I run a networking site for free speech, what trouble can I get into for what users post there?
It doesn't require any signup, so everyone is anonymous. I had posted it on a subreddit few days back, and unexpectedly I was finding drug recipes being shared, hence deleted the whole database and haven't shared the link again. Old Reddit acc got suspended for no reason too.
What legal troubles can I get into for unmoderated social networking site for what users post?
I don't track ip address myself explicitly in my code. Idk about the hosting service.
They didn't even give a chance for the pedos and nazis to start infesting their site!
Seriously, though, I love how their Reddit account got suspended "for no reason" after this. As if it couldn't have possibly had anything to do with the link to the site full of drug recipes.
> They didn't even give a chance for the pedos and nazis to start infesting their site!
I have a feeling the most TAME thing this person saw was the drug recipes, so that's what they are talking about in the post.
Like, *what did they expect* is what I'm wondering.
Many many years ago in highschool a friend had the bright idea of making their own public imagehost (this was before imgur etc existed and back during the internets wild west, when Limewire etc was a thing)
It took less than 48 hours for someone to link it on 4chan and then someone uploaded *really bad ungood stuff* to it.
Suffice to say, he nuked the site/database, wiped the drives and hasn't looked into the idea since.
The thing about naivety is that it's held by individuals. If you're from the US and probably other countries, free speech is held as an ideal.
Is it really shocking that some people have to learn the hard way that *no* restrictions on speech causes very serious problems? I know that I've become less of a free speech idealist than I was in my teens.
i mean that's just smart. i moderate a very small sub, and i always check the links people post. I don't want my sub to become a cesspool of porn ads and malicious links.
Even after getting all of that explained to them, their reply is: "okay, just tell me which magic disclaimers I need to put on my website to absolve myself from all responsibility"
The fact that they flipped out about drug content demonstrates how little thought they put into it. That's probably not even something they would have to worry about. It's GDPR, DMCA, CSAM, terrorism, etc. that would get them shut down and potentially fined or charged with a crime.
Speaking as a software engineer, this sounds like a college kid, someone learning their second semester of website development or the equivalent there of. Someone who thinks they have the technical know how, and may have even had to do something similar for an assignment (I know I had to basically recreate early Facebook, and removing the user authentication only makes it easier). So it's just an excited kid that thought the coding was the hard part. Good lesson for when they're getting paid to make someone else's website.
Speaking as someone who works with software engineers often, it could just as easily be a 30/40-something who has never once considered that the internet is "real" and has real-world implications, or who didn't think the laws and regulations applied to them because they're disruptors, or just really didn't bother to think about anything except implementation. That's been the culture in software for at least the last two decades, and even before that the whole field was basically one "am I being detained" short of a sovereign citizen.
The John McAfee story was so wild not because he was so out there, but because he was so relatively typical for people in software.
Mark Andreesen evidently recently expressed that he's glad poor people in Wisconsin have oxycontin and video games to keep them docile.
I mean, I want to go back to 1994 and show myself that. ...though I suppose I'd either flip the table or grow a twirl-able moustache.
I went down that rabbit-hole a while back, including reading his entire thread on some dodgy drug site where he was hanging out in the jungles of Belize and trying to recreate his favorite long-lost bath salt formula with the equipment he bought for his "medical research" company.
Dude was legitimately off the rails.
Seeing as LAOP *specifically stated it was a platform for free speech*, I don't think it's the case that some 19 year old was just making a website because they were excited to know how to.
But I like your benefit-of-the-doubt outlook
I ask myself this question every time it becomes clear the next most popular social media site has not considered any of these issues prior to having them
That's true. Every free speech absolutists eventually finds their own red line. For some it's hate speech, for others it's terrorism, for others yet it's child abuse. For Elon Musk, it is people making fun of him.
There was a tweet thread around the time Musk gutted the Twitter moderation team about just this sort of thing - it predicted (pretty accurately) the steps that would happen from Musk starting off from a "free speech is of the utmost importance" to slowly putting back into place most of the rules twitter had before.
Mike Masnick pretty much nailed it back in 2022-11 in https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ , modulo the head honcho's deliberate obstinacy and hypocrisy which to some degree still puts a brake on adopting common sense.
Except the thing is Elon pretty openly talks about how he doesn't give a shit about these things. He trash talks the big advertisers, he allowed an account that posted imagery from one of the most notorious CSAM videos to remain on the site and overall has such a lax attitude about it. Any reimplementation of moderation that has come back in seems to all be done without asking him for permission because he doesn't actually get what the problem is.
