A documented record of Reddit's controversies, failures, and real-world impact.

The abrupt firing of AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor triggered a revolt in which moderators of r/IAmA and more than a thousand other subreddits went private in protest.

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.

For roughly three years Reddit hosted r/jailbait, a community trading sexualized images of underage girls, before public pressure forced its closure in October 2011.

Reddit's own transparency reports document persistent spam and inauthentic-account activity. The problem moved from anonymous spammers to credentialed academics in 2025, when University of Zurich researchers secretly ran AI bots posing as real people in r/changemyview to test machine persuasion without users' consent.

In February 2024, days before its IPO, Reddit signed a content-licensing deal with Google reported at roughly $60 million per year, giving Google access via Reddit's Data API to train AI models on years of user content. The deal drew user unease over consent and triggered an FTC inquiry.