Issues Database

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.

In late January 2021 a Reddit community called r/SatoshiStreetBets openly organized a 'coordinated' buy-in that drove Dogecoin up more than 800% in a day, in a dynamic regulators and academics described as a textbook pump-and-dump.

In 2018 Dylan Jarrell of Kentucky used an anonymous Reddit account to post statements signaling a planned school shooting; he was stopped while equipped to carry one out, pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2019, and was sentenced to 120 months in July 2020.

Robert Allam, known as GallowBoob, became one of Reddit's highest-karma users and a moderator of dozens of large subreddits, drawing accusations of mass self-promotion and karma farming before a viral 'power mod' list triggered harassment and his eventual withdrawal from the platform.

A baseless 2020 QAnon theory that the retailer Wayfair was trafficking children spread rapidly after appearing on r/conspiracy, leading to the harassment of real families whose missing-relative cases were dragged into the falsehood and straining a national anti-trafficking hotline.

After years of warnings and a 2019 quarantine, Reddit banned the pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald in June 2020. Its community had already built and migrated to the independent site TheDonald.win (later patriots.win), which reputable reporting and the official January 6th Committee report later tied to violent rhetoric and planning around the 2021 Capitol attack.

r/antiMLM grew into one of the internet's largest hubs for exposing multi-level-marketing schemes such as LuLaRoe, fueling mainstream coverage and clashing with MLM recruiters who tried to defend the model.

Canada's largest subreddit was accused, with leaked chat logs, of being run by moderators with ties to white-nationalist content — including one who placed a $250 'bounty' on a Vice journalist — while the platform's seniority rules made the implicated moderators effectively impossible to remove.

A 2019 clip of streamer DarksydePhil arguing that 'general' racial jokes are acceptable reached a wide audience after being reposted to r/LivestreamFail, the subreddit that has served as a central hub for documenting streamer controversies.

A whistleblower's October 2018 Reddit post exposed that skincare brand Sunday Riley had its employees write fake Sephora reviews under invented identities — a tip that helped trigger an FTC investigation and settlement over fake-grassroots review fraud.

Reddit quarantined the 400,000-subscriber r/CringeAnarchy in September 2018 and banned it on April 25, 2019 after it hosted anti-Muslim content justifying the Christchurch mosque massacre.