The Kyle Quinn Charlottesville Misidentification
August 2017
After the 2017 Unite the Right rally, online crowd-sourced sleuthing wrongly identified Arkansas professor Kyle Quinn as a marcher, leading to threats and doxxing that drove him from his home — a cautionary echo of the Boston Marathon misidentifications.
What happened
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.
Impact
An innocent academic was subjected to threats and harassment and driven from his home, with his family's address exposed, purely on the basis of a superficial resemblance and unverified online speculation.