reddit

Hi everyone, I’m u/traceroo a/k/a Ben Lee, Reddit’s General Counsel, and I wanted to give you all a heads up regarding an important upcoming Supreme Court case on Section 230 and why defending this law matters to all of us.

TL;DR: The Supreme Court is hearing for the first time a case regarding Section 230, a decades-old internet law that provides important legal protections for anyone who moderates, votes on, or deals with other people’s content online. The Supreme Court has never spoken on 230, and the plaintiffs are arguing for a narrow interpretation of 230. To fight this, Reddit, alongside several moderators, have jointly filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing in support of Section 230.

Why 230 matters

So, what is Section 230 and why should you care? Congress passed Section 230 to fix a weirdness in the existing law that made platforms that try to remove horrible content (like Prodigy which, similar to Reddit, used forum moderators) more vulnerable to lawsuits than those that didn’t bother. 230 is super broad and plainly stated: “No provider or user” of a service shall be held liable as the “publisher or speaker” of information provided by another. Note that Section 230 protects users of Reddit, just as much as it protects Reddit and its communities.

Section 230 was designed to encourage moderation and protect those who interact with other people’s content: it protects our moderators who decide whether to approve or remove a post, it protects our admins who design and keep the site running, it protects everyday users who vote on content they like or…don’t. It doesn’t protect against criminal conduct, but it does shield folks from getting dragged into court by those that don’t agree with how you curate content, whether through a downvote or a removal or a ban.

Much of the current debate regarding Section 230 today revolves around the biggest platforms, all of whom moderate very differently than how Reddit (and old-fashioned Prodigy) operates. u/spez testified in Congress a few years back explaining why even small changes to Section 230 can have really unintended consequences, often hurting everyone other than the largest platforms that Congress is trying to reign in.

What’s happening?

Which brings us to the Supreme Court. This is the first opportunity for the Supreme Court to say anything about Section 230 (every other court in the US has already agreed that 230 provides very broad protections that include “recommendations” of content). The facts of the case, Gonzalez v. Google, are horrible (terrorist content appearing on Youtube), but the stakes go way beyond YouTube. In order to sue YouTube, the plaintiffs have argued that Section 230 does not protect anyone who “recommends” content. Alternatively, they argue that Section 230 doesn’t protect algorithms that “recommend” content.

Yesterday, we filed a “friend of the court” amicus brief to impress upon the Supreme Court the importance of Section 230 to the community moderation model, and we did it jointly with several moderators of various communities. This is the first time Reddit as a company has filed a Supreme Court brief and we got special permission to have the mods sign on to the brief without providing their actual names, a significant departure from normal Supreme Court procedure. Regardless of how one may feel about the case and how YouTube recommends content, it was important for us all to highlight the impact of a sweeping Supreme Court decision that ignores precedent and, more importantly, ignores how moderation happens on Reddit. You can read the brief for more details, but below are some excerpts from statements by the moderators:

“To make it possible for platforms such as Reddit to sustain content moderation models where technology serves people, instead of mastering us or replacing us, Section 230 must not be attenuated by the Court in a way that exposes the people in that model to unsustainable personal risk, especially if those people are volunteers seeking to advance the public interest or others with no protection against vexatious but determined litigants.” - u/AkaashMaharaj