[prawn]

(Not a lawyer, but have run a forum for 15-20 years and survived many legal threats.)

You would potentially have legal recourse against the author, and the platform if they didn't act on you reporting the content. I don't know how that would apply were the author in another jurisdiction/country. I don't know if it's universal, but in Australia you'd request identifying information (IP and timestamp) from the platform via lawyer or police, they'd comply and remove the post if appropriate, and then you'd take the information to the owning ISP, get more detailed information and take the author to court.

I would guess that if the content were brought to the platform's attention and they didn't act reasonably, you may have recourse against them.

The debate here as I understand it is about not illegal but misleading, distasteful, harassing behaviour.

[belltaco]

It's much harder in the US. You may want to read this. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/john...

[prawn]

Not sure which bit in particular, but the YouTube response says what I was trying to say - you need to demonstrate that something was legally questionable before they will comply and identify a user.

With my forum, I ask the disgruntled user to have their lawyer contact me as a form of pre-action discovery. That weeds out the ones complaining without a leg to stand on and gives me a little bit of protection. The timestamp and IP address (at least with Australian ISPs) is rarely a slamdunk, and it pushes the real judgement on ISPs who have established systems, and police.

BTW, this is just incredible: "An Economist/YouGov poll in late December 2016 found that 46 percent of Trump voters and 17 percent of Clinton voters thought Pizzagate was real."