Joshua Goldberg: Reddit Troll-Moderator Turned ISIS-Impersonating Bomb-Plot Defendant
2015–2018
Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a prolific Reddit troll who created and moderated racist subreddits including r/CoonTown, was arrested by the FBI in 2015 after, posing as an ISIS supporter, he supplied bomb-making instructions for an attack on a Kansas City 9/11 memorial; he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
What happened
Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a young Florida man, was one of the internet's most prolific multi-persona trolls in the mid-2010s, later admitting to operating at least 27 accounts on Reddit alone. On Reddit he posted thousands of racist messages under a neo-Nazi persona and created and moderated several controversial racist communities, including serving as a moderator of r/CoonTown. Many of the communities he was involved with were removed when Reddit revised and enforced its content policy in August 2015.
Goldberg simultaneously maintained contradictory online identities across platforms, ranging from a far-left activist to a white supremacist on the Daily Stormer to a free-speech absolutist. His most consequential persona posed as an ISIS-affiliated jihadist ('Australi Witness') and gained standing in online extremist circles, including amplifying the May 2015 attack on a Muhammad cartoon exhibit in Garland, Texas.
In the summer of 2015 an FBI confidential source, posing as an aspiring attacker, began exchanging messages with Goldberg. Between July and mid-August 2015 Goldberg sent the source links containing instructions for making explosive devices, identified a Kansas City, Missouri event memorializing first responders killed on 9/11 as a target for September 2015, and instructed the source to hide a bomb near the crowd. The FBI arrested him in Florida on September 9, 2015.
After competency proceedings, Goldberg pleaded guilty on December 20, 2017, to attempted malicious damage and destruction of a building by means of an explosive. On June 25, 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison followed by a lifetime of supervised release.
Impact
The case illustrates how a single Reddit power-user can both run hateful communities under one persona and, under another, escalate online trolling into a federal terrorism prosecution involving a real bomb plot solicited from an FBI source. Goldberg's involvement as a creator/moderator of subreddits such as r/CoonTown also tied him to Reddit's August 2015 hateful-content enforcement. It remains a frequently cited example of cross-platform identity manipulation and the line between online provocation and prosecutable conduct.