Jesse Jackson's Hostile 2015 AMA

At the end of June 2015, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., the veteran civil-rights leader and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, hosted a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' in the r/IAmA community. The session was meant to be an opportunity for Jackson to further discuss his diversity initiatives in Silicon Valley; Mother Jones, which had just profiled that campaign, suggested the AMA to him. Press coverage of the session appeared on 1 July 2015.

Rather than the softball questions a guest might hope for, the most-upvoted comments were sharply hostile. The top question called Jackson 'an immoral, hate-filled race baiter that has figured out how to manipulate the political system for your own gain.' Other prominent questions confronted him about a child he fathered outside his marriage in the late 1990s, alleged financial pressure on corporations, and his role in commenting on the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, in which the accusations were ultimately proven false; at least one participant had also posted in a notoriously racist subreddit. Asked what average African-Americans could do to reduce racial tensions, Jackson replied, 'Well, the source of those tensions often come from denial of an even playing field. You know, we are very good at athletics' — an answer widely mocked as evasive.

A firsthand Mother Jones account, by a reporter who was on the phone with Jackson and AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor during the session, explained why replies seemed out of sync with questions. Rather than Jackson typing, Taylor selected redditors' questions, asked them to him live, transcribed his verbal responses and posted them on his behalf; the session was also among the first of a planned video AMA series, with Jackson answering on camera in a Los Angeles hotel ballroom while Taylor worked remotely from New York. Taylor asked the hostile top question despite its confrontational nature but paraphrased it to omit the most incendiary language — so Jackson never heard the full text his answer would be judged against — and her transcriptions, while generally accurate, were not verbatim.

The fallout outlived the thread. Taylor was fired a day after overseeing the problematic AMA, and many redditors speculated the two events were connected, a theory Reddit's leaders and Jackson's camp both denied; a Jackson representative said he had not even been aware of the firing, had never complained to Reddit, and that such trolling 'is very typical for Rev. Jackson being online.' The dismissal triggered 'AMAgeddon': volunteer moderators shut down hundreds of subreddits — over 100 in a single evening — rendering Reddit virtually unusable, while a Change.org petition seeking interim CEO Ellen Pao's removal drew nearly 200,000 signatures. Reddit chairman Alexis Ohanian insisted Taylor's firing 'has nothing to do with the Reverend's AMA,' and Pao conceded moderators should have been told earlier about the transition. Amid the pile-on, some thoughtful responses were eventually elevated by other users — exactly what Taylor had predicted would happen.