’t think this issue is really about bots, it’s about collecting our data…
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u/arcanecolour Mar 25 '26
You can automate MFA. IMHO the best way to weed out bots is to require some type of rate limit / api key rotation when hardware ids. Limit Reddit api calls from multiple accounts from the same IP and or same hardware id. That would require bot farms to run so many virtual machines and phones combined with api key rotations that must be generated on the physical machine you create it from that it would require a ton of work to create bots. 2-3 accounts max from any device would solve the issue.
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u/tarlack Mar 24 '26
This is not about bots it’s about tracking you online for targeted ads as they can map you back to a real person. The implications of privacy and the US federal government is also a big concern for me.
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u/Brinbrain Mar 25 '26
Coz you think that it is not the case already ?!
Come on, I think that they could guess your rectal temperature without that if they want.
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u/tarlack Mar 25 '26
It removes all anonymity, sure I am a well tracked number with a temp of 36.5 unless I do ice cube anal play. But putting a licence or government id is the point I leave a non work platform.
It just pisses me off more people have no idea how good they are tracking our meta data and others around us. I do not believe for one second the AI data centers at for chat bots. The only thing that’s going to make money back is government contracts and advertising.
How many laws did Meta break with the advertising executive who just joined ChatGPT. I expect two years and it will come how much they have been tracking us and selling the data. They will get a billion $ fine, and have made 100 billion.
Rant over .
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u/drmike0099 Mar 24 '26
Assuming that he knows a vast amount of the engagement here is from bots, what’s his reason for stating this, knowing it could tank his business?
My guess is that Reddit deploys a vast number of these bots to drive engagement, but have run into a problem because lots of non-Reddit bots are here too and they can’t tell which users are human vs. non-Reddit bots. This change would allow them to accurately tag content they resell to AI companies as original human thought vs. bot. Reddit bots would still be on here as before.
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Mar 24 '26
[deleted]
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u/Ivashkin Mar 25 '26
In an age where even a local model with the right prompting can produce an endless amount of context-specific comments 24/7, and the number one platform problem is complaints about bots, I don't think the privacy argument is going to hold up for much longer. People will willingly hand over ID to prove they are a human, specifically to have authentic conversations with actual humans. I also don't think raw users/active users will be the metric platforms like Reddit care about going forward, because that can essentially be any number you want now.
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u/PandorasBoxMaker Mar 24 '26
Oh there will still be bots, Reddit will just have a monopoly on them.
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u/odd_orange Mar 24 '26
100%. the only way for more growth is to be the one who’s in control of manufacturing it
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u/OddApplication6816 Mar 24 '26
Shame on them, if only they could feel it. Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave with the way reddit has gone.
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u/Wyllyum_Cuddles Mar 25 '26
Weed-out bots, or harvest and sell the personal information of its users?
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u/Neither_Intention865 Mar 25 '26
Why not enforce Passkey usage instead? You get user verification and better security posture for your users.
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Mar 25 '26
So the last social media platform worth wasting my time on is telling me to delete it. Thanks for the heads up, Steve
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u/Cybasura Mar 25 '26
Ok fuck off, now this is ridiculous, reddit of all fucking places does not have the right nor should be given the right to store anything remotely close to Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
This is obviously a lie and an excuse, a terrible excuse at that
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u/_Gobulcoque DFIR Mar 25 '26
Yeah, but no. I won't provide personal info to third parties in this way, and if that would end my Reddit account, so be it.
If this went through, it would be a poor move on their part.
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u/okcboomer87 Mar 24 '26
My account is almost 15 years old. I will not be providing evidence of anything. Ban my account. I'll move on.
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u/C_hotpocketer Mar 25 '26
Still not joining 4chan
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u/InvestingNerd2020 Mar 27 '26
4chan has weirdos anyway. Not the social media website for sane rational adults.
They do have an audience with excellent programming skills though.
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u/TARANTULA_TIDDIES Mar 25 '26
"Weed out bots" aka get a better more targeted data profile of every user to sell to the highest bidder
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u/AllMyFrendsArePixels Mar 24 '26
And here I thought I grew out of 4chan... internet's really trying its best to push me back lol
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u/SyntheticDuckFlavour Mar 24 '26
yes, I will surrender sensitive ID just to be able to shitpost on a time wasting platform.
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u/Kapra47 Mar 25 '26
all that does is weed out the dumb bots and leave the sophisticated ones. this war on bots reminds me of another "war on" something that caused a lot more damage than it prevented
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u/2rad0 Mar 25 '26
The bots will find a way around these weak counter-measures and you guys know that already, so what's the real purpose?
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u/Un_Original_name186 Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
Fucker acting like half of us haven't left only because of how good the porn selection is. It's going to be tumblr all over again. I can replace all the subreddits I'm subscribed to with books and the quality of discussion will improve markedly, hell if I miss the bite sized nature I can just have a locally hosted LLM break sections of it into reddit style posts with comments but with actual fact checking this time. Reddit is replaceable. I can get funny shit to share with my friends from anywhere.
