Anonymously clearing your conscience online is one thing … admitting to murder is another. According to The Daily Dot, one Redditor learned this the hard way this week.
The point of the “Confession Bear” meme is very straight-forward: You create your own confession on top of the image, post, and move on with your life. Most of these confessions are light-hearted, sometimes a little dark, but generally amusing. For example, take a look:
Now compare that one to this Confession Bear meme. “My sister had an abusive meth addict boyfriend… I killed him with his own drugs while he was unconscious and they ruled it as an overdose.”
The source of that post was a Redditor by the name of “Naratto” and it was found in the /r/AdviceAnimals Subreddit. The Reddit post was titled, “Finally have the guts to say it.” We can’t tell you if what he published was fact, but Redditors took it upon themselves to find out the truth. What resulted was the doxing of Naratto, meaning that a name, face, job, social network profiles, and just about every detail you could find about that once-anonymous individual was dug up and published very publicly.
Naratto made the mistake of publishing his Confession Bear meme on his main Reddit account. If you’ve published posts on Reddit before, you’ll know that you can browse other user’s histories, which over time unknowingly will be filled with small personal details that the user reveals about his or herself.
But doxing is banned on Reddit – a “law” enacted by the creators of Reddit themselves, so there was some division on how to deal with Naratto. On one side Redditors wanted justice, and the other argued against jumping to conclusions. “An Internet meme is not enough to convict anybody,” a Redditor commented. Despite the back and forth, it was too late. The FBI have apparently been contacted, and Naratto expectedly disappeared from Reddit altogether. We can’t say whether or not the FBI would investigate a crime that may or may not have happened; however it wouldn’t be the first investigation to be started from a public post on a social media platform.
