How Reddit Deals with Data for Deleted and Banned Accounts

1. Introduction

When Reddit bans an account, what happens to that account's data? Is all of it deleted? This article starts from that question.

The question is less simple than it looks, because "data" can mean two different things. One is what other people can still see on the site: the account's profile, posts, comments, images and videos. The other is what Reddit keeps on its own servers, such as IP addresses and backups. A ban could remove both, one or neither. It could also mean only that the person can no longer use the account.

Reddit's own Help Center pages explain what a banned profile looks like, and they explain in some detail what happens when users delete their own accounts. Whether they also say what happens to a banned account's data, for example through a deletion or retention timeline, is the gap this article sets out to address. Where Reddit's pages are silent, the answer has to be pieced together from indirect evidence.

This article asks two questions:

1. What do Reddit's current Help Center pages and privacy policy, an archived Reddit privacy policy and earlier news reports say happens to the data and content of banned accounts?
2. In an archive of 1,524 Reddit accounts, how many are now banned or deleted, and does Reddit still serve the images and videos those accounts posted?

The first question is answered from documents. The second is answered by measurement, which can speak only to what is publicly served, not to what Reddit holds on its servers.

Section 2 defines the terms used and gives background on Reddit's rules on bans and deletion. Section 3 describes the documents and the measurements. Section 4 reports the findings, including what the earlier sources said, and Section 5 discusses what they mean and where they fall short.

2. Background and Related Work

Terms used in this article

In this article, "ban" means any action by Reddit that stops a person from using an account. Reddit's Help Center pages distinguish temporary bans from permanent bans [4, 5]. The enforcement page lists "terminate" next to "permanently ban" without saying how the two differ [6]. "Suspension" is the word the 2015 report uses for the system that replaced shadowbans [12], and this article treats those suspensions as bans. "Deletion" means that an account no longer exists. Voluntary deletion is deletion by the account holder.

Bans and deletion are separate tools

Reddit uses the word "ban" for more than one action. Its current Help Center pages distinguish bans "for violating Reddit Rules" from bans for "spam, inauthentic activity, or ban evasion" (read on 2026-09-30) [4, 5]. They also distinguish temporary from permanent bans. Separately, users can delete their own accounts. These different ways an account can leave active use form the background to the question of what gets deleted.

Earlier sources

Reddit's rules on bans and deletion have changed over time. In 2015, Reddit replaced its earlier shadowban system with account suspensions [12]. Three earlier sources describe the rules of their time: a 2013 news article on Reddit's privacy policy [2], a 2015 report on the move to account suspensions [12] and an archived copy of Reddit's privacy policy, effective 2016-11-22 [10]. What they say is reported in Section 4.3.

A 2018 TechCrunch report, dated 2018-04-11, gives an example of a ban in practice. After Reddit banned 944 accounts linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency, the report says, "the site has preserved all of the activity from these accounts for users to peruse" (read on 2026-10-01) [13].

3. Methods

The article combines two kinds of evidence: a review of documents and a measurement of an archive of Reddit accounts.

3.1 Document review

On 2026-09-29, a web search was run using the question "Looking for data on how reddit deals with banned accounts. Is all the data deleted?". It returned five results from four sources. Three sources were kept: an archived copy of Reddit's privacy policy (held by the UNT Libraries Web Archive), a 2015 TechCrunch report on account suspensions and a 2013 NBC News article on Reddit's privacy policy. All three were read on 2026-09-29. The source that was not kept is described in the Appendix (Section C).

On the same day, Reddit's current Help Center pages on bans and data deletion returned an HTTP 403 error and could not be opened directly. The reason for the error is not known. On 2026-09-30, the same web search was run again, and six Help Center pages were read through the Reddit Help Center's public article feed (support.reddithelp.com/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles/<id>.json). The feed gives the full text of each page, with the dates the page was created and last edited:

• two pages on account bans [4, 5];
• one page on content moderation, enforcement and appeals [6];
• three pages on deleting data and accounts [7, 8, 9].

No other Help Center pages were sought: every web search used the same question. Reddit's current privacy policy (effective 2026-07-01, last revised 2026-05-26) was read separately, on 2026-10-01. Reddit's sites refused automated access, so the author opened the page in a browser and saved a copy of its text [11].

