Christopher Au-Young sentenced to 5 years for cyberstalking across platforms including Reddit (2023)
2022–2023
Christopher Au-Young of California ran a campaign of racist harassment against multiple Black victims, posting threatening videos to platforms including Reddit; he pleaded guilty to interstate stalking and cyberstalking in July 2023 and was sentenced to five years in federal prison in November 2023.
What happened
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida, Christopher Au-Young, then in his mid-thirties and based in California, conducted a sustained campaign of harassment and threats beginning around August 2022 against multiple Black victims. The Department of Justice release described him posting threatening and harassing videos to several platforms — naming Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and Reddit — and frequently using racial slurs and racially offensive language.
The conduct crossed state lines, both because Au-Young was in California while several victims were elsewhere and because the online distribution reached audiences nationally. Prosecutors charged him with interstate stalking and cyberstalking. On 28 July 2023 Au-Young pleaded guilty to six counts, and in November 2023 U.S. District Judge Charlene Honeywell sentenced him to five years (60 months) in federal prison.
Reddit's inclusion in the list of platforms in the official DOJ release is what ties the case to this archive. The case did not turn on Reddit alone — it was a multi-platform harassment campaign — but the government's charging narrative treated posts to Reddit as part of the threatening course of conduct that supported the federal stalking counts.
The prosecution illustrates how federal cyberstalking law (18 U.S.C. § 2261A) reaches harassment that is spread across mainstream social platforms rather than confined to one. It also shows how racially targeted abuse posted publicly — as opposed to private threats — can still satisfy the statute when it is directed at identifiable victims and causes substantial emotional distress or fear.
For the archive, Au-Young is a representative example of Reddit appearing as one channel in a broader harassment prosecution. The platform's role is documented in a primary government source, the charges-to-plea-to-sentence sequence is clear, and the outcome — a multi-year federal sentence — distinguishes it from the many harassment episodes on the site that never reach prosecution.
Impact
The case is a documented federal cyberstalking conviction in which Reddit was named by the Justice Department as one of the platforms used to threaten victims. It demonstrates that public, racially targeted posts can support interstate-stalking charges, not just private threats, and that a cross-platform campaign is prosecuted as a single course of conduct. The five-year sentence marks a substantive outcome relative to most online-harassment complaints.