Joshua Goldberg: Reddit Troll-Moderator Turned ISIS-Impersonating Bomb-Plot Defendant

Joshua Ryne Goldberg, of Orange Park, Florida, was an internet troll who maintained a sprawling network of false online identities spanning the ideological spectrum, including, by his own later admission, at least 27 separate Reddit accounts plus many more on other websites. On Reddit, he operated personas including a neo-Nazi identity and served as a moderator of racist communities such as r/CoonTown, while elsewhere adopting personas ranging from a far-left activist to a white supremacist contributor to a free-speech absolutist.

Goldberg first drew significant law-enforcement and media attention under the persona 'Australi Witness,' which purported to be an Australia-based supporter of the Islamic State. In that guise he amplified calls for violence connected to the May 2015 attack at a 'Draw Muhammad' event at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, where two gunmen were killed by police. The persona was treated by some observers as a credible jihadist voice; in reality it was one of Goldberg's fabrications, illustrating how a single troll could inject inflammatory content into multiple extremist ecosystems at once.

In the summer of 2015, the FBI, working with Australian authorities, investigated the 'Australi Witness' identity and traced it to Goldberg. Beginning in roughly July and continuing into mid-August 2015, Goldberg communicated with what he believed was a sympathizer but who was in fact an FBI confidential source. According to the Department of Justice, Goldberg supplied instructions for constructing an explosive device and identified a target: a September 2015 Kansas City, Missouri event memorializing first responders killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks, directing that a bomb be placed near the crowd.

Goldberg was arrested in Florida on September 9, 2015. His case raised difficult questions about mental competency, intent, and the line between online provocation and material support for violence, and proceedings extended over more than two years.

On December 20, 2017, Goldberg pleaded guilty to attempted malicious damage and destruction by an explosive of a building. On June 25, 2018, he was sentenced in the Middle District of Florida to 10 years in federal prison, to be followed by a lifetime of supervised release, as announced by the Department of Justice.

The Goldberg case is a notable example of how a single individual exploited Reddit and other platforms to operate numerous deceptive personas simultaneously, amplifying extremist content from multiple directions while ultimately attempting to instigate a real-world bombing. The racist subreddits he helped run, including r/CoonTown, were removed in Reddit's August 2015 wave of bans targeting communities that violated its content policy; no individualized action against Goldberg by Reddit has been documented.