The 5 biggest Reddit scandals
About 160 million users from all over the world share and comment on links, texts and images via Reddit. In addition to countless funny and senseless posts, there are revelations, scandals and incredible actions. We present the five best Reddit stories of recent years in more detail.
5th place: Snowden revelations thanks to Reddit
Edward Snowden terrified the world in June 2013 with his revelations about the NSA and its espionage policies. The original documents were published on the websites of the Washington Post and the British Guardian, but did not stop at Reddit.
- The scandal spread like wildfire over the network. Thousands of users posted the whistleblower's articles, documents and statements.
- Even when the NSA scandal slowly subsided in the classic media a few months later, there was still no sign of calm on Reddit. Each new post to further revelations shot to the top of the network's most popular posts.
- Edward Snowden also contacted Reddit directly several times, revealing new secrets. On May 21, 2015, he started another question-and-answer session "Ask Me Anything". Here the whistleblower spoke about the current policy of the USA, the NSA scandal and answered questions from other Reddit users.
- Certainly it wasn't Snowden's last announcement. Politics and current affairs are at the top of the priority list for Reddit users.
4th place: Viruses, death threats and Hitler on Reddit
In addition to the Reddit revelations, there are also scandals surrounding the network itself. Three issues in particular have attracted attention in recent years.
- Viruses: In 2014, for example, a virus infected around 17, 000 Macs. The special thing: The worm got its updates via Reddit. To do this, infected computers sent a search query to the network with the first 8 bytes of a special MD5 hash value in the background. As a result, Reddit provides a website with a list of new command and control servers for the virus. In this way he continued to develop. In the meantime, the security hole in Mac OS has been fixed.
- Termination: Another strange story concerns an American programmer. He had published numerous offensive and pornographic posts and subthreads on Reddit under the pseudonym "Violentacrez". When another user exposed his identity, the troll was dismissed from his job.
- Power struggle: A purely internal "scandal" only occurred in July of this year. Reddit's CEO Ellen Pao resigned after protests from many users. Among other things, she wanted to close several subreddits such as the morally questionable forum "FatPeopleHate". The Reddit community got in the way and even published photomontages of her with swastikas and sent death threats.
3rd place: Reddit users chase assassins of the Boston Marathon
The 2013 Boston Marathon shows that the Reddit community can do it differently. Several attackers had placed two backpacks with explosives on the home stretch of the marathon. The explosion killed three people and injured 264 others.
- Immediately after the events, a massive search broke out on Reddit: users posted photos and videos of the attack and the alleged assassins.
- The community had spotted a suspect less than two hours later. A user posted a photo of the alleged perpetrator that he had taken himself. Other users identified the person, which led to a police search.
- However, it later turned out that the person exposed by the community was not the culprit. Instead, the attack was carried out by two Czech brothers.
- Nevertheless, it shows how quickly and organized a large community can work together on the Internet. The posted photos even showed the assassins, only the identification by the users was wrong.
2nd place: Pioneering revelations by Wikileaks and Reddit
The WikiLeaks disclosure page repeatedly causes scandals by publishing secret documents. At Reddit WikiLeaks even gets its own subpage. Accordingly, new revelations are spreading quickly among users.
- For example, WikiLeaks and Reddit have published secret documents about the Guatanamo detention center and US diplomatic reports about numerous governments around the world.
- Even large companies were not spared the disclosure platform: After the Sony hack in 2014, WikiLeaks published several company emails and documents. These are intended to prove attempts by Sony to influence politics and laws.
- In May 2015, WikiLeaks continued to publish secret protocols from the Bundestag's NSA investigation committee. They showed again who the NSA monitored and how often. Furthermore, the federal government is said to have even known about the activities of the USA.
- All new revelations and reports about WikiLeaks now appear almost directly and daily on Reddit.
1st place: The Fappening - the nude photo scandal by Reddit and Co.
Probably the biggest scandal of the past year was the nude photo leak on 4chan.org and Reddit. Hackers had stolen countless private pictures of stars like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Ariana Grande and posted them on the Internet.
- A total of around 100 celebrities were affected. The photos and download links spread especially on Reddit and 4chan every second.
- The stars reacted differently to the published pictures. From threats to a lawyer to claims that the photos were just fake, everything was there.
- As a consequence of the scandal, Reddit tightened its forum rules on nude photos. From now on, such pictures may only be placed online if the persons depicted have given their consent. In addition, there should now be new moderators who pay closer attention to such posts.
Although many of the publications on Reddit are welcomed by users, the revelators are often on the edge of legality. But other services like Facebook are not completely legal.