content: I'll give it a shot. When the government wants information on one or lots of people who use a website, but doesn't have enough evidence to get a warrant, they issu  66a5  e a national security letter that (thanks to the patriot act), allows them to demand this data from a website and at the same time issues what's called a gag order which makes it illegal for the website to even tell anyone the government has been talking to them, as well as making it illegal to tell anyone they've been served the letter.  To get around this, people post warrant canaries.  The name comes from the old times when they would put canaries in mines to warn the miners when there was a dangerous level of poison gas, because the bird would die before the levels got high enough to kill a person. So a site like Reddit or Voat puts up a warrant canary, they're just a little page on a website that says "we haven't been served an order by the government to hand over user data."  The trick is, the page is manually renewed every month, meaning if they don't go in every month and replace it, it disappears, or at least has an expired date on it.  If they get served a letter, they stop renewing the page.  This is a way of letting the users know about the letter without explicitly saying anything about it.  It's kind of a legal loophole but it has been held up in court before. That said, it will probably be made illegal one day. So basically, Reddit used to have a warrant canary page, and now they don't (since 2015), and when people asked Spez about it, he gave very cryptic and vague answers, he even flat out said "I've been advised not to say anything one way or another", which is about as close to a "WE HAVE BEEN SERVED A LETTER" as you can get legally.  So it's very safe to assume that Reddit is handing over lots of user data to the US government.  Voat kind of had a canary that was posted 7 months ago, but nothing has been posted since, and Atko will not speak about it, so it's also safe to assume that Voat is doing the same thing.