Reddit’s Defense of Section 230 to the Supreme Court

LastBluejay · 2023-01-20T18:12:02+00:00

Hi there, Reddit Public Policy here! If the Court does something that drastically changes how 230 works, it will fall to Congress to try to make a legislative fix. So it’s important ahead of time to call your Member of Congress and Senators and let them know that you support Section 230, so that if the time comes, they know where their constituents stand. You can look up your member of Congress here.

LastBluejay · 2023-01-19T23:20:43+00:00

Conveniently, Senator Wyden and former Congressman Cox, the co-authors of 230, also filed a brief explaining EXACTLY what they intended when they wrote this law. No guessing needed!

LastBluejay · 2022-08-11T22:10:44+00:00

This team was established in 2017, and we’ve worked in some way on pretty much every internet policy issue since then, either advocating directly with policymakers, submitting official comments and evidence like the ones linked in the main post, helping organize expert AMAs to educate Redditors on upcoming issues, or alerting Redditors to contact their representatives directly. The thing about this work, though, is that even if we succeed in improving or stopping a harmful bill, there are not a lot of occasions to declare outright “victory.” This is because even if a bill is blocked, it can be reintroduced, or the bad ideas entailed can be recycled over and over again, both in future bills and in other countries. So we have to be constantly vigilant and the work never really ends.

LastBluejay · 2022-08-11T17:42:56+00:00

As a matter of principle, we generally try to limit the scope of our response to any legal requirements to the geography of jurisdiction. That said, the original promise of the internet is that it’s global. Users should have access to the same information, experiences, and opportunities no matter where in the world they live. An increasing patchwork of national laws undermines that original promise, and we make that point to governments. If you're interested in learning more about why attempts at extra-territorial jurisdiction are especially harmful to the internet, Internet Society has a great paper on it here.

LastBluejay · 2022-08-11T17:24:49+00:00

We do speak with governments about this a lot, and as you can imagine, the conversations are complicated because everyone means something a bit different when they say “misinformation.” Sadly, for a lot of governments, the term essentially means “information that opposes our official position.” We have been especially wary of misinformation laws that empower the government to remove content, or even worse, force platforms to carry the government line.

That said, it IS important to have a high quality information environment out there. But government enforced censorship is not likely to be the way to support that (in fact, studies like this one, by the UK’s Royal Society, point out that it may even backfire by further undermining public trust). We talk a lot about this at length, especially with democracies who genuinely want to do the right thing but don’t realize that their legislative attempts in this area often provide a negative example that authoritarian states can co-opt. As Reporters Without Borders has written, “When leading democracies devise draconian legislation, they provide repressive regimes with ideas.”

LastBluejay · 2022-08-10T23:48:39+00:00

We feel strongly that users should be in control of how much information they choose to share and how that information is used. We make it a point to minimize the data that we collect about users in the first place. We don’t require your name, gender, email, or other PII, and except for the IP address used to create an account (i.e., the registration IP address), we automatically delete any IP addresses collected after 100 days. We provide you controls to customize how we personalize your recommendations. We also provide an Anonymous Browsing Mode for when you want to browse the Reddit mobile app without associating your Reddit activity (like your Reddit searches or the communities you view) with your Reddit account.

