Reddit confronts bots with new ‘human verification’ requirements for suspicious behavior

Digg, a potential competitor to Reddit, was shut down because it couldn’t handle the bots sweeping its site. On Wednesday, Reddit said it was taking on the challenge itself.

The company will begin labeling bot accounts that provide a service to users, similar to how “good bots” are rated on X, and will now require accounts suspected of being bots to verify if they are human.

Reddit stresses that this will not be a site-wide verification requirement, and will only happen if there is something that indicates the account is not human, including its activity on the site or other technical signs. If an account can’t pass the test, it may be restricted, Reddit said.

To identify potential bots, Reddit uses specialized tools that look at account-level signals and other factors — such as how quickly an account is trying to write or post content. However, using AI to write posts or comments is not against its policies (although community moderators may set their own rules).

To verify that 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, use government IDs. Reddit notes that this last category may be required in some countries such as the UK, Australia, and some US states, due to local regulations regarding age verification, but it is not the company’s preferred method.

“If we want to verify that an account is human, we will do so in a privacy-first way,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote in the announcement on Wednesday. “Our goal is to make sure there is a person behind the account, not who that person is. The goal is to increase transparency about what’s on Reddit while maintaining the anonymity that makes Reddit unique. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other.”

The changes aim to address the growing problem of bots participating in social platforms and the wider web, where they are often used to influence politics, spread misinformation, inflate popularity, secretly market products, generate fake ad clicks, and more. According to Cloudflare, traffic from bots will exceed human traffic by 2027, when you include bots like web crawlers and AI agents into the mix.

Reddit, in particular, has become a popular destination for bots that attempt to manipulate narratives, wily weeds to promote companies or their products, repost links, spread spam, drive traffic, conduct research, and more. Additionally, since Reddit content is used for AI training thanks to lucrative deals with AI model providers, there is suspicion that bots are posting questions on the site to generate more training data, especially in areas where AI lacks information.

Alexis Ohanian, another co-founder of Reddit, also addressed a related issue known as the “dead internet theory,” a conjecture that bots outnumber humans on the Internet and that the vast majority of content, interactions, and web activity on the Internet are automated or generated by artificial intelligence, not humans. In the age of artificial intelligence agents, theory has become reality.

The company announced last year that it would begin requiring human verification in response to the growing number of bots and the need to meet “evolving regulatory requirements.” But today the company points out that current solutions, which Hoffman recently discussed on the TBPN podcast, are not the best.

“The best long-term solutions will be decentralized, individualized, private, and ideally not requiring ID at all,” Hoffman wrote in today’s announcement.

Along with these changes, Reddit said it will continue to remove bots and spam, averaging 100,000 account removals per day, and is based on reports of suspected bots, with improved tools in the future. Developers who use so-called good bots can learn more about their classification using the new “APP” tag in the r/redditdev community.