The True Cost of Anonymity: How Reddit’s Design Enables Harassers To Run Rampant
It’s been said that Reddit is like the early internet. It reminds us of a time and virtual space when everyone maintained anonymity, and harassment was minimal. Learn how Cybertrace investigations help to resolve harassment and defamation on Reddit.
Harking back to the early days, a geek anarchist ethos ruled the web. Freedom and responsibility danced a tango, and self-organising principles informed this cyber utopia, without the narcissistic spectacle of selfies, influencers, and advertorials that eventually colonised the internet via social media.
Some people cling to Reddit as a kind of hold-out from the early days … but they’re missing something crucial.
The reality is, that the comparatively earnest days of the early internet are long gone, with far more nefarious actors and inflated egos now exploiting anonymous spaces, especially on platforms such as Reddit which have few guardrails in place to prevent them. This is despite the fact that, as a corporation with ultimate control over the platform, Reddit has the power to implement safety measures.
Perhaps Reddit sees the glass as half full? It is true that most Reddit users (Redditors) enjoy coalescing around topics of interest, sharing information, support, ideas, jokes, and general banter. Redditors also enjoy anonymity because it allows them to be confessional and open and still belong to virtual communities without worrying about offending the people in their real lives.
Compared with other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram where accounts are generally bound to individuals’ identities and the curation of a public image, the nature of Reddit enables Redditors to be more brutally honest and less obsessed with the impression they make. They tend not to fear reprisals for sharing their true thoughts and feelings.
But unfortunately, a few rotten apples can spoil the barrel of anonymity.
Although Reddit eventually introduced a ‘karma’ system, where upvotes and downvotes by other Redditors impact your score and therefore your credibility, or the perception of your virtual ‘street smarts’, this still does not seem to encourage a culture of self-censorship on the platform, as it may have been intended. Nor does it, (or can it), deter those acting in bad faith; the individuals who use the platform to troll, defame, and dox whilst maintaining anonymity. The karma system does little to stop people who use Reddit to destroy people’s lives.
Bad faith actors and in fact all Reddit users have the option to conceal their identity behind the cover of a name like ‘mushroom-shampoo88’, ‘angel-cropduster723’ or ‘digital-zit1’,
While this anonymity may seem liberating and intimate for some, serving as a kind of container for thoughts and feelings that can’t be uttered in real life, the anonymity that is intrinsic to Reddit’s design enables harassment to occur often with little recourse.
Let’s take a look at two hybrid forms of harassment and defamation on Reddit.
Beware, malicious misuse of Reddit often takes an omnibus format, combining several crimes at once. However, they are well within Cybertrace’s wheelhouse, in terms of being offences that we are skilled and experienced at investigating.
Defamation + trolling + incitement One of the more abject uses of Reddit in recent times has been the formation of anonymous profiles which are used to encourage others to troll members of the public. This will often include offenders inciting Redditors into leaving negative reviews on the Google sites of small business owners, even though these Redditors have never had any dealings with the businesses. Subreddits (threads) become pits of raging, bilious whinging by people who really ought to be encouraged to get some fresh air and sunlight (TOUCH GRASS).
These terminally online malcontents are ripe for being radicalised by other Redditors with various agendas. See below for a case study about this very thing.
Impersonation + defamation + doxxing + anonymity. This is a particularly nasty and dangerous form of harassment on Reddit. Although its components are illegal in many jurisdictions, and certainly against the rules of the platform, bad-faith actors still attempt to get away with posing as their victims on Reddit and then defaming and doxxing them. They will then publish lies and personal details, written in the first person (as their target) to cause them extensive and irreparable reputational harm.
At Cybertrace, we are sometimes amazed by the nerves of offenders on Reddit. Thankfully, we have a range of strategies to figure out who is really lurking under their anonymous cloaks, and we’re not afraid to use them!
Reddit Investigation – Case Study 1
A small business owner approached Cybertrace because he had been the victim of an intense campaign of defamation + trolling + incitement which needed investigation. It may seem obvious, but such things don’t just happen organically. There are usually very specific interests involved; people who stand to gain from the defamation + trolling + incitement and who are skilled in engaging ‘useful idiots’ to carry out their dirty work.
One such individual who found an angle in the defamation + trolling + incitement business was an influencer named Dylan. Dylan lives in a major Australian city. He began his online career attempting to be a commentator-influencer about popular culture, but it didn’t go very well. His wan, flat affect was not engaging. He was bland personified, but itched to be someone.