The full text of every page cited was saved (the Help Center pages on 2026-09-30, through the article feed, and again on 2026-10-04, the 2018 TechCrunch report on 2026-10-04, and the current privacy policy on 2026-10-01, from the author's copy of the page), and every quotation in this article was checked word for word against the saved text. No point in the Results rests on a search summary alone. How the sources were found, and the created and last-edited dates of each Help Center page, are given in the Appendix (Section C).

3.2 Account sample

The measurements use 1,524 Reddit accounts from the author's archive of scraped accounts. One further account was left out: it had been removed from the archive because of size limitations, so its media was not measured with the rest. The archive was built from August to September 2026. Accounts were not drawn at random. They were chosen because they had media, and accounts with no media were excluded. For 35 of them, however, the manifest is empty: their media had been deleted, so the collection tool saved no file (see below). The sample is therefore not a random sample of Reddit accounts.

The archive was built with the author's own collection tool from two public third-party archives of Reddit: Arctic Shift and PullPush. They are separate projects, and neither is run by Reddit. PullPush describes itself as a successor to Pushshift, an earlier Reddit archive whose access was restricted [3]. Arctic Shift offers search, an API and downloads of archived Reddit posts and comments [1]. For each account, the tool asked both archives for the account's post history, merged the two lists and removed duplicates. From each post with an image or video, it took the address of the file recorded in the archive and saved that address with the file. These saved addresses are the source URLs requested in Section 3.4. Because the archives keep posts after they are deleted on Reddit, the archive can include media from posts that were later deleted or removed.

Each account's folder has a manifest that records every file the tool saved, with its source address. All file counts in this article come from these manifests. Most addresses were Reddit's own (i.redd.it, preview.redd.it or v.redd.it). About 14% of the files saved were hosted elsewhere, almost all on RedGIFs (media.redgifs.com). Because the question is what Reddit serves, files hosted outside Reddit are left out of every count in this article. Of the accounts, 34 saved only such files (5 in the "suspended" group, 4 in the "profile not found" group, 3 deleted and 22 active), and the manifests of 35 further accounts are empty because their media had been deleted. For the 29 of these that are not banned (14 deleted, 14 active and 1 with no such account), the media was deleted by the account holders; for the 6 banned ones (5 in the "suspended" group and 1 in the "profile not found" group), it is not known who deleted it. These accounts are counted in Table 1, but they contribute no files to Table 2.

3.3 Account status

The archives store each post with its author's username as it was when the post was captured, and that username stays in the archive after Reddit stops showing it. This made it possible to check the status of each account in the sample by its username. Figure 1 shows this for one post, viewed on 2026-10-01; the post is not from the measured sample and serves only as an illustration. On Reddit, the post is still up, but its author is shown only as "[deleted]". Looking the post up by its ID in Arctic Shift returns the same post with the original username, its full text, its score and its number of comments [1]. Arctic Shift's record also gives the time the post was created and the time the archive retrieved it: the post was retrieved 33 seconds after it was posted. The username and the post's ID, subreddit, title, text and date are withheld here, in line with the Ethics Statement.

Account status was measured on 2026-09-29. For each account, the public profile feed was requested once. The profile feed is the account's public RSS feed on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/user/<name>/.rss?limit=1), which normally lists the account's newest public post or comment. For an active account, it answers with HTTP status 200 and the title overview for <name> (Table A1). The HTTP status and title of the feed were used to sort accounts into five groups: active, banned (feed: suspended), banned (feed: profile not found), deleted, and no such account. Below, the two banned groups are called the "suspended" group and the "profile not found" group, after the feed's answer. Each mapping from feed response to status was confirmed against accounts whose status was already known (one or two accounts for each status), and the mapping for the "profile not found" group was also confirmed against a random sample of its accounts (below). The feed response for each group, and the number of known accounts used to confirm it, are given in the Appendix (Table A1).

Banned accounts answered in one of two ways. Of these, 183 answered with Reddit's ban notice ("suspended"), and 101 answered "page not found" although the account still existed: its profile description was still served. A random sample of 10 of these 101 accounts was opened in a logged-in browser on 2026-09-30, and all 10 profile pages showed the account as banned. Why Reddit's feed answers these banned accounts differently is not known. Accounts whose owners hid their posts with Reddit's "Content and activity" setting are in neither group: an account using that setting was observed on 2026-09-30 to answer the feed normally, so such accounts were counted as active.

