The AMA: format, farce, and PR vehicle

Actor Woody Harrelson's 2012 'Ask Me Anything' descended into a debacle when he refused to discuss anything but his new film Rampart, crystallizing concerns that celebrity AMAs had become undisclosed, PR-managed marketing.

On 29 August 2012, sitting US President Barack Obama held a Reddit AMA during his re-election campaign — a landmark moment for the platform that briefly overwhelmed the site's servers and legitimized Reddit as a political venue.

During an AMA for his side project How to Destroy Angels, musician Trent Reznor answered a fan's question about signing to a major label with a sarcastic 'the wifi on our yacht is having issues' brush-off that went viral.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield conducted a Reddit AMA in February 2013 while aboard the International Space Station, a session widely hailed as one of the best in the platform's history and a positive counterexample to PR-driven celebrity AMAs.

Morgan Freeman's April 2013 promotional Reddit AMA drew tens of thousands of participants but was widely panned for terse, low-effort answers, with many users suspecting a publicist was typing the responses.

Bill Cosby's June 2014 Reddit AMA and a later #CosbyMeme promotion were overrun as users surfaced the decades-old sexual-assault allegations against him — an early, vivid case of a celebrity PR push on Reddit and social media colliding with the audience's own agenda.

Civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson's late-June 2015 Reddit AMA was overrun by hostile, highly upvoted questions, becoming a widely cited example of how unscripted AMAs can turn against polarizing public figures.

Weeks after raising the price of the drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a pill, Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli held a defiant Reddit AMA in October 2015 that drew widespread hostility and became a case study in PR misjudgment.

A 2016 AMA meant to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Fugees' 'The Score' collapsed when Redditors flooded musician Wyclef Jean with questions about his shuttered Haiti charity, Yéle Haiti; he answered a few, then deleted his account.

Actress Jenna Elfman's April 2017 AMA promoting her sitcom 'Imaginary Mary' was flooded with questions about Scientology, and outlets reported nearly all of them went unanswered.

Across multiple AMAs beginning in 2013, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates engaged at length on philanthropy, technology, and public health — sessions widely cited as a model of how the format can succeed, in contrast to the genre's many disasters.

Former UFC champion Ronda Rousey's August 2024 AMA promoting a graphic novel was overrun by questions about a 2013 Sandy Hook conspiracy video she had reposted; days later she issued a lengthy apology.