After completing a Liberal Arts degree, Dylan decided to pivot from an uncertain path to making content about political issues when he realised he might get more traction there. He started targeting various small businesses, inciting people to leave negative reviews.
How did he get away with it? With inflation rates at around 3-5%, many Australians reported feeling the pinch of the cost of living. Dylan made reels of his tirades about this issue. He whipped his supporters into a frenzy. He failed to mention that in fact, Australians are among the wealthiest people, per capita, on the planet. In Argentina, people are contending with inflation rates of over 200%. But we digress.
As Dylan’s following on Facebook and Instagram grew, so did his patrons who crowdfunded his antics. He eventually diversified into Reddit. There he carried on the same antics, yet due to Reddit’s anonymity, Dylan and his legion of loyal trolls felt safer to besmirch small businesses even more – naming names, boasting about leaving negative reviews (despite having never engaged with their services), and advertising their plans to take these businesses down.
Dylan continued to build his platform and supporters, by continuing his attacks on small business owners and effectively blaming them for the cost of living. His legion of useful idiots began targeting people like our client who approached us for some assistance.
Cybertace instigated a meticulous investigation, a major aspect of which was language analysis. Despite Redditors best attempts to disguise their ill-willed ennui, our team is highly skilled at forensic close reading. Ironically, Dylan, with his Liberal Arts degree, could also have chosen the light over the darkness and added some more training and pursued such a career. But we’ve digressed again.
Along with forensic textual analysis, and engaging other investigative tools and techniques to reach into the backgrounds of the individuals who left bogus negative reviews, Cybertrace was able to close in on most of the offenders.
Dylan is still rabbiting on (even covert narcissists don’t like to give up the limelight) but many of his supporters have moved on, now knowing their useful idiocy could get them into serious trouble with Cybertrace on the trail.
Reddit Investigation – Case Study 2
A client approached us because her ex-husband had taken to Reddit and was impersonating her; using false personae to ‘reveal’ information about her that was erroneous and defamatory.
Our client had worked hard to become a partner in a prominent law firm whose focus was representing the tech industry. Her marriage had broken down and following this, she had met a new man and had soon fallen pregnant. Her ex-husband, in a roiling twisted knot of bitterness and resentment, felt he wanted to destroy our client’s happiness. He knew that many of her colleagues were young and internet-savvy. He also knew that pretending to be her on Reddit and publishing damaging stories about her in her name, would plant maggots in the minds of her contemporaries, even if it didn’t add up that she would do such things.
The offender made defamatory claims that our Client had been involved in sordid affairs with her married superiors in other roles and that she had criminal associations. The offender also leaked information that pointed to the victim’s professional and home addresses.
Quite obviously, the offender was hell-bent on destroying our client’s reputation among her peers.
What the offender didn’t bet on was that Cybertrace, with our expertise in forensic close reading and technical investigation could root them out. He left a cyber footprint that was barely discernible in the grimy sewers of Reddit. While undetectable by most, his footprint didn’t escape our Investigations Team.
The Impact of Reddit Harassment On Victims
The impacts of Reddit harassment on victims spans the social, psychological, and economic realms. People’s livelihoods, reputations, relationships, and well-being become impacted. Victims can feel very helpless, and earlier traumas in their lives can also become triggered. Being targeted in this way can be highly traumatic and victims often report irreparable damage.
Investigating what has happened to victims of Reddit harassment is something Cybertrace can do to attempt to bring about some redress to the situation. Sometimes just understanding the harassment and seeing it all laid out in a rigorous and exacting report can bring greater peace of mind to victims who have been deliberately bamboozled and deeply violated. This can be particularly important for victims who are having trouble receiving the support that they need, because the people in their lives may not understand what has happened to them. Sometimes clients find that even explaining Reddit harassment and abuse to others is very draining and overwhelming. Cybertrace brings a sense of order to chaos for our clients by providing support and assisting with investigating.
Reddit’s Response
Reddit’s response is not really up to scratch. Its moderators are compelled by the platform’s policies to implement them, however, this often does not occur and they certainly won’t initiate an investigation for a complaint. Complaints can be made and internal investigations can ensue however these can be time-consuming and not always yielding results. Meanwhile the shapeshifting nature of the offending Redditor, under the cover of an anonymous cloak can open new accounts and the abuse can mushroom and spiral. Reddit needs to do better, and we sincerely hope that you are never in a situation where you need Cybertrace’s help. But if you ever do, we are here.