A temporary ban does not change the profile [5], so temporarily banned accounts cannot be detected from the feed and appear in the active group. The two banned groups therefore cannot reflect a temporary ban. The author takes both to correspond to the Help Center's permanent ban, or to a termination, which the pages do not distinguish. The quoted Help Center text does not use the word "suspended".

The feed could not show whether an account was deleted by its owner or removed or terminated by Reddit. The "deleted" group may therefore include both.

3.4 Media persistence

Media persistence was measured between 2026-09-29 and 2026-09-30. For each archived image or video whose original Reddit URL had been recorded (Section 3.2), that URL was requested once. A file counted as "gone" only if the request returned HTTP 404 or 410. A file counted as "still served" if its final HTTP status was in the 200 to 399 range after any redirects (301, 302, 303, 307 and 308, up to ten) had been followed. Each file was requested with HTTP HEAD. Where a server rejected HEAD (status 405), a single byte was requested instead, and a 206 reply also counted as still served. Any other status (for example 403, 429 or 503), and any request that received no response, was recorded as "no answer". In this measurement, only the status code was examined. Response bodies were not downloaded or compared with the archived files, and the targets of redirects were not recorded. A substitute or placeholder served with a success status would therefore have been counted as still served. Percentages are of the files checked. The measurement recorded how many files gave no usable answer for each account, not which files they were, so these files cannot be split by host. They stay in the denominators and are not counted as gone, which changes no share by more than 0.1 percentage point.

To test whether a success status could hide a placeholder, a content check was made on 2026-10-01. A random sample of 75 images that the measurement had not found gone was downloaded once from Reddit and compared byte for byte with the archived copies: 25 from each of the "suspended", "profile not found" and deleted groups, all hosted by Reddit (i.redd.it and preview.redd.it) and drawn with a fixed random seed. Videos, and files hosted outside Reddit, were not part of the sample. The result is reported in Section 4.5.

For banned or deleted accounts, the manifests record 34,382 Reddit-hosted files saved. Of these, 34,285 were still on the drive and were checked (32,622 images and 1,663 videos). The other 97 (75 for the "suspended" group, 17 for the "profile not found" group and 5 for deleted accounts) were no longer on the drive, so they were not checked. Counting files on any host, 53, 60 and 153 files gave no usable answer for the three groups.

For active accounts, the comparison group, the manifests record 96,899 Reddit-hosted files saved. Of these, 93,935 were on the drive and were checked, and 2,964 were not. In all, 328 gave no usable answer (any host), including 1 Reddit-hosted video from an account for which no file answered. The split by account status is given in the Appendix (Table A2). Files from the two accounts in the "no such account" group were left out of the comparison (Section 4.5).

Post dates and ban dates were not used in this analysis, so the measurement does not compare post age between status groups.

4. Results

4.1 What Reddit's current pages say about banned accounts

No page found says that banning an account deletes its data or its past content. The two pages on bans describe what the profile shows, and neither mentions deleting content or data [4, 5].

For a permanent ban, the page on bans for violating Reddit Rules says: "If you've been permanently banned, there will be a message on your profile letting people who visit it know you've been banned." (read on 2026-09-30) [4].

For a temporary ban, the page on bans for spam, inauthentic activity or ban evasion says: "If you've been temporarily banned, your profile won't change and other people on Reddit who view your profile won't know that you've been banned." (read on 2026-10-04) [5].

Both pages cover both kinds of ban. Each has the same two sentences: a temporary ban leaves the profile unchanged, and a permanent ban puts a message on the profile [4, 5]. In both cases, the profile stays up. The two kinds of ban differ only in whether visitors see a notice.

The enforcement page lists the actions Reddit may take, from "Remove the content" and "Send a warning to the user who posted it" to "Temporarily ban the user's account(s)" and "Permanently ban or terminate the user's account(s)" (read on 2026-09-30) [6]. Actions on accounts are thus listed separately from the removal of individual pieces of content. The page does not say whether "terminate" differs from "permanently ban" in how data is handled.

The page on bans for violating Reddit Rules lists what a banned user can no longer do: "While banned, you'll lose the ability to vote, post, comment, send chats to users or communities, report content, create new communities, edit wiki pages, edit posts and comments, or create self-serve ads." (read on 2026-10-04) [4]. The page on bans for spam, inauthentic activity or ban evasion gives almost the same list [5]. Neither page says whether a banned user can still delete their posts or comments.

