Hi everyone,

I’ve been wondering about legal implications of self-hosting Lemmy. Isn’t it universally required in many countries to moderate the content that you host publicly? What happens when someone posts something illegal on your instance and you don’t won’t to bother with being a mod and just enjoy the technical aspects of it?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

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    31 year ago

    I feel like I have something to offer in terms of my thoughts on this matter. Under President George W. Bush, he passed The Patriot Act. I have read certain parts, if not most of the patriot act, and my understanding of it is, is that if someone is threatening to harm themselves or someone else, especially a child and giving great details and context to the crime or self harm that they are going to commit this could be problematic and could get you shut down technically by the US government and perhaps even sued in some cases because you decided not to do anything and let somebody just basically talk about for example, how they’re going to kill a child. Say, for example some crazy guy wanted to lay out his plans on how to commit genocide upon a minority group within the United States, if you did nothing about that and then something crazy happened and they traced it back that he had posted about it on your website, I think there might be some legal complications for you down the road. the same goes for say a guy was planning to rob a bank in great detail, and then did it or for example, a serial killer was talking about the various killings he had committed. You are giving people like that a platform to hype himself up to actually commit the crime and celebrate their criminality. There is a fine line between satire and what can be considered an actual threat to public safety or something like that. Many of us have different views on censorship, but I think calls to genocide and planning of criminal acts and planning of murders completely crosses the line. anyway, I hope that helps.