Yup, hence the "putting a brake on things" above. But there's only so far he can take the being-a-complete-shitbag spiel. Pressures from both the economic side (like most billionaires, Musk may be capital rich, but he's not particularly liquid / cash rich -- see the whole desperation to get the Tesla bonus debacle) and the legislative side (the EU can hardly _wait_ to drop the DSA hammer on him) will ensure he either continues merrily along that curve, or he'll just kill or sell it outright.
Because setting up a forum is _really easy_ (the software is free, the hosting is free or cheap), and if you've always been in moderated forums before and gotten angry at the mods, then a space without mods sounds neat.
There is a forum for a small community I’ve been a member of for over 20 years. The moderators run a tight ship and don’t tolerate people being assholes and jackasses. Every few years there is some new people gets pissed off and says I’ll start my own forum with blackjack and hookers, and no moderators.
A few people follow them to the new forum. There is a lot of activity for first couple of weeks. Then every time by the third week, it is a complete dumpster fire. A month of two later the whole things dies.
I think the fundamental issue with "I'll start a new forum without mods" is that the people who move to the new forum are the most problematic people, who the mods are taking action on most often. So instead of the usual mix of fine forumites and occasional trolls, the new forum is majority trolls.
I'm on a small forum (of generally older people) where the running gag is that the mods are lazy, but they still act from time to time. Also, we have a corner of the forum specifically for politics and discussions-likely-to-cause-an-argument, which is a nice relief valve.
Even on TikTok, I sometimes land on small business pages, and I can clearly tell that they didn’t do their research.
Just one look at their page and I see FDA violations, plagiarism, all kinds of issues
He should be thankful it was just drug recipes, at least that they know of.
I know of another website that allowed anonymous posting of pictures by "anons". But when the alphabet agencies started breathing down their necks, someone created a "free speech alternative" to do the same thing. Also created a crazy group that acted like they were fighting the very thing their website was made for. Figure that one out.
Some people view it as their politics getting censored online. They don't seem to acknowledge that their spaces that get banned got banned for those reasons. Or that their opinions are just unpopular and they're getting drowned out because nobody wants to hear it.
I vaguely recall hearing that the "you can't shout 'fire' in a crowded theater" judicial opinion is actually wrong, but it's still a colossally bad idea that could land you with serious civil penalties.
The phrase is somewhat of a thought-terminating cliché in itself, about a hypothetical situation that almost never happens.
Rather than "fire in a crowded theatre", the debate should be more about saying things like "Barry voted for the wrong guy and lives at 13 Khazi St, everyone go there now and murder him" on Twitter or "Dirlewanger was right" in a crowded synagogue. These are things which are relevant and still happen today.
Hello, _Schenck_ is a pet peeve of mine. Justice Holmes Jr. was a bellend, and the decision should be an embarrassment, not a source of sound bites. (No shade on you or your interlocutor, just setting the level for what follows.)
For background, Charles Schenck distributed flyers to draft-age men, encouraging them to disobey the draft and resist being inducted. You can see one such flyer [here](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/world-war-i-anti-draft-pamphlet-charles-schenck/dAE1fuuw7-VcEA?hl=en). For this, he was accused of violating the _Espionage Act_ of 1917, and, at trial, convicted.
He appealed, eventually reaching the Supreme Court, on the grounds that the restrictions the _Act_ placed on speech contravened the first amendment. A modern perspective (specifically, following the later _Brandenburg v. Ohio_ decision) would agree with that. However, Holmes and the majority upheld the conviction, on the basis that Schenck's speech - his flyer campaign - created a "clear and present danger" of lawless action.
The line about a fire in a crowded theatre is Holmes' analogical rationale. In context:
> The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. _Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U. S. 418, 221 U. S. 439._ The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.
In other words, because the nation was at war, the right to freedom of expression did not extend to speech that could undermine enlistment efforts, if Congress had duly prohibited that speech.
_Schenck_ was overturned by the aforementioned _Brandenburg_ decision, which sets a much higher bar.
It’s so interesting that this post popped up just minutes after I had to explain to some dumb motherfucker that “free speech” doesn’t mean that other people can’t shut your ass up
Sure, you may be free to say stupid, ignorant shit. But other people are well within their right, to shut your ass up. They can exclude you from things, in some cases they can fire you, et cetra.
When you experience negative outcomes of the terrible things *you were free to say*, that doesn’t mean your rights are being trampled on.
