The Kyle Quinn Charlottesville Misidentification

After the violent 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 11-12 August 2017, online users launched a crowd-sourced effort to identify and publicly name rally attendees from photographs, in the same vein as Reddit's earlier crowd-identification campaigns. The ordeal began when thousands shared an image of a bearded marcher in an 'Arkansas Engineering' T-shirt posted by the Twitter account Yes, You're Racist, which was publishing rally photos under the hashtag #ExposetheAltRight; more than 11,000 people retweeted the photo. Amateur sleuths matched the man to Kyle Quinn, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering who runs a wound-healing research lab at the University of Arkansas. The identification was wrong: Quinn was more than 1,000 miles away.

Quinn learned of the accusation on Saturday afternoon while watching television with his wife, when the university's relations office called to confirm his whereabouts and warned his weekend was 'about to get a lot worse.' His Twitter account and email were inundated with people cursing at him and threatening him and his wife, while the university fielded calls and emails demanding his firing, including tweets such as 'FIRE KYLE P. QUINN. There cannot be any negotiation or wavering on this issue.' On Saturday night users tweeted his home address; the couple called the police and hid at a friend's house. 'They're emboldened, because they're online and there's no or little consequences for their actions,' Quinn said.

The correction was fast but could not catch the accusation. Quinn had been with fellow faculty members and university administrators in Northwest Arkansas throughout the rally weekend, and within hours of the first rumors the university publicly verified that the man in the photo was not him and that no engineering faculty attended the marches. Media outlets confirmed it, yet users continued to retweet and repost the erroneous information, and abusive messages kept arriving for days, slowing only as word spread.

Verification experts said basic checks would have raised doubts: the marcher wore glasses, while Quinn does not in his university photo. Quinn told The New York Times that 'you have celebrities and hundreds of people doing no research online, not checking facts,' describing the episode as potentially derailing work to which he had dedicated his career, and added that 'being on the receiving end, this is not the way to go about it.'

The case became a widely cited example of crowd-sourced identification gone wrong, grouped with the 2013 Boston Marathon episode in which users on Reddit and other sites combed through photos, producing a New York Post cover falsely suggesting two men were suspects and false accusations against a missing Brown University student. The contrast sharpened the lesson: while genuine attendees such as hot-dog chain employee Cole White lost jobs after accurate identification, doxxing remained against most platforms' rules yet continued largely unchecked, with the correction left to the University of Arkansas and mainstream outlets rather than the platforms where the false identification spread.