The Jacksonville Shooting 'Ravenchamps' Misidentification
August 2018
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.
What happened
On 26 August 2018, a mass shooting occurred at a video-game bar at Jacksonville Landing in Jacksonville, Florida, during a Madden NFL tournament. The attacker, a 24-year-old man from Baltimore, killed two people and injured about eleven others before killing himself.
In the immediate aftermath, several far-right outlets and commentators falsely claimed the shooter operated a Reddit account named 'Ravenchamps' — a handle that actually belonged to an uninvolved man from Minnesota. They amplified anti-Trump statements posted under that account in an effort to politicize the shooting. The false identification spread through partisan media and online communities, with the attacker's actual, superficially similar pseudonyms fueling the confusion.
The innocent account owner was subjected to a harassment campaign, with numerous people online claiming he was the dead shooter. He later pushed back publicly, responding with humour. The misidentification stands as a clear case of Reddit-content-driven confusion causing reputational harm to a bystander, in the same family of incidents as the Boston Marathon and Charlottesville misidentifications.
Because the hoax was propagated chiefly by external partisan media rather than via official Reddit channels, there was no formal Reddit statement. At least one of the outlets that spread the false claim later posted a retraction.
Impact
An uninvolved Minnesota man was publicly and falsely tied to a mass shooting and subjected to a harassment campaign, illustrating how Reddit-username speculation can be weaponized to politicize tragedies and harm bystanders.