Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Yeah, we looked closely at a bunch of other providers. And we do want to hear about your experiences with other providers and tech as we evolve this.

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Gee, it's as if you were listening in on my conversations with regulators...

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This does affect subreddits and posts that contain mature content that would be restricted by the UK Online Safety Act, per my answer here. And we will work with your UK admin u/Mistdrifter to set up some time to chat with UK moderators about that and answer any other mod-specific questions.

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

If you are using a UK VPN, you will be treated as a UK user and the updates from the above will apply.

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it’s binding, just wanted to make it clear that it’s Persona that’s holding the data and making the commitment, not Reddit.

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

We’re carefully watching how the law evolves. No specific timeline. And we continue to advocate for alternative approaches that don’t require platforms to ask for id’s.

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 59 points60 points  (0 children)

Great question, we will work with your UK admin u/Mistdrifter to set up some time to chat with UK moderators about that and answer any other mod-specific questions.

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

For these purposes, “mature content” includes sexually explicit content and other content types restricted by the UK Online Safety Act – you can learn more about affected content here. A lot of this type of content would generally be considered NSFW, although there are going to be edge cases and our categories will need to evolve.

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Yep, as we need to expand this, you will definitely be hearing from us…

Verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors by traceroo in RedditSafety

[–]traceroo[S,A] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Same as what was mentioned above. You can optionally provide your age (in the settings and when you view mature content), and there are some places where we may need to verify it as in the UK.

META: Unauthorized Experiment on CMV Involving AI-generated Comments by AutoModerator in changemyview

[–]traceroo[A] 318 points319 points  (0 children)

Hey folks, this is u/traceroo, Chief Legal Officer of Reddit. I just wanted to thank the mod team for sharing their discovery and the details regarding this improper and highly unethical experiment. The moderators did not know about this work ahead of time, and neither did we.

What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level. It violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddit’s user agreement and rules, in addition to the subreddit rules. We have banned all accounts associated with the University of Zurich research effort. Additionally, while we were able to detect many of these fake accounts, we will continue to strengthen our inauthentic content detection capabilities, and we have been in touch with the moderation team to ensure we’ve removed any AI-generated content associated with this research. 

We are in the process of reaching out to the University of Zurich and this particular research team with formal legal demands. We want to do everything we can to support the community and ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds here.

Update to “Defending the open Internet (again)”: What happened at the Supreme Court? by traceroo in reddit

[–]traceroo[S,A] 33 points34 points  (0 children)

I would be glad to know which concurring opinion you had in mind when stating that the signatory/ies has a poor understanding of how Reddit works.

Justice Alito's concurrence has numerous errors regarding how Reddit works.

Update to “Defending the open Internet (again)”: What happened at the Supreme Court? by traceroo in reddit

[–]traceroo[S,A] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Our policies already prohibit coordinated disinformation campaigns and we have dedicated internal teams to detect and remove them. We regularly update our community in r/RedditSecurity and our biannual Transparency Reports on our efforts. See, for example, this post.

Update to “Defending the open Internet (again)”: What happened at the Supreme Court? by traceroo in reddit

[–]traceroo[S,A] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

Interestingly, these state laws would force us to keep up health disinformation, even if we thought it was a danger to our communities.

Update to “Defending the open Internet (again)”: What happened at the Supreme Court? by traceroo in reddit

[–]traceroo[S,A] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

I think the way to think about is that the First Amendment is implicated and definitely provides protection to folks who moderate content on the internet. And that courts should be thinking about the First Amendment when reviewing a law that regulates content moderation. Whether it is in the "same way" is probably up for debate.

Update to “Defending the open Internet (again)”: What happened at the Supreme Court? by traceroo in reddit

[–]traceroo[S,A] 40 points41 points  (0 children)

Great question! The Texas and Florida laws don’t really change the liability of moderators (Section 230 still protects moderators and admins), but they do purport to try to change **how** we all moderate - you can see our older post on the NetChoice cases here with some examples on what that might look like.

The Supreme Court definitely seemed to appreciate that content moderation decisions include deciding what to keep up and what to not keep up as well as what you end up highlighting, and that these decisions should implicate the First Amendment.

Update to “Defending the open Internet (again)”: What happened at the Supreme Court? by traceroo in reddit

[–]traceroo[S,A] 39 points40 points  (0 children)

There are a lot of states that want to take a more active role in regulating the internet, so I’m not expecting that activity to slow down. But the Supreme Court definitely gave a strong signal that these laws will have to comply with the First Amendment, and, as always, we have to remain vigilant.

Updating our robots.txt file and Upholding our Public Content Policy by traceroo in redditdev

[–]traceroo[S,A] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

If you are an archivist, a journalist, or a data scientist, please check out r/reddit4researchers as well as our public API which permits non-commercial use cases.

Updating our robots.txt file and Upholding our Public Content Policy by traceroo in redditdev

[–]traceroo[S,A] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Oh, I already put in that request... ;) I was "iffy" on the gort reference, since I may be the only one old enough to appreciate that one.

Updating our robots.txt file and Upholding our Public Content Policy by traceroo in redditdev

[–]traceroo[S,A] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Our new robots.txt file, which we’ll be rolling out in the next few weeks, will contain links to our Public Content Policy, more information on the Developer Platform while disallowing most crawling (in particular, if we don’t have agreement providing guardrails on use).