this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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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…

#fediverse

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@minode

Cool that’s what I was thinking of doing. Basically a personal blog, but content can federate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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 🙈

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is a pretty huge concern with distributed hosting, I hope there are some safety measures on all instances

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@iByteABit

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Well, insufficient moderation tools do seem to be a big concern around here.

My bigger worry is the modlog.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

@can

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

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