cont.

He did, however, find an attorney willing to file a defamation SLAPP (Strategic lawsuit against public participation) against Reddit, and erroneously referred to me as an ”employee” of Reddit in order to facilitate my inclusion in the suit, and target me for reasons of personal contempt. I am not and never have been an employee of Reddit, as I think is pretty clear in this statement. Reddit, considering that I had in no way defamed this person, generously provided me with legal counsel.

In the course of this, the plaintiff not only harassed me personally, but also provided a frivolous motion to attempt to unmask approximately forty users in the community in an attempt to subject them to further harassment for having seen or commented on the original post. Reddit accommodated our community with active diligence, filing legal briefs to defend those users against unmasking, and to push back against many of the plaintiff’s empty threats, and his lawyer’s failure to supply the most basic legal action to back his claims.

The suit, unsurprisingly, was ultimately dropped -- but that doesn’t reflect any kind of guarantee. The state of California, where Reddit is based, has very strong anti-SLAPP legislation in place, and because this person framed his place of business as being located there, it’s unlikely he would have made much progress. He still harasses me personally by putting my email on websites and impersonating me as soliciting sexual services, funeral services, other little contextualized hints of his malice, but he is not in a very strong position to weaponize further litigation against me.

Now, in my opinion, these acts are only restrained from escalation due to his lack of opportunity. In spite of a paucity of organization and tendency to self-sabotage, his level of hate is so vitriolic that he demonstrates a personality that does not so much resemble plaintiff Gonzales…but ISIS.

So in addition to compartmentalizing the chain of responsibility in order to protect human volunteers such as myself, we have to ask how far the distance really is between a hateful individual with enough money to hire an attorney (all while intimating wishes to do harm to the defendant with no care to their own legal case’s integrity) to bring a SLAPP -- and an individual who will visit actual physical harm on another in order to silence them in contempt of their freedoms.

It isn’t a one-to-one comparison and I am not suggesting someone who harasses me online is equivalent to ISIS, but there is another consideration: if Section 230 is weakened because of a failure by Google to address its own weaknesses (something I think we can agree it has the resources and expertise to do) what ultimately happens to the human moderator who is considered responsible for the content that appears on their platform, and is expected to counteract it, and is expected to protect their community from it?

We are already, by tacit agreement, placed in that chain. We’re not algorithms, we are the agents of programming those algorithms to aid our service to our communities. Reddit isn’t perfect, it has struggled with balancing free speech and hate speech in the past. No company or individual can monitor all corners of the internet at all time, but the same goes for a school yard, or a mall, or any other place where human communities assemble.

Further, Reddit has tightened its regulations precisely because it does not want to inadvertently host those potential threats. Without a moderationship and administration free to act without fear of being litigated against or even charged with abetting these threats, organizations like ISIS, or the Proud Boys, or various international bad actors, would in fact find comfort in the weakening of Section 230.

Such interests often attempt to use human-run forums to propagate their message and recruitment. Twitter recently saw the departure of its entire paid moderator team, and the increase of hate speech, racism, abuse, misinformation and other threats to our freedoms has skyrocketed. A weakening of Section 230 would codify such an invitation to chaos, endangering the individuals whose role it is to ensure speech while using their best judgement to mitigate threats by exposing them to prosecutions.

Indicating my actions as a single individual performing this role in my spare time are the same as Google’s automated challenges suggest that any individual who litigates for any reason against platforms like Reddit should enjoy the same protections as a victim of terrorism.

This is not consistent with what I consider a standard of freedom or free speech.

Conclusion

It’s realistic to say that large, heavily resourced, well-financed corporations like Google should be required to implement better protections where their automated regulation of content is concerned. It’s fair, I think, to say that Section 230 may need to be reconsidered in light of this, and that its text should be updated to make these distinctions, as well as expanding protection to paid or volunteer moderator teams whose primary purpose is to ensure the protection of their communities.

That includes terror threats -- and the importance of human intervention. Whether the YouTube’s content regulation instruments can recognize the difference between an ISIS recruitment video or a television clip is a question of technological limitations. If, however, if 230 is weakened in order to punish those technological limitations, as written it will ultimately punish the individuals like myself whose far more sophisticated perception is vital to determining the difference between speech, and potential harm.

I am not capable of predicting what any bad actor might choose to propagate within my community before it comes to my inbox. Reddit, by extension (relying on thousands of human volunteers) cannot predict this either. It’s possible Google has a greater share of responsibility to do so, but if Section 230 suffers as a result of this lawsuit, it would preemptively chill human participation in moderating harmful content, and as a result, that harmful content very potentially would enjoy more and not less distribution.

If the object of this case is to prevent recruitment and indoctrination by terrorists, weakening my immunity as a volunteer moderator means not only that the person who attempted to sue me for defamation would likely have far greater success in falsely crediting responsibility to me for his indignity, but that I would not choose to make myself available to police any controversial content in service to my community, whether that be cottage industry grift, or terrorist recruitment, or simple bickering.

I am not an algorithm. I am not a Reddit employee, or a Reddit department. In the course of being sued, I have taken the personal, voluntary initiative to prevent the names and addresses of community members from becoming public and making those members vulnerable. I was a liaison between Reddit and those community members. I don’t receive compensation for this, and I was happy to do it -- but I don’t think I would feel that way if I was blamed for anything posted in my community. That simply does not make sense. And if there is further examination of Section 230, it should consider my level of responsibility does not match Google’s.

Finally, the victims and the targets of terror need moderators who can act without fear of being accused of participating in terror for simply being in a chain of administrators. Section 230 must remain in place to ensure that threat management is protected and improved, or else it credits responsibility to every paid or unpaid participant responsible for regulating potentially harmful content.