Users can appeal: "Users may submit an appeal within six months of receiving the notification." (read on 2026-09-30) [6]. The page on bans for violating Reddit Rules gives the same window: "you can file an appeal any time within six months of receiving the ban" (read on 2026-09-30) [4].

Reddit's privacy policy mentions banned accounts once, in its section on how Reddit protects information: "if you violate our policies and your account is suspended or banned, we may store the identifiers used to create the account (such as phone number) to prevent you from creating new accounts." (read on 2026-10-01) [11]. No page found gives a timeline for retaining or deleting the data of banned accounts.

4.2 What Reddit's current pages say about deletion

The deletion pages do not mention bans. They describe what happens when data or an account is deleted.

On data in general: "Reddit promptly makes deleted data unavailable on the Reddit platform and subsequently deletes such data, unless we have a legal reason or a legitimate business need (e.g., helping protect the safety of Reddit and redditors) to retain the data for longer." (read on 2026-09-30) [7]. The same page extends the rule to others who use Reddit's data: "Any moderator, developer, researcher, or data licensee accessing Reddit public content is required by Reddit to stop displaying or using deleted content when the content is deleted by redditors or Reddit." (read on 2026-09-30) [7].

On accounts that users delete themselves: "Any posts or comments you made from your deleted account stay on Reddit, but people can't see who they came from." (read on 2026-09-30) [8]. The same page says "Your username is removed from Reddit" and "Your profile and associated data is removed from Reddit", and it treats messages like posts: "Any messages you sent or chats you took part in from your deleted account stay on Reddit, but people can't see who they came from." (read on 2026-09-30) [8].

On the server side: "Once you delete your account, we initiate a deletion process which commences within 90 days to safely remove or anonymize your account from our servers." (read on 2026-09-30) [9].

The privacy policy states the general rule: "We store the information we collect for as long as it is necessary for the purpose(s) for which we originally collected it." It adds that Reddit "may retain certain information for legitimate business purposes and/or if we believe doing so is in accordance with, or as required by, any applicable law." (read on 2026-10-01) [11]. On deleting an account, it says the profile is "no longer visible to other users and disassociated from content you posted under that account", that content posted before the deletion "will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content", and that the deletion process removes the data from Reddit's servers or keeps it "only in anonymized form" (read on 2026-10-01) [11].

On IP addresses, the privacy policy says: "Except for the IP address used to create your account, Reddit will delete any IP addresses collected after 100 days." (read on 2026-10-01) [11]. No current page found addresses backups.

4.3 What earlier sources said

2013: backups and IP addresses

A 2013 news article described Reddit's privacy policy at that time. It reported: "Reddit also keeps copies of the entire site on its servers, which are refreshed every 90 days." (read on 2026-09-29) [2]. According to the same article, the 2013 policy said that IP addresses were not deleted, even after an account was deleted [2]. The article does not say whether deleted content was kept in these copies. This is a single secondary source, and it describes the situation at that time only.

2015: from shadowbans to suspensions

A 2015 news report said of suspended users: "Their accounts are still visible in read-only mode, and they can continue to delete or edit past posts and comments." (read on 2026-09-29) [12]. In other words, suspended accounts were not wiped. Their past content stayed up, and the users themselves kept some control over it.

2016: the archived privacy policy

An archived copy of Reddit's privacy policy, labelled as effective 2016-11-22, describes what happened when a user deleted an account. It says that "the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others, unless you delete such content." (read on 2026-09-29) [10]. It also says Reddit "may also retain certain information about you as required by law or for legitimate business purposes after you delete your account" and that content "may still be viewable or available on our servers" after deletion [10]. The copy was captured on 2016-12-05; the 2012-12-06 timestamp in its web address is only the date that was requested (see Appendix, Section C).

On IP addresses, the same policy says: "Except for the IP address used to create your account, Reddit will delete any IP addresses collected after 100 days." (read on 2026-09-29) [10]. The sign-up IP address therefore sat outside the normal deletion cycle.

Apart from the 2015 report on suspensions, none of these earlier sources addresses banned accounts specifically. The 2013 and 2016 material covers deletion in general.

4.4 Account status in the archive

On 2026-09-29, 474 of the 1,524 accounts (31.1%) were banned or deleted (Table 1).

Table 1. Account status, measured 2026-09-29

4.5 Media still served

From the 474 banned or deleted accounts, 34,285 Reddit-hosted files were checked (32,622 images and 1,663 videos). Reddit no longer served 1,083 of them (3.2%) (Table 2 and Figure 2).

