Reddit launches human verification for suspected bot accounts and labels legitimate automated accounts

Reddit will begin requiring accounts flagged as potential bots to verify they are human using passkeys from Apple, Google, YubiKey, or biometric services, including Face ID and Sam Altman's World ID, while also introducing an “APP” label for legitimate automated accounts that provide services to users. The verification will not be sitewide and will only trigger based on account-level signals like unusually fast posting behavior or other technical markers, with accounts that fail the check facing restrictions. Reddit currently removes an average of 100,000 bot and spam accounts per day, and the changes come as Cloudflare projects bot traffic will exceed human web traffic by 2027, when including crawlers and AI agents, with Reddit in particular facing suspicion that bots are posting questions on the platform specifically to generate AI training data.