The r/MensRights Brigade of Occidental's Reporting Form

In December 2013, users on Reddit's r/MensRights subreddit, alongside parallel discussion on 4chan, coordinated to flood Occidental College's anonymous online sexual-assault reporting form with fake reports. As UPI put it, commenters on r/MensRights discussed filing phony rape reports at the college's anonymous reporting system, and then they did it. The form had been set up in July 2012; submissions were reviewed by campus administrators and primarily used to track patterns of serial offenders, and the school said it was meant to improve understanding of how many assaults occur, including those against students who do not want to press charges through the school or the criminal justice system.

The brigade was triggered by a post on "Men's Rights" pages of Reddit and 4chan that blamed "feminists" at Occidental for creating the form and misrepresented how it worked. "You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge," the post claimed, falsely, adding, "The 'victim' never has to prove anything or reveal their identity." The stated intent was to prove the system was open to abuse by abusing it.

The college was flooded with 400 assault reports in 36 hours, according to an email to students and staff from Lauren Carella, the interim Title IX coordinator, who described them as the "result of an effort by off-campus Internet 'trolls.'" Communications director Jim Tranquada said the surge began late Monday, December 16: "That's far more than we have ever received in the past. The sheer number of reports was suspicious." Administrators concluded an off-campus group was responsible because the language in the submissions matched what was circulating on Reddit and 4chan. Some fake reports named respondents such as "Occidental College," "feminists" and "Fatty McFatFat," while others listed real faculty, staff and student names.

The flood struck a school already under federal scrutiny: in April 2013, 37 students, faculty and alumni had filed federal complaints accusing Occidental of violating Title IX and the Clery Act, and the college had admitted in October that it underreported sexual assaults in recent years. Staff nonetheless pledged to review every submission, with Tranquada noting, "There might be a real report among all these suspicious reports," and the school began reviewing options to replace the form. Sociologist Lisa Wade called the trolling "classic backlash," saying the men targeting the form were "mad that women are being listened to."

No site-level enforcement action against r/MensRights was reported, and the subreddit was not banned. Reddit's policy shift came later: in May 2015 the company enacted its first anti-harassment policy, defining harassment as "systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone" and warning that responses could include banning users, and its quarantine system followed the same year. The episode is now commonly cited as a textbook example of organized subreddit-to-external-target brigading.