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Problem theme
Coordinated campaigns, crowd-sourced 'investigations', and the publication of private information that spilled into real-world harm.
Reddit's scale and anonymity make it an efficient engine for targeting people. The 2013 Boston Marathon manhunt — in which users wrongly named several innocent people, including a student who had already died by suicide — is the defining example of how fast a well-intentioned crowd becomes a harassment mob. Dedicated hate-and-harassment communities added intent to the capacity.
This hub collects the documented harassment and doxxing episodes: the campaigns, the banned communities built to run them, and the convictions for swatting, stalking, and threats that followed. Reddit's anti-doxxing rules and its often-delayed bans are tracked alongside, showing how long the platform tolerated coordinated targeting before acting.
A federal grand jury in the Northern District of Georgia indicted Anthony Belford in June 2026 on a cyberstalking charge, alleging he created fake accounts — including a Reddit account — impersonating a former classmate to distribute AI-generated nude images and false claims; the case is pending and he is presumed innocent.
Anonymous moderators of a subreddit critical of YouTuber Ethan Klein fought his legal effort to compel Reddit and Discord to reveal their identities, arguing that unmasking would expose them to harassment, extortion, and threats of violence.
Reddit's 2022 block overhaul, meant to curb harassment, had a side effect users later weaponized: once blocked, a person could no longer view, edit or delete their own comments in that thread — letting strangers silence others and fracture discussions.
A 2024 feud between YouTuber Ethan Klein and the pop-culture subreddit r/Fauxmoi escalated into harassment and doxxing threats against its moderators, with at least two forced to delete their accounts.
Christopher Au-Young of California ran a campaign of racist harassment against multiple Black victims, posting threatening videos to platforms including Reddit; he pleaded guilty to interstate stalking and cyberstalking in July 2023 and was sentenced to five years in federal prison in November 2023.
Around the Depp-Heard defamation trial, an analytics firm documented coordinated, partly inauthentic harassment of Amber Heard and her supporters; pro-Depp and anti-Heard communities, including dedicated subreddits, were part of a broader cross-platform fandom ecosystem.
Reddit runs on unpaid volunteer moderators whose exposure to harmful content and harassment causes documented psychological harm — a problem underscored by professional-moderator PTSD lawsuits across the industry.
In late August 2021, moderators of roughly 135 subreddits took their communities private to protest Reddit's refusal to act on COVID-19 misinformation; days later Reddit banned the COVID-denialist hub r/NoNewNormal — citing brigading rather than misinformation — and quarantined 54 other subreddits.
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.
During the January 2021 GameStop squeeze, members of Reddit's r/WallStreetBets directed an off-platform harassment campaign at short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, including hacked accounts used to contact his children.
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 Reddit's 2015 harassment bans, users of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown flooded Voat, a 'free speech' Reddit clone that became a haven for communities banned from the platform — and a real-world test of whether deplatforming works, before it collapsed for lack of funding on Christmas Day 2020.
Reddit quarantined the subreddit for IRL streamer Ice Poseidon in September 2018 for bigotry and abuse, then banned r/Ice_Poseidon and r/Ice_Poseidon2 in October 2019; the community was notorious for swatting, doxxing, and stream-sniping.
On September 12, 2018 Reddit banned r/GreatAwakening — the largest QAnon hub — and roughly 18 related subreddits for inciting violence, harassment, and doxxing.
After the Parkland school shooting, conspiracy communities including r/conspiracy, r/The_Donald, and r/CBTS_Stream amplified false 'crisis actor' claims against teenage survivor David Hogg, who received death threats and was later swatted at his family's home.
After the 2018 Jacksonville Landing shooting, far-right outlets falsely claimed the shooter ran a Reddit account named 'Ravenchamps' — which actually belonged to an uninvolved Minnesota man — subjecting an innocent bystander to a harassment campaign.
After CNN identified the anonymous Reddit user behind a Trump-shared anti-CNN wrestling meme in July 2017, its statement reserving the right to publish his name triggered the #CNNBlackmail backlash and a wave of harassment against CNN journalists' families.
Dan McComas and Jessica Moreno, who left Reddit in 2015 over disagreements about how the site should be run, raised about $11 million to build Imzy — a community platform with civility rules meant to fix Reddit's harassment problems — only for the 'nicer Reddit' to shut down in 2017 for failing to find a market.
Reddit removed the flagship alt-right subreddit r/altright on February 1, 2017 for repeated content-policy violations, citing the doxxing of, and a 'bounty' campaign against, the man filmed punching white-nationalist Richard Spencer.
Tyler Barriss's fake hostage 911 call — arising from a Call of Duty wager dispute coordinated online — led police to fatally shoot uninvolved Wichita resident Andrew Finch in December 2017; Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in 2019.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In April 2013, users of r/MensRights set out to identify the anonymous author of a feminist blog, but misidentified an uninvolved woman — who then received death threats at her school and workplace, prompting Reddit to threaten to shut the subreddit down.
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.
After Gawker journalist Adrian Chen unmasked the moderator 'Violentacrez,' volunteer moderators of several large subreddits — including r/politics — retaliated by banning all links to Gawker Media sites, exposing the tension between Reddit's anti-doxxing norms and press accountability.
Gawker's Adrian Chen identified Reddit's most notorious moderator, 'Violentacrez', as a 49-year-old Texas programmer — igniting a fierce debate over anonymity, doxxing, and moderator power.
After science communicator Rebecca Watson mildly described an uncomfortable late-night encounter, a backlash dubbed 'Elevatorgate' spread across the online atheist community — including Reddit — and escalated into years of misogynistic harassment, rape and death threats.
Reddit launched in June 2005 out of Y Combinator's first class and grew into 'the front page of the internet' on a near-absolutist free-speech ethos that would later collide with hate, harassment and child-safety scandals.
Every record elsewhere in the archive linked to the issues above — the convictions, lawsuits, regulatory actions, breaches, and bans that make this a systemic problem rather than a series of isolated events.