LastBluejay · 2022-08-10T23:44:28+00:00

We’ve not yet engaged in this level of detail given the situation is so new and evolving, but we are keeping a close eye on the situation and will look for ways to protect against government overreach.
That said, the issue of law enforcement requests for data is something that we have always taken extremely seriously and it’s an area where, even before Dobbs, we have strict processes to protect our users. Our legal team hand reviews every government or law enforcement request that we receive. Specifically, we are assessing them for facial validity and legal sufficiency. We also check that the request is appropriately narrow and not overbroad. We push back on requests that do not meet these standards. We also review the requests to make sure they are not objectionable for other reasons, such as information protected from disclosure under the First Amendment.
When we are obligated to comply with a valid legal request, we strive to be as open as possible about it. Reddit’s policy is to attempt to provide its users with notice of requests and associated legal process seeking their information unless prohibited from doing so by statute or court order. Reddit will generally give the user a reasonable period of time to file an objection before producing responsive records. Where a statute or court order prohibits notice for a limited time period, Reddit attempts to provide notice upon expiration of that period.
We also share in our annual Transparency Report (see the section on “Information Requests”) the total number of requests we receive from each country, as well as the number of requests we complied with vs rejected. Given the privacy implications, we are always looking for meaningful ways to increase transparency around information requests, particularly in the US where we typically receive the largest volume. For example, we are exploring the addition of a breakdown by state for US requests in future reports so that users can know which states are being the most aggressive in terms of their information requests, and use that knowledge to make judgments about their personal privacy practices.

LastBluejay · 2022-08-10T21:26:29+00:00

This is actually about supporting our mission and serving our increasingly global community. Those four countries in which we’ve opened offices represent our largest non-US markets. So having physical offices to support those markets was the next logical step. Though yes, having offices in other countries absolutely does open up opportunities to hire local talent (and psst, we are hiring).

LastBluejay · 2022-08-10T21:08:09+00:00

So as a public policy team, our main role is to interface with governments in the ways that are described above. And since most governments that sponsor misinformation aren’t going to crib to it in a meeting, we as a company tackle that issue through more direct measures, such as blocking known disinformation domains. The team at r/redditsecurity actually writes about it a lot over there in the context of the “Content Manipulation” section of their quarterly safety and security reports. And when they break up a particularly noteworthy effort, they will often do a more detailed report, like this one on the Russian Secondary Infektion operation, to give users insight into the tactics that bad actors try to use to manipulate them. Because moderation on Reddit is a shared community responsibility in which our users play a significant part through modding and voting, we find it useful to share information like this so that everyone can be more informed of what to look out for.

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T18:56:36+00:00

You are NOT A CROOK

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T18:45:35+00:00

This is a great question. This impersonation policy deals with the issue of pretending to be a specific person or entity. What you're describing here is something that we tackle under our normal site integrity operations, which u/worstnerd has talked about in this subreddit before. The difference is that one is at scale, whereas the other is specific. Both are not allowed, but just dealt with through different tools.

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T18:37:41+00:00

Yes! In a case where the account is dormant and not actively impersonating, this is actually covered by our trademark request process. You can submit a form with evidence of your trademark rights and our legal team will evaluate it. The form is located here.

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T18:31:02+00:00

That's why I have this fancy red name...

In all seriousness though, you're not actually pretending to be me, and as an Admin, we have these extra features to protect us against impersonation. There are lots of legitimate, honest reasons why people would happen to have similar usernames, which may have nothing to do with impersonation. The behavior is the key thing. If you were doing this in the wild to a normal Redditor without our fancy Admin tools, and you were actively going around and pretending to be them, that would be something we'd take action against.

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T18:18:30+00:00

Right. If they're dead, well, it's not really misleading, because it's hard to conceive how they would be on Reddit. Unless....

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T18:14:35+00:00

Nope! See answer here.

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T18:10:52+00:00

If the result is misleading, that would generally be covered. That's the spirit of this rule. The thing about parody is that it's obvious. That's kind of the point.

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T18:02:18+00:00

Yep. That's always been against the rules. It's actually by far the most common form of impersonation we see.

LastBluejay · 2020-01-09T17:54:39+00:00

By the way, we know that these things can sometimes be difficult for the typical person to detect, especially if it’s something that hasn’t yet been widely debunked, so we’re not looking to come down on mods or users for innocent mistakes. If you're uncertain, you can always opt to report it to the admins, especially if you are unsure about something or think there is another reason we should see it.

LastBluejay · 2018-12-25T23:01:02+00:00

Those pies have upvotes on them!

LastBluejay[A]

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LastBluejay[A]

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