r/RBI and the Documented Harms of Reddit Amateur Sleuthing
2013–2021
Reddit's amateur-detective culture, centered on subreddits such as r/RBI ('Reddit Bureau of Investigation'), has been studied and criticized for crowd-sourced 'websleuthing' that can misidentify innocent people and degrade real investigations — a pattern documented in peer-reviewed research and journalism beyond the well-known Boston Marathon case.
What happened
r/RBI, the 'Reddit Bureau of Investigation,' is a long-running subreddit (over 100,000 members) where anonymous volunteers attempt to solve real-world mysteries. Its own rules acknowledge the risks of the activity: criminal matters are supposed to be referred to police, no personal information is to be revealed, and conduct must be civil. Those guardrails exist precisely because crowd-sourced online investigation has a documented tendency to spill into harassment and misidentification when participants pursue named suspects.
Peer-reviewed scholarship has examined this dynamic directly. A 2018 study in Information, Communication & Society ('Not your personal army!') analyzed a Reddit websleuthing collective and described the constant negotiation between members' self-image as helpful researchers and the slide toward retributive vigilantism. A 2021 experimental study in Frontiers in Psychology found a concrete harm mechanism: witnesses who searched social media and encountered a similar-looking 'lookalike' before a lineup correctly identified the real culprit only about 11% of the time, versus roughly 45% in control conditions — suggesting websleuthing can actively contaminate eyewitness memory.
These findings generalize the lesson of high-profile failures (such as the 2013 Boston Marathon misidentifications) into a structural critique: Reddit's incentives, speed, anonymity, and scale can convert well-meaning amateur investigation into defamation, harassment of uninvolved people, and degraded evidence, even when individual subreddits impose rules to curb it.
Impact
Establishes Reddit's amateur-sleuthing culture as a documented source of real-world harm: misidentification and harassment of innocent people, plus experimentally demonstrated contamination of eyewitness identification that can jeopardize real cases. The pattern is recognized in peer-reviewed research and journalism and has shaped both subreddit rules (r/RBI) and broader critiques of crowd-sourced investigation.