Biography
Jason Koebler is a technology journalist who has reported on Reddit across more than a decade, from the 2015 hate-subreddit bans to investigations published in the 2020s. A former editor-in-chief of VICE's Motherboard, he later co-founded the journalist-owned outlet 404 Media.
On the day in June 2015 when Reddit banned r/fatpeoplehate and several other subreddits under a new anti-harassment policy, Koebler published a Motherboard piece documenting the user exodus to Voat, an unmoderated 'free speech' clone that briefly absorbed displaced communities. He continued covering the Reddit-to-Voat dynamic, including the conspiracy theories that circulated about the migration, providing some of the most-cited mainstream coverage of that wave of bans.
His Reddit reporting continued at 404 Media, where he broke the story that academic researchers had secretly run a large, unauthorised artificial-intelligence persuasion experiment on users of the r/changemyview subreddit. The scoop drew significant attention to research ethics on the platform and prompted Reddit to threaten legal action against the researchers involved.
Koebler's byline on landmark Reddit stories across two distinct eras gives him an unusually deep and verifiable record on the platform. His reporting is generally characterised by direct documentation and on-the-ground sourcing rather than commentary, and he is frequently cited as one of the journalists who has most consistently covered Reddit's controversies over time.