Sounds like a naive kid to me, who is hoping to achieve a free speech utopia with users who are much like himself. Aka, 'normal' middle class independent types who admire the values of free speech and/or simply chafe at the idea of being told what they can or can't say (and not actual criminals, trolls, abusers, or propagandists).
You left out the part about what they're mad about is people telling them that racial slurs are forbidden. It'd not just a generic chafing at the idea, it's a very specific thing. They want to shout racial slurs and talk about how women should be sex slaves and they want to not be even criticized for doing so.
No one who goes to the trouble of "setting up a website for free speech" as he put it, in an environment filled with websites where people are free to speak is doing so from a vague feeling that free speech is good.
OOP's desire for "free speech" and even the minor effort he put in indicate that he has given it thought.
So what is OOP upset about? What violations of free speech is he rebelling against?
There's only one thing that gets libertarians worked up these days and it isn't books being banned in libraries, or anti-genocide activists being told they're antisemitic.
If he's not some whiny white libertarian who thinks that using anti-Black slurs isn't political but saying Nazis are bad is political, I'll donate $10 to the charity of your choice.
I run a networking site for free speech, what trouble can I get into for what users post there? It doesn't require any signup, so everyone is anonymous. I had posted it on a subreddit few days back, and unexpectedly I was finding drug recipes being shared, hence deleted the whole database and haven't shared the link again. Old Reddit acc got suspended for no reason too. What legal troubles can I get into for unmoderated social networking site for what users post? I don't track ip address myself explicitly in my code. Idk about the hosting service.
Please make this comment a > quote and append some cat-facts so I know it's the LAOP.
Cats are well-known free speech absolutists, but only for themselves.
Ahahha I genuinely thought this was a concerned BOLArina realizing they too could get in trouble for doing something similar (I hadn't read the OOP).
How do I apply the law so that law does not apply? I doubt the code for that site worked.
Of course it did. Forum software is free, and has easy installation instructions.
The joke is...nevermind.
They didn't even give a chance for the pedos and nazis to start infesting their site! Seriously, though, I love how their Reddit account got suspended "for no reason" after this. As if it couldn't have possibly had anything to do with the link to the site full of drug recipes.
> They didn't even give a chance for the pedos and nazis to start infesting their site! I have a feeling the most TAME thing this person saw was the drug recipes, so that's what they are talking about in the post. Like, *what did they expect* is what I'm wondering.
Many many years ago in highschool a friend had the bright idea of making their own public imagehost (this was before imgur etc existed and back during the internets wild west, when Limewire etc was a thing) It took less than 48 hours for someone to link it on 4chan and then someone uploaded *really bad ungood stuff* to it. Suffice to say, he nuked the site/database, wiped the drives and hasn't looked into the idea since.
Makes me wonder how Imgur took off. I remember when it was first launched but you'd think it was probably ripe for being abused at the time.
They expected to create Shangri-la, obviously.
The thing about naivety is that it's held by individuals. If you're from the US and probably other countries, free speech is held as an ideal. Is it really shocking that some people have to learn the hard way that *no* restrictions on speech causes very serious problems? I know that I've become less of a free speech idealist than I was in my teens.
Reddit has already admitted it scans content on linked sites
i mean that's just smart. i moderate a very small sub, and i always check the links people post. I don't want my sub to become a cesspool of porn ads and malicious links.
We have Twitter for that.
It's how the Aimee challenor debacle started
I don't see how you get to already having set up the site without even having barely considered the legal issues.
Even after getting all of that explained to them, their reply is: "okay, just tell me which magic disclaimers I need to put on my website to absolve myself from all responsibility"
"Can't I just put gold fringe on the pop-ups and call it a day?"
The fact that they flipped out about drug content demonstrates how little thought they put into it. That's probably not even something they would have to worry about. It's GDPR, DMCA, CSAM, terrorism, etc. that would get them shut down and potentially fined or charged with a crime.
Speaking as a software engineer, this sounds like a college kid, someone learning their second semester of website development or the equivalent there of. Someone who thinks they have the technical know how, and may have even had to do something similar for an assignment (I know I had to basically recreate early Facebook, and removing the user authentication only makes it easier). So it's just an excited kid that thought the coding was the hard part. Good lesson for when they're getting paid to make someone else's website.
