- By editing users’ comments to reflect something other than their original intent, Huffman changed himself and Reddit from being an “interactive computer service”2 to an “information content provider.” i.e. If Huffman or Reddit are sued, they cannot claim Section 230 immunity from a lawsuit.
- That the CEO of a media company so flagrantly violated the integrity of the copyright of its users is insane. It represents a complete lack of understanding of the ethical, moral, and legal duties he has to his customers and his shareholders. Huffman has potentially exposed Reddit to legal liability through his actions. By any account, it’s a breach of his fiduciary duty to shareholders.
A long time ago, when I was just a lad, I was told by the old men around me that I should always remember the following statement: When men get emotional, people get hurt and killed. Now, because of an emotional reaction to what basically amounts to shitposting, Reddit the Company is going to have to answer a ton of questions, all of them uncomfortable. Section 230 is there to protect the web site and the web site operators from the shitposting trolls and bullshit spewing idiots; breaking that legal wall is a big oopsie.
It's not a secret that I no longer like Reddit as a community, a company or a site. But this fuck up by an, ostensibly, adult man who simply did not walk the fuck outside for a few hours is going to reverberate all across the so-called Web 2.0 companies. Twitter employees worked to trend Hillary Clinton news and information. Are they now subject to FEC rules and have to register as lobbyists, to give an example? Somewhere in a dank office with lots of loose paper strew across a desk, a lawyer is planning out how to take advantage of this information and run with it. I fully anticipate a spike in litigation against Reddit the company here in the next few months.
What is the line on the spez death watch? My bet is he does not last the weekend.
For any lawsuit that, currently or in the future, involves content appearing on Reddit in any fashion, it seems reasonably prudent to: - Subpoena Reddit for all moderation and administration activity as it relates to said content, - Depose all moderators and administrators who have access to said content. I wouldn’t take the word of anyone at the company during routine discovery. Well.Aside, for all my brother and sister lawyers out there:
Very true. He just added a nominal nuisance amount to the legal and personnel costs for all the lawsuits about comments and posts. I would assume that the number of suits is very low however so BFD. Regarding the second last sentence, good luck for a plaintiff getting depos from all people who have access as logs would narrow that scope to those who have relevant knowledge. Regarding the last sentence, a lawyer always treats a deponent's words with skepticism.
Were they to do this they'd basically get to increase the onerousness of their discovery motions by an order of magnitude. And also terrify the shit out of their entirely-volunteer moderators. It's an elective glueball to throw into the works for purposes of making any legal motion suck that much harder for the target. And it has the potential for chilling effects against the people who actually make the site functional. Not gonna lie; saw that list and debated dumping the few mod slots I still retain.
I don't think the relative cost to reddit would be great but good point about mod paranoia. Not sure where the potential liability would lie there as HQ is really in charge. But I have seen "non-sophisticated litigants" (ie. anyone that does not do it for a living), even when the claim was absolutely bullshit, emotionally/psychologically ruined by the prospect of potential liability. I really prefer a "loser pay" model of litigation cost and I believe the States is the only 1st world country without that rule. In the States anyone can sue anyone for anything and incur no cost if they have a contingency lawyer. The defendants though have to shell out monetarily and emotionally no matter how frivolous the claim.
My liability training is related to medical devices (and really fuckin' out of date) so my understanding is likely to be off-base, but the way you go after a medical device manufacturer is you make them cough up every document they've ever had on anything they've ever done on any continent in any year for any reason ever and then you go through and ding them for shit you don't see. Then you hassle them about the documents that are missing and pursue summary judgement. Then you go through and depose everybody who kept the notebooks to determine what's accurate and what isn't. And you aren't even to litigating yet but you're already neck-deep in compliance issues and settling starts to look pretty good, particularly as your insurance has kicked in and they've got an entirely different idea about how this should go than you do. And you don't even need to get to guilt or innocence because for some reason there's a lab notebook from 1994 that hasn't been found and yeah, the jury might not assume it's full of condemning evidence but Zurich Re doesn't want to take that risk so they're going to pay the plaintiff ten million and liquidate your company to cover the costs, bitch. And that's why there are no medical device startups anymore.