Table 2 deliberately leaves out the two accounts in the "no such account" group. Reddit does not know either name, which usually means the archive folder was renamed, so their status is unknown, and two accounts are too few to compare with the other groups. The two accounts hold 62 Reddit-hosted files (41 images and 21 videos), of which 17 were gone.

Table 2. Media no longer served, by account status (Reddit-hosted files), measured 2026-09-29 to 2026-09-30

Note: files hosted on RedGIFs (media.redgifs.com), a separate service not owned by Reddit, were excluded from this table and from every other count in this article, as were 77 files hosted on other sites (Section 3.2).

The share of files gone was lowest for the "suspended" group (1.7%) and highest for active accounts (6.2%). The "profile not found" group and deleted accounts fell in between (4.9% and 3.9%).

The content check (Section 3.4) found no placeholders. All 75 sampled images were identical to the archived copies, none was a placeholder, and none was redirected. With no mismatch in 75 files, the share of placeholders among such images is below about 4% (one-sided 95% bound). This applies only to images from the banned and deleted groups. Videos, and files from active accounts, were not checked this way.

5. Discussion

The short answer to the question "is all the data deleted?" is no, at least for what the public can see. Both lines of evidence point the same way, although they cover different things. The Help Center pages quoted speak about profiles, posts and comments, and they do not mention images or videos. The privacy policy counts images and videos among the public content users submit, but its rule on deleting an account speaks only of posts, comments and messages (read on 2026-10-01) [11]. The measurement covers only images and videos. The agreement between the two is therefore inferred rather than direct.

The measurement also carries one large caveat. In the main measurement, files were judged by status code only, so a placeholder or substitute served with a success status would have been counted as still served (Section 3.4). A content check of 75 images from the banned and deleted groups found all 75 identical to the archived copies, which puts the share of placeholders among such images below about 4% (Section 4.5). Videos, and files from active accounts, were not checked for content, so for them Table 2 may understate the share gone.

On the documents side, Reddit's current pages describe a ban as something that changes what the account can do and what its profile shows, not as deletion (Section 4.1) [4, 5]. The enforcement page treats banning an account and removing content as separate actions [6]. Even voluntary account deletion, the stronger step, leaves posts and comments on the site without a name attached (Section 4.2) [8, 9].

On the measurement side, judged by status code only, a permanent ban did not take an account's images and videos down: Reddit still served most checked files from both banned groups, as well as from deleted accounts (Table 2). In this sample, the share of media gone from these groups was not higher than the share gone from active accounts. This is a descriptive observation only: the sample is not random, no statistical test was made, and post ages may differ between groups (see Limitations). The small share that was gone may have been removed for reasons unrelated to the account's status, such as removal by the author or by moderators, but the measurement cannot tell which.

This data does not explain why active accounts had the highest share of files gone. One possibility is that people who still use their accounts are more likely to remove their own posts, but nothing in this study tests this.

Server-side data is a different question

Public visibility is only part of the question. The only source found that says what Reddit keeps after a ban is its privacy policy, and it names one thing: the identifiers used to create the account, such as a phone number, kept to stop the person from creating new accounts (Section 4.1) [11]. It says nothing about the account's content or other data, so the rest of the evidence is indirect.

For deleted data in general, Reddit says it makes data unavailable and later deletes it, but may keep it longer for a legal reason or a legitimate business need (Section 4.2) [7]. The 2016 policy described in Section 4.3 carried a similar exception [10], and the current privacy policy keeps it, for account deletion too (Section 4.2) [11]. A safety exception of this kind seems likely to matter for banned accounts in particular, since bans are an enforcement action, but Reddit's page does not link the two. This remains an open question.

The history in Section 4.3 also shows that retention rules change: the rule reported for 2013, that IP addresses were not deleted, had given way by 2016 to a 100-day rule for IP addresses [2, 10]. The current privacy policy keeps the 100-day rule, with the same exception for the IP address used to create the account (Section 4.2) [11]. No current source covers backups. The 90-day figure in the 2013 report and the "within 90 days" figure on today's account deletion page describe different mechanisms, and the sources found do not show that they are related [2, 9].

What banned users can do

Section 4.3 notes that in 2015, suspended users could still edit or delete their past posts and comments [12]. Today's ban pages list editing posts and comments among the abilities a banned user loses (Section 4.1) [4], so at least the ability to edit has since been removed. This matters: a banned user's past content stays up, and the user can no longer change it. The pages do not say whether banned users can still delete their content or their account, or request a copy of their data.

