Witch Hunt

On Reddit, a witch hunt refers to the community collectively identifying, naming, and targeting a specific individual for harassment, public shaming, or vigilante "justice," often based on incomplete information. It typically begins when a post accuses someone of wrongdoing and other users mobilize to uncover and broadcast that person's identity or personal details and direct anger at them. Because crowds can be wrong, witch hunts have repeatedly led to misidentification of innocent people and serious real-world harm, which is why both Reddit's rules and longstanding community etiquette ("reddiquette") explicitly discourage them.

The most cited cautionary example is the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when users on Reddit attempted to crowdsource suspects and wrongly implicated innocent individuals, prompting an apology from the site's general manager. In response, Reddit and many subreddits adopted anti-witch-hunting rules, often forbidding posting others' personal information or tagging someone to mobilize harassment, with some communities using intent as the dividing line between acceptable discussion and a ban-worthy call to action. Witch-hunting overlaps with Reddit's prohibitions on harassment and doxxing, and it illustrates the platform's broader reliance on self-policing norms to restrain the same crowd dynamics that make the site powerful.