That is still the way it is. The vast majority of litigation cost is pre-trial as most cases never go to trial. Insurers also always make the decisions about lawsuits and they are very sophisticated litigants who simply view it on a cost/benefit analysis. I would think that medical device litigation is very different than suing reddit about a post, which would not be nearly as complicated. Or involve such enormous potential benefit to the contingency lawyers so would not be an incentive for overreaching. Contingency lawyers too would do a cost/benefit analysis and might not demand evidence that is not relevant or go on "fishing expeditions" (an actual legal term about discovery). Server logs would narrow it down. Or maybe they would try to access to access Slack threads to find additional evidence. Who knows. But back to potential mod liability... if they were found to be relevant (of course after the plaintiff brings a motion to depose that may be contested to the cost of $5,000 or something to the mod, who of course does not have insurance against such eventuality), there is still the emotional cost of being potentially liable for some astronomical absurd amount claimed. They probably do not have deep pockets though and the plaintiff may settle in exchange for their cooperation, but that too is still a cost to the mod. This might be an out of date stat as well but I have heard that tort litigation in the States is a bigger business than the automobile industry. And it is certainly not the aggrieved that benefit the most. For some reason tort reform is really opposed by the ABA.
Holy fuck is this a good summary of experiences of friends who are in biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical device startups on either coast.
It was an extremely fucking grim existence. We'll start with the fact that you're designing shit to last two or three years longer than your clients. So. 80% of patients with atrial fibrillation are gonna be dead in ten years. If your gadget lasts twelve you're good. Then we'll dig into what the prevailing insurance climate is for quality-of-life devices and their deductibles and determine just how much grandma is willing to spend on herself rather than leaving as a legacy to her kids for those extra ten years. That's your budget. Can't make it for that? Then don't make it. Make it for less than that? Charge that much anyway because you're going to need wiggle room. Is it your IP? Or are you licensing it? Because if you've got the patents, you'll get to sell them when you're blown out of the water. But if you're licensing those patents they're depreciating every year you don't make a sale. If it takes you ten years to bring a viable product to market, there are only ten years for your buyer to recoup the expenses of buying you. I worked briefly for a company that licensed patents in 1996. It took them until 2005 to bring a product to market. By 2006 they'd burned through $70m. By 2012 they'd made $28m in sales. It's safe to say they were a good $100m-$120m in the hole when they were sold for $140m in 2013. That's a company with 80 employees burning a patent for 17 years returning $1m/yr to all its VC founders and if I'm not mistaken, the patents expired last year. What I remember most is the silicone. Everybody wants 3M. 3M will happily sell their silicone to Nike because nobody is suing Nike out of existence because of the silicone in their shoes. Medical devices? Well, you always look for the deep pockets and in any device involving 3M silicone in its construction, the deep pockets are 3M (unless you're Johnson & Johnson or Philips, who have swallowed up pretty much everybody else). So there was an entire industry that bought 3M silicone, shipped it around, sold it, bought it, resold it, rebought it, processed it, melted it, chopped it up and re-sold it in such a way that it was chemically and physically 3M silicone but not legally 3M silicone. How's that for a cottage industry? "Medical commodity laundering." Worked nine days straight once. Factory floor - our dozen-or-so talented watchmakers - built 38 whizbangles. I tested all 38 whizbangles. Put them in the designated ready rack. VP of engineering was leading shareholders through on a tour and managed to slam them all in a drawer. $140m in 2013.
"true" and "false" are only part of the story when it comes to litigation. There's also "how much pain can you suffer while we attempt to argue 'true' vs. 'false.'" 4chan has a distinct advantage in this case because they've always been cash-poor and their value is arguably zero. There are no pockets to go after. Advance Publications, on the other hand, has $8b in revenue yearly. The question then becomes who wants it more - litigants taking a flyer to find Reddit's pain point or Reddit's parent counsel wanting to defend the actions of a subsidiary they've never really known what to do with or how to derive revenue from.