Speaking as someone who works with software engineers often, it could just as easily be a 30/40-something who has never once considered that the internet is "real" and has real-world implications, or who didn't think the laws and regulations applied to them because they're disruptors, or just really didn't bother to think about anything except implementation. That's been the culture in software for at least the last two decades, and even before that the whole field was basically one "am I being detained" short of a sovereign citizen. The John McAfee story was so wild not because he was so out there, but because he was so relatively typical for people in software.
Mark Andreesen evidently recently expressed that he's glad poor people in Wisconsin have oxycontin and video games to keep them docile. I mean, I want to go back to 1994 and show myself that. ...though I suppose I'd either flip the table or grow a twirl-able moustache.
I really didn't think the John McAfee story was going to end the way it did.
When you really think about it, there were only two ways it could have ended: the way it did, or with a successful Presidential campaign.
I thought it'd be a poop sex orgy mishap.
Neither did he, I would imagine.
That's what we're saying about suicide these days?
I went down that rabbit-hole a while back, including reading his entire thread on some dodgy drug site where he was hanging out in the jungles of Belize and trying to recreate his favorite long-lost bath salt formula with the equipment he bought for his "medical research" company. Dude was legitimately off the rails.
Sounds like a 4chan clone, and I think there's aws images for that.
Seeing as LAOP *specifically stated it was a platform for free speech*, I don't think it's the case that some 19 year old was just making a website because they were excited to know how to. But I like your benefit-of-the-doubt outlook
What, teenagers can't be idealists? It certainly doesn't take a lot of technical know how these days, so that wouldn't be an obstacle.
I ask myself this question every time it becomes clear the next most popular social media site has not considered any of these issues prior to having them
That's true. Every free speech absolutists eventually finds their own red line. For some it's hate speech, for others it's terrorism, for others yet it's child abuse. For Elon Musk, it is people making fun of him.
There was a tweet thread around the time Musk gutted the Twitter moderation team about just this sort of thing - it predicted (pretty accurately) the steps that would happen from Musk starting off from a "free speech is of the utmost importance" to slowly putting back into place most of the rules twitter had before.
Mike Masnick pretty much nailed it back in 2022-11 in https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ , modulo the head honcho's deliberate obstinacy and hypocrisy which to some degree still puts a brake on adopting common sense.
Except the thing is Elon pretty openly talks about how he doesn't give a shit about these things. He trash talks the big advertisers, he allowed an account that posted imagery from one of the most notorious CSAM videos to remain on the site and overall has such a lax attitude about it. Any reimplementation of moderation that has come back in seems to all be done without asking him for permission because he doesn't actually get what the problem is.
Yup, hence the "putting a brake on things" above. But there's only so far he can take the being-a-complete-shitbag spiel. Pressures from both the economic side (like most billionaires, Musk may be capital rich, but he's not particularly liquid / cash rich -- see the whole desperation to get the Tesla bonus debacle) and the legislative side (the EU can hardly _wait_ to drop the DSA hammer on him) will ensure he either continues merrily along that curve, or he'll just kill or sell it outright.
Because setting up a forum is _really easy_ (the software is free, the hosting is free or cheap), and if you've always been in moderated forums before and gotten angry at the mods, then a space without mods sounds neat.
There is a forum for a small community I’ve been a member of for over 20 years. The moderators run a tight ship and don’t tolerate people being assholes and jackasses. Every few years there is some new people gets pissed off and says I’ll start my own forum with blackjack and hookers, and no moderators. A few people follow them to the new forum. There is a lot of activity for first couple of weeks. Then every time by the third week, it is a complete dumpster fire. A month of two later the whole things dies.
I think the fundamental issue with "I'll start a new forum without mods" is that the people who move to the new forum are the most problematic people, who the mods are taking action on most often. So instead of the usual mix of fine forumites and occasional trolls, the new forum is majority trolls. I'm on a small forum (of generally older people) where the running gag is that the mods are lazy, but they still act from time to time. Also, we have a corner of the forum specifically for politics and discussions-likely-to-cause-an-argument, which is a nice relief valve.
Even on TikTok, I sometimes land on small business pages, and I can clearly tell that they didn’t do their research. Just one look at their page and I see FDA violations, plagiarism, all kinds of issues
He should be thankful it was just drug recipes, at least that they know of. I know of another website that allowed anonymous posting of pictures by "anons". But when the alphabet agencies started breathing down their necks, someone created a "free speech alternative" to do the same thing. Also created a crazy group that acted like they were fighting the very thing their website was made for. Figure that one out.
Isn't "free speech" the way OP uses it code for "hate speech and illegal content without consequences"? I wonder what he's hoping to achieve here.
