Ex-Reddit CEO on Twitter moderation

It is both yes, and no. CAN-SPAM do only apply to electronic mail messages, usually shorten down to email. However...

In late March, a federal court in California held that Facebook postings fit within the definition of "commercial electronic mail message" under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act ("CAN-SPAM Act;" 15 U.S.C. § 7701, et seq.). Facebook, Inc. v. MAXBOUNTY, Inc., Case No. CV-10-4712-JF (N.D. Cal. March 28, 2011).

There is also two other court cases: MySpace v. The Globe.com and MySpace v. Wallace.

In the later, the court concluded that "[t]o interpret the Act in the limited manner as advocated by [d]efendant would conflict with the express language of the Act and would undercut the purpose for which it was passed." Id. This Court agrees that the Act should be interpreted expansively and in accordance with its broad legislative purpose.

The court defined "electronic mail address" as meaning nothing more specific than "a destination . . . to which an electronic mail message can be sent, and the references to local part and domain part and all other descriptors set off in the statute by commas represent only one possible way in which a destination can be expressed.

Basically, in order to follow the spirit of the law the definition of "email" expanded, with traditional email like user@example.invalid being just one example of many forms of "email".

Spam is a behavior, not a fundamental trait of the actor.

Would be interesting to make a service where spammers have to do recaptcha-like spam flagging to get their account unlocked.

He’s specifically referring to Reddit’s content moderation which actually has two levels of bans. Bans by mods from a specific subreddit are done by mods from that specific subreddit and having an explanation isn’t required but is sometimes given - these bans apply to just the subreddit and are more akin to a block by the community. Bans by admins happen to people that have been breaking a site rule, not a subreddit rule.

Both types of bans have privacy issues that result in lack of transparency with bans.

> But you likely aren't, and most people likely aren't either.

Is there any evidence of this? 1% bad content can mean that 1% of your users are bad actors, or it can mean that 100% of your users are bad actors 1% of the time (or anything in between.)

For me, malice relates to intent. Intent isn't observable. When person X makes a claim about Y's intent, they're almost always filling in invisible gaps using their imagination. You can't moderate on that basis. We have to go by effects, not intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

It took me a long time to learn that if I tell a user "you were being $FOO" where $FOO relates to their intent, they can simply say "no I wasn't" and no one can prove otherwise, making the moderation position a weak one. Mostly they will deny it sincerely because they never had such an intent, at least not consciously. If you do that as a mod, you've just given them a reason to feel entirely in the right, and if you proceed to moderate them anyway, they will feel treated unjustly. This is a way to generate bad blood, make enemies, and lose the high ground.

The reverse strategy is better: describe the effects of someone's posts and explain why they are bad. When inevitably they respond with "but my intent was $BAR", the answer is "I believe you [what else can you say about something only that person could know?], but nonetheless the effects were $BAZ and we have to moderate based on effects. Intent doesn't communicate itself—the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it." (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

Often when people get moderated in this way, they respond by writing the comment they originally had in their head, as a defense of what they actually meant. It's often astonishing what a gap there is between the two. Then you can respond that if they had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine, and that while they know what they have in their head while posting, the rest of us have no access to that—it needs to be spelled out explicitly.

Being able to tell someone "if you had posted that in the first place, it would have been fine" is a strong moderation position, because it takes off the table the idea "you're only moderating me because you dislike my opinions", which is otherwise ubiquitous.