Reddit is the armpit of the Internet. It’s where unverifiable narratives go to be recycled into “content” with a veneer of authenticity.

It is filled with hooey and no way to verify the countless AITA‑style narratives. YouTube channels that crib from Reddit usually put in serious disclaimers about the endless fodder of spooky and folksy nonsensical yarns puked out by its users. Fake legal problems. Fake confessions. Fake accounts. Fake grievances.

Reddit is a giant urban legend. It’s not a record of reality so much as a factory for stories that feel true enough to travel. No platform‑level fact‑checkers, no meaningful vetting for paid operatives, bots, or mule accounts. It’s a life-sink.

But while X (deservingly) gets scrutinized, Reddit is the worse offender who seemingly gets away with spreading misinformation, but more importantly, allowed vested interests to target individual and groups with impunity.

And the latest manufactured target, conveniently, is Perplexity, one of the few tools that can read Reddit without inheriting its groupthink.

Reddit has filed a lawsuit accusing Perplexity of “industrial‑scale” scraping of user content, casting itself as a besieged bank vault. Yet the same Reddit happily lets tabloids like the New York Post and Daily Mail strip‑mine threads for “news” articles, Google index and surface its posts, and countless horror and mystery channels narrate Reddit stories for profit: YouTube channels such as Lazy Masquerade, The Void, Chilling Scares, and others openly bill their videos as “true scary stories from Reddit” and link to the original threads when it suits them, with no pushback from Reddit. These channels also bury their videos in disclaimers that remind viewers nothing has been verified.

This climate makes an outside vested interest, whether competitors, litigators, or political actors, see Reddit as a fertile ground to launch a hate campaign against Perplexity with peculiar waves of accusations that Perplexity is a “scam,” and there should be a class-action lawsuit…for doing exactly what every other website is doing.

From the timing and repetition, this looked like an organized but amateur operation, complete with bots and repetitive accusations with the same flawed logic.

If these were organic complaints, you would expect different levels of understanding of how websites operate.

I noticed this scam; so I decided to conduct a little method research: I would go in and use a little Jim Can’t Swim [JCS interrogation] in the Perplexity subreddit and see what happens.

In JCS interrogations, police listen and let the suspect talk, offering small facts like rope. The suspect doesn’t confess; they just keep revising the story to fit each new fact, tightening the noose themselves. The killer is not usually going to say, “You caught me.” They will change the story, but always in such a way to incorporate the fact the police provided.

This tactic seemingly mimics on the 36 Stratagems of War: toss a brick to get a jade.

However, what it does is show someone drowning in their own lies mistaking the fact as a lifeline, not another rock that will sink their freedom.

So here is the score so far:

1. The first category of whining was people getting their free trials cut off…without expressly mentioning what part of the ToS they violated. The omission tries to make Perplexity sound dishonest: not that the user scammed a free trial or gave their access to other people (for free or for a fee).
2. The second is the diatribe that free trials require a credit card. All free trials do because (a) the vast majority of free trials end in paid subscriptions, and (b) this is a way to counter fraud and ensure, as much as possible that the person getting the free trial is who they say they are. I have signed up for a lot of free trials, and every one, for years, has required this step. This is probably the most nonsensical of the complaints, but users always try to shade this as something evil and unique to Perplexity. It is neither. Moreover, student/educator and rotating pop‑ups don’t require a credit card.
3. Once I mentioned that the people who benefited from Perplexity’s lavish year-long free trial were freeloaders and people like me who pay for Perplexity Max were subsidizing it (and I never had a free trial because I knew this was perfect for me), suddenly, the complaints shifted from people griping about the free stuff, and suddenly claimed to be paid subscribers of Pro who claimed they “hardly ever used it”, which makes no sense unless you realize this is a way to cover for the fact they have no idea how Perplexity works. This is a huge red flag: both the shift, and the butt covering.
4. Perplexity is still a work in progress: like every serious SaaS product. Features rotate in and out, ToS and privacy policies update, and capabilities move between tiers; this is standard practice, not evidence of a conspiracy. It removes outdated functions, and experiments with new ones, and rotates functions, taking out some, a replacing it with new, superior functions, or upgraded older functions. Every company does this: updates the ToS and changes to their privacy policy. This is also nothing new. This is where the fake outrage is now coming trying to spark a class-action lawsuit. The problem, I pointed out, was that all companies do this. Then suddenly, someone tries to clumsily bring in Perplexity’s ToS…all while ignoring the fact that Perplexity functions in sessions, and takes things out and replaces them with new features.

You will hear about these features on X, Facebook, and Discord all the time, but not on Reddit. On Reddit, the narrative freezes at whatever combination of features best serves the current outrage.

If I sat in Perplexity’s C‑suite, I’d be funding an investigation into who is running this campaign, how they coordinated it, and why Reddit is the only place it caught fire.

When one of the most innovative companies of 2026 becomes the target of a hyper‑specific smear campaign that lives almost entirely on a platform with no verification controls and a financial axe to grind, you would be negligent not to question who is paying for the story.