Conversation

(I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Please do not take it as such!)

A big issue in the fediverse that I have witnessed a distressing amount is a seeming lack of understanding on fedi sysadmins legal obligation when dealing with illegal content when it is present on their servers, as well as active misinformation and fearmongering regarding it when the topic comes up as well.

Some people act like you’re responsible for knowing everything about your server at all times when you host services that is publicly accessible when in most jurisdictions it’s more complicated than that.

What I see often though is when people talk about illegal content being posted on their instances how they deleted it. And I look at their profile info and see they are American. And when I read them mention that content originated from their instance it immediately fills with me a deep sense of dread.

In the United States specifically if you are informed of illegal material of a specific variety that has originated on your server by one of your users, you CANNOT simply delete it. You have a legal obligation to preserve that content for at least 90 days and initiate a report with NCMEC with as much details as you can provide so that if need be authorities can seize it. By deleting that content if it originated in your server without filing a report, you have potentially engaged in a felony by deleting potential evidence of a crime. And by instructing others how to delete stuff in the way you did, you are sharing how to commit a potential felony as well.

I don’t fault admins for not knowing this on the fediverse by default especially on small instances but there seriously needs to be some sort of resource for fedi admins to learn this stuff otherwise it can become a nightmare really fast. Misinformation spreads like mad around this topic and it doesn’t help that it varies from country to country. The legal obligation a server hosted in the UK vs the US is very different for example. It doesn’t help that since these are hobby projects a lot of us can’t really afford lawyers to help advise on this either.

Having some sort of public info about this to reach for would be nice. It would also help tell admins what their duty is to report other content or interactions (like exploitation) as it arises as well and how to do so properly.