Copies outside Reddit

Reddit requires those who use its public content to stop using content once it is deleted (Section 4.2) [7]. Since a ban does not appear to delete content, it is unclear whether this rule reaches content from banned accounts at all.

Third-party archives can also keep what Reddit no longer shows. In the example in Figure 1 (Section 3.3), Reddit shows the author of a post as [deleted], while Arctic Shift still holds the same post with the original username, its full text, its score and its number of comments [1]. This is a single post, not from the measured sample, and its author's account was deleted rather than banned. It shows that a copy outside Reddit can keep details that Reddit itself has stopped showing.

Limitations

Documents.

• Apart from the sign-up identifiers that the privacy policy says Reddit may keep, no source describes what happens to a banned account's data on Reddit's servers, or gives a retention or deletion timeline for banned or terminated accounts. The main question can only be answered indirectly.
• The search was narrow. Every web search used the same single natural-language question (Section 3.1). The statements that no source describes a given point, and that no prior studies were found that measure what happens to content after Reddit bans an account, rest on that question alone. No search aimed at prior studies was made.
• Reddit's privacy policy was read once, on 2026-10-01, from a copy of the page that the author saved in a browser. It was last revised on 2026-05-26 and may change after it was read.
• The Help Center pages carry created and last-edited dates (Appendix, Section C), and they may have changed after they were last read on 2026-10-04. Two of them changed between 2026-09-30 and 2026-10-04 (Appendix, Section C).
• The 2013 claims about IP addresses and backups rest on a single secondary news source.

Measurements.

• The sample is not a random sample of Reddit accounts: only accounts with media files were collected, so the shares of banned and deleted accounts should not be read as rates for Reddit as a whole.
• Post age, and time since any ban, may differ between status groups, which could affect how much media is gone in each.
• A temporary ban does not change the profile, so temporarily banned accounts appear active. Only permanent bans are visible.
• Most mappings from feed response to status were confirmed on only one or two accounts of known status (Table A1). The "profile not found" group was also checked on a random sample of 10 of its 101 accounts, not on every account.
• The "deleted" group may include accounts removed or terminated by Reddit, not only accounts deleted by their owners.
• The mapping from feed response to status is observed behaviour, not a documented Reddit interface, and could change without notice.
• "Gone" shows that Reddit stopped serving a file, not why.
• In the main measurement, responses were checked by status code only. The content check covered 75 images from the banned and deleted groups, not videos or files from active accounts, so for those the shares gone may be understated. Even for images, a sample of 75 with no mismatch leaves room for a placeholder share of up to about 4%.
• Only Reddit-hosted files still on the drive were checked. Files hosted elsewhere (mostly on RedGIFs, about 14% of the files saved) were left out, and 97 Reddit-hosted files from banned or deleted accounts that the manifests record were no longer on the drive. Files with no usable answer were recorded per account, not per file, so they stay in the denominators.
• Each file was requested once, at a single point in time. The measurement does not show whether files are removed later, for example after a delay following a ban.
• That Reddit publicly serves a file says nothing about what else it keeps about the account.

Future work

Two steps would address the main limitations of the measurement. First, the content check could be extended to videos, to files from active accounts and to larger samples, to show how often a success status hides a placeholder or substitute. Second, the same files could be requested again at later dates, to show whether media from banned accounts is removed after a delay.

6. Conclusion

Reddit does not describe a ban as deletion. Judged by status code only, a permanent ban also did not stop Reddit from serving the images and videos of banned accounts: permanently banned profiles stay up, and in an archive of 1,524 accounts, Reddit had stopped serving only 1.7% of the checked images and videos from one group of banned accounts and 4.9% from the other. The main caveat is that responses were judged by status code only. A byte-for-byte check of 75 images from the banned and deleted groups found no placeholder, but videos were not checked this way, so for them these shares may be understated. Each file was also checked only once, and the posts, comments and profile text of banned accounts were not measured. Temporary bans leave the profile unchanged, so they could not be detected or measured. Even voluntary account deletion leaves posts and comments on the site.

What Reddit keeps on its servers after a ban is a separate question that the sources found answer only in part: Reddit's privacy policy says it may keep the identifiers used to create a banned account, such as a phone number, to stop new accounts being made, and it says nothing more about banned accounts. Reddit's own pages allow data to be kept longer for legal reasons or legitimate business needs, and its retention rules have changed over time. Settling the question would require a clear statement from Reddit on banned accounts.

