Gawker identifies a Reddit moderator; subreddits retaliate by banning Gawker links.
Gawker names Reddit moderator Violentacrez
Event Not yet reviewed This page has not yet been through the automated review pipeline.On 12 October 2012 Gawker published Adrian Chen's article identifying the person behind the pseudonymous Reddit account Violentacrez, a moderator of subreddits including r/jailbait and r/creepshots. Ahead of and after publication, moderators of a number of subreddits banned links to Gawker-network sites, and r/jailbait and r/creepshots were removed. The episode is one of the most-documented early instances of the deanonymization practice that scholarship later defined as doxing.
Sources
- 01.
Chen, A. (2012). Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web. Gawker. Published 12 October 2012; the article that named the moderator. Gawker is defunct and the original URL no longer resolves, so the archived capture is the only working link.
- 02.
Hern, A. (2012). Reddit blocks Gawker in defence of its right to be really, really creepy. New Statesman. Contemporaneous account, 11 October 2012, of Reddit moderators banning Gawker-network links ahead of publication and of the removal of r/jailbait and r/creepshots.
- 03.
Douglas, D. M. (2016). Doxing: a conceptual analysis. Ethics and Information Technology, 18(3), 199-210. Definitional source for doxing — deanonymizing, targeting and delegitimizing forms — and discusses this Reddit case.
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October 12, 2012
Gawker names Reddit moderator Violentacrez
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