Reddit: Evidence shows suspected Russian role in disinformation campaign ahead of U.K. election

The social media company Reddit said Friday that it has detected a suspected Russian disinformation campaign on the site intended to spread classified British documents ahead of next week's U.K. election.

A social media analytics firm also suggested in a report this week that Russian tactics played some role in the leak of the documents last month, which caused a commotion as they detailed U.S. and British discussions leading up to Brexit. The leak also showed that U.S. officials wanted the vaunted public National Health Service to be “on the table” in any post-Brexit talks — a claim that bolstered an attack line by the opposition Labor Party and fed allegations that the ruling Conservatives were putting the system up for sale.

In a statement outlining how it tied the latest campaign back to Russia, Reddit said it believes the post was connected to similar disinformation efforts that Facebook discovered earlier this year.

In an analysis of the earlier campaign, which Facebook took down in May, the Washington think-tank the Atlantic Council called the operation the "Secondary Infektion."

"The operation was strongly reminiscent of the Soviet-era 'Operation Infektion' that accused the United States of creating the AIDS virus," according to an Atlantic Council blog post at the time. "The latest operation ... used a similar technique by planting false stories on the far reaches of the internet before amplifying them with Facebook accounts run from Russia."

The Atlantic Council said the size, scope and sophistication of the effort suggested it was developed by an intelligence operation.

Reddit said Friday that it confirmed "a pattern of coordination" that linked the recent suspicious post on its platform to the much larger campaign on Facebook. Suspicious accounts on Reddit linked to the post "have the same shared pattern as the original Secondary Infektion group detected, causing us to believe that this was indeed tied to the original group."

The company said it banned one "subreddit" discussion forum and 61 accounts as a result of its investigation.