Ethics Statement

This study used the author's archive of scraped Reddit accounts, built from August to September 2026. The archive was collected from two public third-party archives of Reddit, Arctic Shift and PullPush (Section 3.2).

For the measurements, each account's public profile feed was requested on 2026-09-29, and each archived image or video with a recorded source URL was requested once between 2026-09-29 and 2026-09-30. Only files hosted by Reddit are counted; files hosted on RedGIFs and other sites were excluded (Section 3.2).

No usernames or other details that could identify account holders are reported in this article. Results are given only as counts and shares by account status.

Conflict of Interest

The author built and operates mediawipetool.com, which offers free tools related to the subject of this article. For Reddit, the site checks which third-party archives still hold copies of a person's posts and comments and prepares a removal request for each one. For X, it lists the services known to keep copies of posts and provides request text. The tools do not submit anything on a person's behalf: each request is sent by the person themselves. The site charges nothing and has no paid tier. It accepts voluntary donations through PayPal, Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee.

Because the site exists to help people remove archived copies of deleted posts, the author has an interest in findings showing that deletion on Reddit or X does not remove those copies. To limit that bias, every statement about Reddit's rules is drawn from Reddit's own published pages, with the date each was read, and every quotation was checked word for word against a saved copy of the page. Every measurement is described with its date and method so that others can repeat it. The author received no funding from Reddit, X, or any archive operator, and has no financial relationship with them.

Data Availability

All documents used in this article are public web pages. Their addresses and the dates they were read are given in the References. The archived privacy policy is held by the UNT Libraries Web Archive [10]. The created and last-edited dates of each Help Center page are given in the Appendix (Section C). The pages may have changed since they were read (2026-09-29 to 2026-10-04). Reddit's current privacy policy was read from a copy of the page that the author saved (Section 3.1).

The account list and the per-file results are not shared, to protect the privacy of the account holders. Only the counts by account status reported in this article are available (Tables 1 and 2, and Tables A1 and A2).

References

1. Arctic Shift. 2026. Arctic Shift. Web page. https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/ Read on 2026-10-01.
2. NBC News. 2013. How to Really Delete Reddit Posts. Web page. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna51768332 Read on 2026-09-29.
3. PullPush. n.d. Announcing PullPush, a successor and further development of Pushshift. A 3rd party service to keep 3rd party apps running. Web page. https://pullpush-io.github.io/ Read on 2026-10-01.
4. Reddit Help Center. 2026. My account was banned for violating Reddit Rules. Web page. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045734511-My-account-was-banned-for-violating-Reddit-Rules Read on 2026-10-04.
5. Reddit Help Center. 2026. My account was banned for spam, inauthentic activity, or ban evasion. Web page. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045734911-My-account-was-banned-for-spam-inauthentic-activity-or-ban-evasion Read on 2026-10-04.
6. Reddit Help Center. 2026. Content Moderation, Enforcement, and Appeals. Web page. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23511059871252-Content-Moderation-Enforcement-and-Appeals Read on 2026-09-30.
7. Reddit Help Center. 2026. What happens when I delete my data?. Web page. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/24656943463828-What-happens-when-I-delete-my-data Read on 2026-09-30.
8. Reddit Help Center. 2026. If I delete my account, what happens to my username, posts, and comments?. Web page. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043047932-If-I-delete-my-account-what-happens-to-my-username-posts-and-comments Read on 2026-09-30.
9. Reddit Help Center. 2026. How do I delete my account?. Web page. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/204579509-How-do-I-delete-my-account Read on 2026-09-30.
10. Reddit, Inc. (archived by UNT Libraries Web Archive). 2016. Reddit Privacy Policy (archived copy, effective 2016-11-22). Web page. https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20121206222307mp_/http://reddit.com/help/privacypolicy Read on 2026-09-29.
11. Reddit, Inc. 2026. Reddit Privacy Policy. Web page. https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy Read on 2026-10-01.
12. TechCrunch. 2015. Reddit Replaces Its Confusing Shadowban System With Account Suspensions. Web page. https://techcrunch.com/?p=1236872 Read on 2026-09-29.
13. TechCrunch. 2018. Reddit has banned 944 accounts linked to the IRA Russian troll farm. Web page. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/reddit-bans-944-accounts-linked-to-russian-internet-research-agency/ Read on 2026-10-01.

