How you can prove that a human genuinely wanting the information in the page is filling that information out? Imprisoned humans are great CAPTCHA defeat bots.
I get the feeling if you really wanted a true transparency report, you would discuss government requests, but also prevalence & detection & restriction of bots, prevalence & detection & restriction of vote farming, true likelihood of random submissions doing anything, acts of reddit censorship and the underlying and reportable reasons for doing so, user tracking and sales & mining of user information.
I get the sense that nearly all social networks have a large financial incentive to either not talk about - or to minimise and downplay - the volume and impact of bots & manipulative actors.
The chance of this behaviour getting addressed is microscopic while these incentives remain as they are.
Traffic quality analysis is often far worse at a lot of these sorts of companies than you'd expect. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have an accurate analysis on the full scope of bots on their network.
Consider that if they study the problem they may discover the problem is severe and they can't fix it. Now they have an even more serious problem: If they lie about the existence of the report, they're defrauding advertisers. If they admit the contents of the report, advertisers and users will flee.
So it's rational for them to not look in the first place. If they don't know, then they're not technically lying. This is good for them, but nobody else.
This "transparency report" is similar to Google's "do no evil" thing, in the sense that it is purely a marketing/PR play, and otherwise completely and utterly meaningless.
Technology only gives you gadgetry, not morals. Hasn't anyone in Silicon Valley realized this yet? They're building a huge technological cage to control the masses.
A coworker literally said this in response to me raising objections over Saudi investment: "I believe Chomsky remarked that socially responsible investing is a contradiction in terms." And I must say, the logic is impeccable: money is incompatible with morals, therefore morals are worthless.
The headline is clearly wrong. Maybe they should have said "current trees". The tree tech has already been invented to circumnavigate present restrictions in tree biological restrictions. Very clickbait-y.
Reddit has been known to be quite susceptible to shills for sometime. It is a source of both fake news and swayed opinion in favor of whoever has the most money to throw at it. I'm not saying that other places are immune to this, but the problems with reddit are actually very well documented, and management seems not to care. It's even possible they are shilling themselves.
Also, reddit has changed comments before, or their CEO has. They have probably also banned people for less than transparent reasons.
Twitter is even worse with their shadow banning, and limiting viewership of twitter accounts, censorship of mainstream conservatives, while notably not censoring known terrorist accounts.
Youtube is known for allowing pedophilia posts, but having conservative politics also gets people banned.
I like mastodon, but I haven't used it enough yet to have a real opinion.
Also scuttblebutt (https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/) looks very promising but has made little real progress into mainstream as of yet.
Just a point of clarity - I am registered green party, but I don't think you can have true democracy with media manipulation.
How you can prove that a human genuinely wanting the information in the page is filling that information out? Imprisoned humans are great CAPTCHA defeat bots.