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Every documented issue, searchable and filterable by category, year, and keyword. Toggle between grid and timeline views, and export the filtered set to CSV.
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.
During the breaking-news aftermath of the June 12, 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, r/news moderators removed thousands of comments and banned many users, triggering mass accusations of censorship and a wave of unsubscriptions. Some moderators later acknowledged they handled it poorly.
A young man killed in a 1995 Virginia car crash went unidentified for two decades as 'Grateful Doe'; a Reddit community devoted to the case, working with other volunteers, helped renew attention that led to his 2015 identification through DNA as Jason Callahan. No crime was involved.
After r/CreepShots was shut down in 2012, near-identical communities — r/CandidFashionPolice (covert photos reframed as 'fashion critique') and r/PhotoPlunder (nudes scraped from misconfigured photo-host accounts) — persisted for years, exposing how slowly Reddit enforced its own non-consensual imagery rules.
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.
Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a prolific Reddit troll who created and moderated racist subreddits including r/CoonTown, was arrested by the FBI in 2015 after, posing as an ISIS supporter, he supplied bomb-making instructions for an attack on a Kansas City 9/11 memorial; he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.
On August 5, 2015, returning CEO Steve Huffman (u/spez) rolled out an updated content policy and banned r/CoonTown along with a cluster of openly racist subreddits, while introducing a new 'quarantine' tier for offensive-but-permitted communities.
Reddit banned r/beatingwomen in 2014 after its moderators were caught sharing users' personal information, and named r/rapingwomen among communities banned in 2015 for inciting violence and rape.
Reddit became a primary hub for the 2014 'Fappening' celebrity nude-photo leaks via the r/TheFappening subreddit, removing it only under DMCA and child-imagery pressure; nearly six months later, on February 24, 2015, Reddit announced a privacy-policy change banning the posting of explicit images of anyone without their consent.
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.