Mass hijacking spree takes over subreddits to promote Donald Trump

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Dozens of discussion groups on Reddit—including those dedicated to the National Football League, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Gorillaz—were hit in a Friday morning mass takeover spree that used the subreddits to spread messages promoting President Trump.

The hijacked accounts had tens of millions of combined members. The 148,000-member subreddit Supernatural, dedicated to the TV show by the same name, was emblazoned with pro-Trump images and slogans. Reddit personnel have since restored the moderator account to its rightful owner. The image above is how the subreddit appeared when the takeover was still active. The takeovers came five weeks after Reddit banned /r/The_Donald, a leading forum for fans of the president, and hundreds of other unrelated subreddits for violating recently rewritten content rules.

Reddit personnel published this post captioned, “Ongoing incident with compromised mod accounts.” Reddit personnel then warned that moderator accounts were being compromised and used to vandalize subreddits. It asked moderators of affected subreddits to report them in responses. At the time this post when live, the list of reported subreddits included:

A larger list of subreddits reported as compromised is available at the incident report linked above.

Reddit investigates

Reddit officials issued the following statement: “An investigation is underway related to a series of vandalized communities. It appears the source of the attacks were compromised moderator accounts. We are working to lock down those accounts and restore impacted communities.”