Issues Database

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.

Reddit hosted r/pizzagate, where the false 'Pizzagate' conspiracy was incubated and named individuals and a D.C. pizzeria were targeted; weeks after Reddit banned it for doxxing, a gunman fired a rifle inside the restaurant.

Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned on July 10, 2015, after the surprise firing of popular talent director Victoria Taylor triggered a site-wide moderator revolt, and a petition demanding her ouster drew more than 200,000 signatures amid a torrent of sexist and racist abuse directed at her.

On June 10, 2015, Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate and four other subreddits under an anti-harassment policy first announced in May 2015, triggering a site-wide revolt that flooded r/all and targeted interim CEO Ellen Pao with abuse.

In 2015 Reddit removed r/GasTheKikes and its successor r/KikeTown — openly antisemitic communities whose names invoked the Holocaust — but only after months of external pressure, exemplifying the platform's slow, reactive enforcement against hate that its own 2015 harassment policy was supposed to address.

Fans of the comedy group Million Dollar Extreme repeatedly tricked media outlets and even a member of Congress into naming comedian Sam Hyde as the perpetrator of mass shootings — a recurring hoax circulated across Reddit and other platforms that injected false suspect names into breaking-news coverage.

Reddit moved from tolerating 'witch hunts' to formal anti-doxxing and anti-harassment rules only after a string of high-profile misidentifications and harassment campaigns, culminating in its 2015 policy overhaul.

During the GamerGate harassment campaign, Reddit communities — most prominently r/KotakuInAction — served as a major hub for coordination and amplification, as targets including Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian faced doxxing, threats, and forced evacuations from their homes.

In the chaos after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Reddit users wrongly named several innocent people as suspects — including Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, who had already died by suicide a month before the attack.

Beyond the widely remembered misidentification of Sunil Tripathi, Reddit's r/findbostonbombers also helped circulate the faces of 17-year-old track athlete Salaheddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaimi, who were innocent spectators splashed across a tabloid front page as 'Bag Men.'

In December 2013, users coordinating on r/MensRights flooded Occidental College's anonymous sexual-assault reporting form with roughly 400 false reports in about 36 hours, a clear case of subreddit-organized brigading against an external target.