[majormajor]

> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.

I don't think this is true at all. Twitter employs (employed? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-mode... ) paid moderators. Facebook does ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo... ). Plenty of other forum sites have owner-operator mods.

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).

That explicitly applies to providers and doesn't say they aren't allowed to moderate at all.

[titusjohnson]

> "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1))

While Reddit started as a link aggregator, the vast majority of useful content on the site is not external links. It is content generated for reddit, on reddit.

[majormajor]

It's content generated by users, and it's the source of the content that matters, not the source of the moderation.

There's no generally accepted interpretation of 230 that restricts site owners from moderating user comments. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 "Section 230 allows for web operators, large and small, to moderate user speech and content as they see fit." See again the FB/Twitter examples I linked - those sites are also full of content generated for them, on them.

Here's a couple cases drawing the difference:

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/anthony-v-yahoo-inc - Yahoo isn't protected against fraud claims by 230 for creating fake dating profiles, because they did it themselves

BUT

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat... - Lycos is protected against defamation claims on their own message boards

[paulmd]

People act like Facebook doesn’t pay their moderators or something. Paid moderation doesn’t make them liable for what users post.

People are coping super hard.

[jeltz]

Let's keep that kind of insulting language away from Hacker News.