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. A photo circulated of a bearded marcher wearing an 'Arkansas Engineering' T-shirt. Amateur sleuths across social media — an effort in the same vein as Reddit's earlier crowd-identification campaigns — concluded the man resembled Kyle Quinn, an assistant professor who runs a research lab at the University of Arkansas. The identification was wrong.

Within roughly a day, around 14–15 August 2017, Quinn was inundated with abusive messages, accusations, threats, and demands that he be fired. His and his family's home address was posted online. Fearful for his family's safety, Quinn left his home and stayed with a colleague. He had a clear alibi: he had been in north-west Arkansas with university colleagues throughout the weekend of the rally, and the university publicly confirmed within hours that the person in the photo was not him.

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. The correction came from the University of Arkansas and mainstream outlets rather than from the platforms where the false identification spread.

The case became a widely cited example of the harms of crowd-sourced identification gone wrong, frequently grouped with Reddit's 2013 Boston Marathon misidentifications as evidence of the dangers of viral, unvetted online detective work.