A TL;DW summary for those who don’t want to watch the video (it’s only two mins long.)
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is currently in force across 26 EU member states and the United Kingdom, which has its own form of GDPR enshrined in UK law. It includes the right to access and request the deletion of personal data.
Thomas Hunter II (the video’s author) attempts to delete his comment and post history on his Reddit account (nucleocide), only for Reddit to restore it hours later.
He formally makes a request to Reddit’s legal team to have his content deleted under the CCPA and they give him a boilerplate response which essentially asks him to use the account deletion form, and after manually deleting all of the posts and comments he made.
Nucleocide manually deletes all of his comments again, this time providing video proof of him manually deleting each of his posts and comments.
Reddit (unsurprisingly) restores it again.
Upon raising his request with Reddit’s legal team again, he gets no reply.
I’m not saying it’s definitely not happening, but I have yet to see any evidence of Reddit actually restoring deleted comments. As someone who has also purged their Reddit account, I know that the only time comments reappear on my profile, they’re from subreddits that had been privated previously. Much like you’ll see in the video; the comments restored are all from a single subreddit, r/javascript. And what do you know, r/javascript was set to private until very recently. So as much as I dislike Reddit right now, let’s not spread any baseless rumors here. Reddit likely isn’t undeleting comments, they were simply never deleted in the first place.
That said, I wonder if not being able to delete comments in privated communities in the first place is a violation of the CCPA and/or GDPR? I honestly know nothing about them.