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.