CNN to Interview Reddit\'s Violentacrez: A Troll Comes Out From Under the Bridge

Last week's story on Gawker that outed Violentacrez, the moderator of several controversial forums on the online community of Reddit, hit all the Web's hot buttons: Freedom of speech versus privacy, anonymity versus accountability, and community versus the broader community.

But what had been a fetish object of the Web is about to break out into broader realms: Violentacrez, aka Michael Brutsch, indicated on Reddit that he was going to sit for an interview on CNN, a network where Anderson Cooper had focused on the salaciousness of “Jailbait,” one of the forums Mr. Brutsch moderated. According to Christa Robinson, a spokeswoman for CNN, Mr. Brutsch will likely be interviewed on “AndersonCooper 360″ this Thursday.

The identity of Mr. Brutsch, who posted and moderated under the name Violentacrez, was revealed in a story by Adrien Chen on Gawker. Using his alias, Mr. Brutsch had distributed suggestive images of underage girls, posted links to stories of de ad teen girls, and hosted forums on porn, racism, incest and gore. Mr. Brutsch pleaded with Mr. Chen not to reveal his identity and when word got out, many other so-called Redditors said it violated the expectation of anonymity, one of the tenets of the Web.

Mr. Chen was unmoved.

“Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit's role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women.

I am OK with that,” Mr. Chen wrote.

Apart from the controversy, Reddit has been very much in news, having hosted a so-called “Ask Me Anything” forum by President Obama at the end of August. The controversy over Violentacruz serves as a reminder that even though Reddit seems to be in the middle of things, some of its content lies far outside the mainstream.

Mr. Brutsch lost his job after his identity was revealed , and all posts from Gawker were banned on Reddit for a time, which sparked its own debate on Reddit and elsewhere. The folkways and codes of the Web are mutable and subject to a great deal of debate, and the running argument over the right of anyone to post anything on the Web has been fascinating to behold. You can read vivid trips down that hobbit hole here, here, here, and here as well. And it should make for some interesting television if Mr. Brutsch sits for the interview.