Jesse Jackson's Hostile 2015 AMA
July 2015
Civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson's late-June 2015 Reddit AMA was overrun by hostile, highly upvoted questions, becoming a widely cited example of how unscripted AMAs can turn against polarizing public figures.
What happened
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. 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 single highest-voted question accused Jackson of being a 'race baiter' who had manipulated the political system for personal 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.
Jackson left many of the most pointed questions unanswered, and several of his replies were characterized by reporters as evasive or confusing. The AMA was panned across coverage as a demonstration both of redditors' hostility toward polarizing public figures and of the risks such figures face under unscripted scrutiny.
Reddit the company issued no statement; this was a community-reception event. Coincidentally, the Jackson AMA fell within the same window as the firing of AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor and the resulting 'AMAgeddon' blackout in early July 2015.
Impact
The AMA became a recurring example of a high-profile session 'going wrong,' cited in discussions of the reputational risk controversial public figures take on when facing Reddit's unmoderated question-ranking.