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someguyfromcanada  ·  2680 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Did The CEO Of Reddit Pierce Section 230

Any article citing Gawker as a source of legal information needs to immediately be disregarded.

It seems that this article is predicting doom for reddit as it has lost the wholesale protection of 230 because of this. Bullshit.

As far as the case law so far, essentially 230 it applies if the intermediary (reddit) was neutral and unknowing about certain particular content posted through its servers. If they are aware of or positively participate with such content they lose their safe haven protection regarding that particular content. It only applies to each particular circumstance and does not eternally strip them of protection for other content. For example, if someone posted something illegal tomorrow that reddit was unaware or and did not actively interact with, they are not going to forego 230 protection because of what spez did. No matter how ridiculous that was.

spez apparently did write/alter/interact with the content himself or had a script do it or something. I guess he redirected negative comments aimed at him to the mods of TheDonald. In other words, the reddit CEO did become the publisher/speaker of that particular content and therefore threw away the protection of 230 for only that particular content.

That does NOT mean that the 230 safe haven protections will be stripped from the website as a whole. Or at least no one has ever argued that in the past as far as I know and no court has ever narrowed the protection so far. It is remotely possible that a court might find some evidence that the CEO of reddit is actively moderating all of the content of reddit, in which case 230 might be not apply to reddit as a whole, but I highly doubt that is ever going to happen.

Are the mods of TheDonald going to sue them/him for libel or nuisance, etc.? They might win if so. But that has nothing to do with anything else.

IAAL with a LLM in Internet law although no specific expertise in 230.