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A great point made on the 4chan board:

This isn’t a joke. This Reddit cuck was apparently forced to keep spamming Reddit with apologies until his account was deleted; his apology appears to be synchronized with CNN’s threats of revealing his identity if he did not comply. The general tone of his cuckpologies appear to be genuine fear.

Blackmail generally is regarded if someone did something “bad” and someone threatens to expose that conduct. Extortion is threatening someone who essentially did not do anything morally culpable.

This is not blackmail. This is extortion. Virtually all commonwealth jurisdictions differentiate between blackmail (person did something bad, forced to do something to keep secret hidden) vs extortion (person did nothing wrong, acts purely out of fear).

CNN threatened to have this man’s reputation, livelihood and, what appears to be, have this person or his family, associates etc physically harmed, maimed or killed.

If CNN had a legal basis to reveal his identity, ie. as part of a lawsuit if he did not comply, or something of the sort, then they would have an absolute defense. Perhaps they threatened to sue him for defamation for having shopped CNN’s logo into that GIF; however, their ability to prove it was him would be impossible (he/she could simply claim they found it somewhere). This is highly disturbing. I see no legal grounds for CNN to threaten to reveal his identity, knowing full well the consequences just or unjust, if he did not meet some legal obligation, which does not appear to be the case here.

This may be blatant and RICO-level extortion, especially if Reddit’s owners, Huffman et al, were contacted to illegally reveal IP addresses/identifiers.

If multiple were involved in CNN’s hierarchical chain, as in Zucker or one of his subordinates, this is a RICO case.

Extortion is serious shit. In Commonwealth countries it almost always carries a life sentence.