Reddit's amateur detectives, and the people they got wrong

In April 2013, users of r/MensRights set out to identify the anonymous author of a feminist blog, but misidentified an uninvolved woman — who then received death threats at her school and workplace, prompting Reddit to threaten to shut the subreddit down.

In April 2013 a Reddit user posted a 'Confession Bear' meme claiming to have killed an abusive man and disguised it as an overdose; amateur sleuths named a suspect and San Diego police opened an inquiry, but no crime was ever substantiated and no charges followed.

In the chaos after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Reddit users wrongly named several innocent people as suspects — including Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, who had already died by suicide a month before the attack.

Beyond the widely remembered misidentification of Sunil Tripathi, Reddit's r/findbostonbombers also helped circulate the faces of 17-year-old track athlete Salaheddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaimi, who were innocent spectators splashed across a tabloid front page as 'Bag Men.'

Fans of the comedy group Million Dollar Extreme repeatedly tricked media outlets and even a member of Congress into naming comedian Sam Hyde as the perpetrator of mass shootings — a recurring hoax circulated across Reddit and other platforms that injected false suspect names into breaking-news coverage.

Reddit hosted r/pizzagate, where the false 'Pizzagate' conspiracy was incubated and named individuals and a D.C. pizzeria were targeted; weeks after Reddit banned it for doxxing, a gunman fired a rifle inside the restaurant.

After the 2017 Unite the Right rally, online crowd-sourced sleuthing wrongly identified Arkansas professor Kyle Quinn as a marcher, leading to threats and doxxing that drove him from his home — a cautionary echo of the Boston Marathon misidentifications.

After the Parkland school shooting, conspiracy communities including r/conspiracy, r/The_Donald, and r/CBTS_Stream amplified false 'crisis actor' claims against teenage survivor David Hogg, who received death threats and was later swatted at his family's home.

After the 2018 Jacksonville Landing shooting, far-right outlets falsely claimed the shooter ran a Reddit account named 'Ravenchamps' — which actually belonged to an uninvolved Minnesota man — subjecting an innocent bystander to a harassment campaign.

The viral 2021 search for Gabby Petito energized true-crime communities on Reddit and other platforms, but the same amateur-investigation impulse led sleuths to publicly accuse and harass innocent people, reviving longstanding concerns about crowdsourced detective work.