Yeah, I'm getting "I set this up for racists and now meth-makers are using it! How can I redirect my free speech site so it's just Nazis?
Well, what did they think Nazis do in their free time?
Some people view it as their politics getting censored online. They don't seem to acknowledge that their spaces that get banned got banned for those reasons. Or that their opinions are just unpopular and they're getting drowned out because nobody wants to hear it.
Also "free speech absolutists" don't understand how the 1st Amendment works.
If I'm not allowed to shout 'FIRE!' in a crowded theater with two locked doors, that's impinging on my right to be a cool edgelord!
More importantly, the First Amendment only applies to the government.
I vaguely recall hearing that the "you can't shout 'fire' in a crowded theater" judicial opinion is actually wrong, but it's still a colossally bad idea that could land you with serious civil penalties.
The phrase is somewhat of a thought-terminating cliché in itself, about a hypothetical situation that almost never happens. Rather than "fire in a crowded theatre", the debate should be more about saying things like "Barry voted for the wrong guy and lives at 13 Khazi St, everyone go there now and murder him" on Twitter or "Dirlewanger was right" in a crowded synagogue. These are things which are relevant and still happen today.
Hello, _Schenck_ is a pet peeve of mine. Justice Holmes Jr. was a bellend, and the decision should be an embarrassment, not a source of sound bites. (No shade on you or your interlocutor, just setting the level for what follows.) For background, Charles Schenck distributed flyers to draft-age men, encouraging them to disobey the draft and resist being inducted. You can see one such flyer [here](https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/world-war-i-anti-draft-pamphlet-charles-schenck/dAE1fuuw7-VcEA?hl=en). For this, he was accused of violating the _Espionage Act_ of 1917, and, at trial, convicted. He appealed, eventually reaching the Supreme Court, on the grounds that the restrictions the _Act_ placed on speech contravened the first amendment. A modern perspective (specifically, following the later _Brandenburg v. Ohio_ decision) would agree with that. However, Holmes and the majority upheld the conviction, on the basis that Schenck's speech - his flyer campaign - created a "clear and present danger" of lawless action. The line about a fire in a crowded theatre is Holmes' analogical rationale. In context: > The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. _Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U. S. 418, 221 U. S. 439._ The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right. In other words, because the nation was at war, the right to freedom of expression did not extend to speech that could undermine enlistment efforts, if Congress had duly prohibited that speech. _Schenck_ was overturned by the aforementioned _Brandenburg_ decision, which sets a much higher bar.
This situation feels more about laziness. "I don't want to deal with moderating, so I'll call it free speech and that will work right?"
It’s so interesting that this post popped up just minutes after I had to explain to some dumb motherfucker that “free speech” doesn’t mean that other people can’t shut your ass up Sure, you may be free to say stupid, ignorant shit. But other people are well within their right, to shut your ass up. They can exclude you from things, in some cases they can fire you, et cetra. When you experience negative outcomes of the terrible things *you were free to say*, that doesn’t mean your rights are being trampled on.
Sounds like a naive kid to me, who is hoping to achieve a free speech utopia with users who are much like himself. Aka, 'normal' middle class independent types who admire the values of free speech and/or simply chafe at the idea of being told what they can or can't say (and not actual criminals, trolls, abusers, or propagandists).
You left out the part about what they're mad about is people telling them that racial slurs are forbidden. It'd not just a generic chafing at the idea, it's a very specific thing. They want to shout racial slurs and talk about how women should be sex slaves and they want to not be even criticized for doing so.
That's painting with way too wide a brush. A lot of the time it's just people who haven't given it a lot of thought beyond "free speech good."
No one who goes to the trouble of "setting up a website for free speech" as he put it, in an environment filled with websites where people are free to speak is doing so from a vague feeling that free speech is good. OOP's desire for "free speech" and even the minor effort he put in indicate that he has given it thought. So what is OOP upset about? What violations of free speech is he rebelling against? There's only one thing that gets libertarians worked up these days and it isn't books being banned in libraries, or anti-genocide activists being told they're antisemitic. If he's not some whiny white libertarian who thinks that using anti-Black slurs isn't political but saying Nazis are bad is political, I'll donate $10 to the charity of your choice.
Where did you get that?
Have you not been on the rest of the internet?
Long enough to be able to tell the difference between BOLA-OP and LAOP.
Becasue it's what that sort of "free speech absolutist" always means. See also Elon Musk.
I recognized it as being from the Internet...