A fellow mod informed me that about it as I was laying in bed. Reddit sent a message to the mod team and after 1 hour demoded me. I didn’t even had time to see it, never-mind respond to it.
Looks like we rattled reddit enough to start shooting. There goes all that fancy talk about our protest not affecting them much.
Just FYI for now. It’s late here so I’ll see how we proceed tomorrow.
Does this, from a legal standpoint, absolve them of what is hosted on their servers? Especially when they just took steps to make sure it is open for bussiness?
As any good legal question goes, I imagine the answer is one of the many shades of “It depends.”
Ultimately it’s going to come down to how accommodating Reddit wants to be if rightsholders lawyers come around demanding an explanation for why Reddit facilitates the piracy of their works. Generally a platform doesn’t have liability for infringing content posted on it as long as they are responsive to requests to take it down.
Not a lawyer, so not sure how enforceable reddit’s ToS is, but the TL;DR (as I read it) is “you’re responsible for everything you post; reddit owns it.”
Section 230 (often called the 26 words that created the internet) reads:
Wikipedia also says:
I’m also not a lawyer so I have no clue what the ramifications for this are, but I’m guessing that Reddit isn’t liable for stuff people upload as long as the illegal stuff gets removed.
If Reddit undeletes a post, could they be treated as the publisher? At the very least it sounds not very good-samaritan-y of them to do that, so maybe they wouldn’t be protected in that case.
BTW, the supreme court heard a few cases centered around section 230 a few months ago! And Biden called for it to be reformed! So depending on how that goes, the internet could get shaken up soon. We’re in some interesting times.
Which is essentially what section 230 has given all social media companies. They are absolved from responsibility from what users post, but own it all and can moderate (or fail to) however they want. Companies have all of the control
We need digital rights