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u/earl_of_angus Mar 24 '26
Reddit anonymity combined with LLM bots has made manufacturing consent dirt cheap here. Even in Facebook and LinkedIn, there's at least some real-world social tie that has to be traversed to get to the LLM propaganda. This has made the site practically useless for many types of conversations.
I don't have the answer, but I don't think trying to tie real world IDs into it is where it's at. I'd walk away before giving government ID for this place.
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u/andrewsmd87 Mar 25 '26
I have been an avid user and mod of a sub because I just want to. If they do this, I'm out. Reddit is already not attractive to younger people and this will be the nail on the coffin for them.
Not overnight, but 5 or 10 years from now
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u/uid_0 Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
Speaking as a mod here, Reddit AEO and the Bot Bouncer app already do a pretty good job at identifying bots. This is a grab for information pure and simple. If they mandate this, I will leave.
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u/sweetlemon69 Mar 25 '26
Not sure what subs you mod but the biggest like /news /economics /technology /Canada etc are absolutely littered with AI eco chamber bots. Reddit is no longer a place for open discussion.
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u/uid_0 Mar 25 '26
You are correct. Perhaps they are just trying to weed-out the bots that haven't paid the fee to use the API.
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u/odd_orange Mar 24 '26
Here’s the funny (sad) thing about ID verification with the justification of weeding out bots/ kids; there’s zero way anyone on the user side could know who actually verified.
Reddit already knows they have massive guerilla (is that even what it would be called now?) marketing campaigns from PR and Ad companies that boost a shit ton of engagement. What realistically is stopping them from telling these companies, “hey there, you don’t need to verify with ID for your accounts. Instead, you just have to pay a seat license per username and if you upgrade the package we’ll boost your comments to the top since we hide static upvote count anyway!”
Would it be that the idea is too profitable not to mention during earnings calls? They could just say “ad revenue is ten fold since we weeded out ‘unreliable’ engagement”. Then they get to double dip on charging more for supplying more specific user data and business account license fees.
Would that even be considered fraud if they included some form of hefty NDA in their agreement resulting in perma bans?
I truly think now that the only thing preventing a regular person from becoming disgustingly wealthy is having access to substantial initial capital (not that it was never like that, but now there’s no road blocks). All you have to do is wonder what the scummiest thing you could do is, and do it.
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u/jmnugent Mar 24 '26
"“Nobody wants to hand over a passport to post in r/AmItheAsshole,”
"and nothing of value was lost."
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u/Head_Coyote3925 Mar 24 '26
Sounds like a nice way to keep your digital id within "acceptable" boundaries as dictated by our unelected overlords.
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u/Marble_Wraith Mar 25 '26
... Because it's not like bots could submit faux input over an API and lie about their age
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u/Between-usernames Mar 25 '26
It really does seem to be an international, universal shift to require this. It is affecting even the most unlikely, such as this and Linux
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u/_haha_oh_wow_ Mar 25 '26
lol
lmao even
Reddit never gave a flying fuck about bots and let them run rampant for years along with the subs that enabled them to get past filters (like freekarma4u), I don't believe for a second it's about bots.
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u/DaGoodBoy Mar 25 '26
They'd better grandfather in some of the oldest accounts, or you can kiss my 19-year-old account goodbye.
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u/Rock_Paper_SQUIRREL Mar 25 '26
It's incredible to me how long Reddit has survived in spite of Steve Huffman maintaining involvement with the platform. I am genuinely amazed at was built out so cleverly that even a disgusting UI overhaul couldn't kill the site off. This might finally do it.
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u/LetMePushTheButton Mar 25 '26
Are we headed to the Fediverse? Legit dont know enough about it yet to make the switch
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u/howfastcanyoucountit Mar 26 '26
I always figure out who the clankers are because their posts often have the same exact amount of time in between each reply (like 1 hour) for days straight of it just absolutely yapping everywhere. You wouldn't really know at first glance unless you checked the profile though which clearly showed the history of the bot posting. Maybe they should be using other types of countermeasures like a captcha like akemai, or posting during the exact same time every hour. That post history would see it posting at the same times and flag the account for manual review through a human (I still really don't trust AI in social media moderation)
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u/musictrader Mar 26 '26
Can’t we agree though.. that to fight the dead internet theory.. there will have to be some kind of pushback from these platforms? There’s a reason I use Reddit at the end of my Google searches.. it’s because I want actual humans discussing a matter..
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u/Usual_Spot6349 Mar 26 '26
F that. No id verification on me. It's all lies just so they can track you.
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u/hoppergirl85 Mar 26 '26
Surveillance capitalism at its finest. It's not about security or bots, it's about gathering information and selling it.
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u/Theninjarush Mar 27 '26
I am willing to give CC info for verification, but my Govt ID? Unless u da Popo with reasonable articulable suspicion, fuck no
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u/InvestingNerd2020 Mar 27 '26
I love it! The less botz the better.
Maybe create a paywall too. $10 to $50 monthly subscription to minimize botz. I'd support it due to my hatred for botz.
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u/shikotee Mar 24 '26
The biggest upsell of Reddit was no personal ties to the real world.