•The platform removed 877 pieces of terrorist content from the platform, resulting in 854 accounts being deleted. Majority of this was from the Middle Eastern region.
•This 258 percent surge has been attributed to improved detection tools for copyright violations and an expanded team to address them.
Image: FILE
US based social media platform, Reddit has revealed that Kenya is yet to report any cases of copyright infringements despite the push to fight pirating.
In its latest transparency report, the firm said that Kenya and five leading economies in Africa are not reporting cases of infringement or terror related activities on its platform.
The report shows that the social media platform gets 12 million active visits from Kenya per month, or just 0.23 percent of the its total traffic.
Nigeria is not far off with 14 million (0.26 percent) active monthly visits, South Africa 18 million active visits.
Egypt fairs a bit better with 20 million active visits than Kenya per month. This accounts for 0.36% of the total monthly traffic.
According to Reddit, in 2023, Sub-Saharan Africa emerged as the region with the highest number of terrorist attacks worldwide.
The platform removed 877 pieces of terrorist content from the platform, resulting in 854 accounts being deleted. Majority of this was from the Middle Eastern region.
Despite the increasing use of the social media by terrorists for recruitment, fundraising, and spreading propaganda, its does not seem to be their platform of choice in Africa based on the low number of reports from the region.
Additionally, the report further reveals a significant rise in user bans due to copyright infringement in the latter half of 2023.
This 258 percent surge has been attributed to improved detection tools for copyright violations and an expanded team to address them.
“Interestingly, despite the increase in user bans, the number of content items removed following copyright complaints actually decreased, totaling just over 500,000. Many takedown requests are denied because the content has already been deleted,” the report reads in Part.
The report, covering the period from July 1st to December 31st, 2023, provides data on legal removal requests received by Reddit.
These requests typically come from governments, law enforcement agencies, and private entities, and they are made to remove content either through court orders or other forms of requests.
During the entire second half of 2023, no legal removal requests were made by any African state or legal entity.
Reddit received a total of 121 requests from 19 countries during this period. Russia, involved in a conflict with Ukraine, led the list with 25 requests, followed by the UAE with 23 requests.
The platform is one of the most popular users generated content (UGC) forums in the world.
As it puts user content first, people turn to the platform they are looking for information.
United States has the most users. The United Kingdom and Canada come second and third in terms of Reddit users.
Australia is responsible for about 3.9 percent of all Reddit users, while Germany is responsible for about 3.4 percent of all Reddit users.
Perhaps the number of legal removal requests is representative of active usage. A Geopoll study in 2023 revealed that across Africa, Reddit only has 6 percent user rate.
This places the platform bottom of the list that ranks only major social media platforms. In fact, in a recent survey by Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), Reddit did not get featured.