Appendix

A. Feed responses and account status

Table A1 gives, for each status, the profile feed response used to assign it and the number of accounts of known status used to confirm the mapping (Section 3.3).

Table A1. Feed response and confirmation, by account status

B. Files not checked, by account status

Table A2 gives, for each status, the files the manifests record as saved: the Reddit-hosted files, how many of them were checked, and the files hosted elsewhere (Section 3.4).

Table A2. Files held and files checked, by account status

Notes to Table A2:

• "No usable answer" was recorded for each account, not for each file, so it counts files on any host, including some hosted elsewhere. Where no file of an account answered at all, the count is exact: two deleted accounts of this kind held only RedGIFs files, and one of two such active accounts held 1 Reddit-hosted video.
• "Hosted elsewhere" is almost all RedGIFs (media.redgifs.com); 77 files are on other sites.
• 34 accounts saved only files hosted elsewhere (5, 4, 3 and 22 in the four rows), and the manifests of 35 further accounts are empty because their media had been deleted (5, 1, 14 and 14, and 1 with no such account): by the account holders for the 29 accounts that are not banned, and by an unknown party for the 6 banned ones. Table 1 counts all of them, but they add no files here.

C. How the documents were found

The first web search, on 2026-09-29, returned five results: two passages from the same page of the archived privacy policy, the 2015 TechCrunch report, the NBC News article and a 2025 arXiv paper, Throwaway Accounts and Moderation on Reddit (USEC 2025). The arXiv paper was not kept because it studies throwaway accounts and how moderators treat them, comparing removal rates with those of ordinary accounts. It does not measure what happens to content or data after Reddit bans an account.

The six Help Center pages were found by running the same web search again on 2026-09-30, through the AI assistant Claude (its Research mode, using web search and web fetch). That search returned eight results, and all eight were kept: the six Help Center pages, the 2015 TechCrunch report and a 2018 TechCrunch report on Reddit banning 944 accounts linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (Section 2). The 2018 report is dated 2018-04-11. It was read on 2026-10-01; its full text was saved on 2026-10-04, and the quotation in Section 2 was checked word for word against that copy [13].

Reddit's current privacy policy was not among the search results. It was looked up directly on 2026-10-01, after the narrow search had been noted as a limitation, and read from a copy of the page that the author saved in a browser (Section 3.1) [11].

The web searches returned a short excerpt of each page and a search summary written by Claude, which ran the searches. Because a summary may paraphrase, shorten or misread a page, the full text of every page cited was saved, and every quotation was checked against it (Section 3.1).

For each Help Center page, the created and last-edited dates given by the article feed are reported. These show when the text was written and when it was last changed. The feed also has an "updated" field, but that field changes daily, so it was not used. The date each page was read (2026-09-30) is kept as the date read. All six pages were read again on 2026-10-04. Four were unchanged. The two pages on bans had been edited on 2026-10-02: where they had said "redditors", one sentence now says "users" and another "people on Reddit", with no other change, and the quotations from them follow the 2026-10-04 text. The dates are:

• My account was banned for violating Reddit Rules [4]: created 2020-07-01, last edited 2026-10-02 (2026-03-28 when first read);
• My account was banned for spam, inauthentic activity, or ban evasion [5]: created 2020-07-01, last edited 2026-10-02 (2026-03-28 when first read);
• Content Moderation, Enforcement, and Appeals [6]: created 2024-02-06, last edited 2026-08-06;
• What happens when I delete my data? [7]: created 2024-03-15, last edited 2025-11-11;
• If I delete my account, what happens to my username, posts, and comments? [8]: created 2020-05-12, last edited 2025-12-15;
• How do I delete my account? [9]: created 2015-06-08, last edited 2026-02-26.

Two further points about the sources:

• The archived privacy policy gives its effective date as 2016-11-22, but the timestamp in its web address is 2012-12-06. The 2012 date is only the date that was requested, not the capture date: the archive served its nearest copy, which was captured on 2016-12-05 and gives that effective date.
• The 2015 TechCrunch report was found under two web addresses, a short one (techcrunch.com/?p=1236872) and a longer one (techcrunch.com/2015/11/11/reddit-account-suspensions/). Both were fetched on 2026-09-30: the short address redirects to the longer one, and the two copies saved have the same text. They are therefore one source, cited here under the short address [12].