If you host an instance and allow people to sign up and post, what is preventing bad actors from filling your storage with cp and other illegal shit?
Are you just signed up for permanent content moderation assisted by some tooling?
That liability sounds absolutely terrifying to me…
Yes. You’re signing up to be a moderator.
The liability issue is addressed somewhat through the DMCA safe harbor law. But it’s probably not a lawsuit you want.
I’ve asked a similar question to the self-hosting community. The gist of it is: if you’re planning on self-hosting to try something new, just create an instance and lock the signups. Legal ramifications for hosting an instance without moderation are very real and depend on your local law.
Cool that’s what I was thinking of doing. Basically a personal blog, but content can federate.
@corytheboyd This is literally what section 230 is about. did everyone suddenly forget that drama? social media platform hosts are not legally liable for user-posted content, provided they follow takedown requests of illegal content when it’s brought to their attention.
@Otome-chan@kbin.social Guess I did? Never been a moderator, etc. before and this seemed like a safe enough place to ask a potentially dumb question
@corytheboyd Yup there was a lot of drama about it I think related to twitter. because Trump wanted to remove section 230 or something and people were emphasizing how crucial it was to protect social media server hosts from legal liability of the users’ content.
Oh goodness, yeah that kinda rings a bell now. I honestly wasn’t really paying a whole lot of attention to the world back then 🙈
Well, insufficient moderation tools do seem to be a big concern around here.
My bigger worry is the modlog.
Isn’t this still just data in a database that can be deleted? Perhaps not very transparent of the instance owner, but I’d rather sacrifice complete transparency for compliance with the law
This is a pretty huge concern with distributed hosting, I hope there are some safety measures on all instances
Even if you went nuclear and flagged all posts etc. for manual approval by a mod, the offending data still resides on your infrastructure.
Will be following this closely, it’s a very interesting problem!