That's the glorious thing about litigation - all it takes is a lawyer willing to take a flyer at it to find out. Considering how much patent trolling and exploratory class action litigation happens in the US, I don't think it'd take too many flights before good ol' Advance decides that their black sheep needs to find a new pasture. I mean, have you seen the dumpster fire that is Twitter's attempt to sell itself? Every time Salesforce or whoever says "mmmmmyeah, too toxic" Reddit's value drops proportionately. There will come a time when Reddit's potential worth will be outweighed by Reddit's potential liability and then things get interesting for Reddit. I don't know law, but I surmise that spez is pushing on the minute hand. I wouldn't even begin to guess where on the spectrum this falls.
I think Conde Nast bought Reddit thinking they'd be able to turn it into Disqus, which didn't exist at the time. Then their network guys got a look under the hood and determined that while they could implement it, they'd need to rewrite it, hobble it, unfuck it and otherwise gut it in order to turn it into a well-heeled hierarchical comments system. So they let it run for a while to see what happened with it - after all, it was a sunk cost and it didn't hit their bottom line much. And besides, they got to look edgy and forward-looking in a way that Wired accomplished back when Douglas Coupland was still cool. And since then, it's been prominent and interesting and they can't offload it without it looking like a failure... but I think it's a pain in their ass more often than not. Twitter went public before people figured out that it has essentially zero value. Reddit did not. Dumbass A16Z poured what? $40m into Imgur before they figured out that it needed to become photobucket to make money? It's always been weird to me that the valuelessness of 4chan is immediately obvious to everyone but people think Reddit hasn't made money yet because they haven't cracked banner advertising or some shit.
When people who don't understand computers are told that something on the computer is important, they believe it. Pets.com raised $82m despite the fact that Petco and Petsmart were closing stores and consolidating. Twitter is top-heavy because journalists use it and it's easy to embed within online news therefore it must be important, right? And if it's important, it must be worth something? And if it's worth something, surely we can trade for it? The thing that reworked my understanding of finance was greater fool theory.
I don't understand why this is such a big deal. Because he admitted it? Mod edits have been around as long as there have been BBS as far as I was aware (I first got online in 98). He's the site admin. I assume every post I ever write on any website can be altered.
As much as I'm disappointed in Huffman's actions because I think people's posts are sacrosanct, I hope that this article is over reacting. I'm also wondering about this part. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but it seems to say that if the site were unpopular, the action would be OK, but since it's popular, that changes everything. I'm wondering why that should be.By Huffman’s actions, he has exposed Reddit to liability and the possibility of defamation lawsuits from untold parties. Huffman seems to think he can sweep this aside with a “LOL, whoops, my bad.” But Huffman isn’t just some guy running a small message board where his actions have little consequence. He is the chief executive of one of the largest social media discussion sites in the world.
johnnyFive, IANAL, but my understanding, which is consistent with the summaries on Wikipedia, is that the only times sites have lost immunity under Section 203 was where when they explicitly provided support for doing something illegal (roommates.com allowing users to select discriminatory criteria), actually wrote some of the content themselves (www.badbusinessbureau.com), or where just publishing content wasn't the issue (ModelMayhem.com not warning users about a known rapist). Does this post sound plausible to you, assuming that changing "fuck /u/spez" to "fuck u/someoneelse/" isn't itself an issue?
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.
The key point here is that this is the one time HE GOT CAUGHT and now there are a lot of people wondering if the admins have done this in the past? Has any admin, say during the whole Pao garbage edited comments? This action created uncertainty, and I know a few lawyers that make a great living off exploiting uncertainty.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.
There was one instance I remember from many years ago where some admin edited a post title. I can't remember the context but think it was fairly innocuous. As far as I know no one really caught onto it but it was discussed in a private defaultmods subreddit and last night I could not find anything on google about it. But server logs would certainly show whether or not that happened if it ever became an issue.
My reading of the situation is totally in line with someguyfromcanada's.