Technology

Legal Subreddit Bans All Ex-Twitter Links Due To Safety Risk

From the time-to-move-on department.

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Reddit logoSpeech has consequences.

Elon Musk has decided to reenable accounts suspended for posting CSAM while at the same time allowing the most basic of CSAM scanning systems to break. And, that’s not even looking at how most of the team who was in charge of fighting CSAM on the site were either laid off or left.

And, that’s made Ex-Twitter a much riskier site in lots of ways, including for advertisers who have bailed. But also for anyone linking to the site.

r/law, a popular subreddit about the law announced last week that it was completely banning links to Twitter for this reason.

Since Musk took control of Twitter, he mostly eliminated the Trust and Safety group and stopped paying the vendor that scans for CSAM. As a result, CSAM (child sexual abuse material) has apparently been circulating on Twitter recently (from what I’ve read elsewhere, the same notorious video that the feds found on Josh Duggar’s hard drive).

Musk also recently reinstated the account of someone who posted CSAM content.

As a result, we’ll be removing any content here that leads to Twitter, or, as he now calls it, X. Whether it’s an embed link or a direct link to a tweet. Don’t care what outlet is doing it. If you’re a reporter or editor, stop embedding links to Twitter in any of your content.

Note that they’re not just banning links that go directly to Twitter, but also links to news stories that link or embed Twitter content. As that final sentence notes, the subreddit is encouraging journalists to stop linking to Twitter entirely (remember, at Techdirt we banned Twitter embeds last year).

I’m not sure it’s reasonable to ban any news article that merely links to or embeds a tweet, but it’s certainly interesting to see how this subreddit, in particular, is handling the increasing liability that Twitter (er… Ex-Twitter) has become.

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I had wondered if the members of that subreddit would be upset about this, but skimming the comments and it seems like they’re pretty overwhelmingly in support of the move. Again, this is, perhaps surprising, but a real indicator of just how much damage Elon has done to Ex-Twitter’s brand, let alone to “X.”

More Legal News from Techdirt:

Netflix Defeats Spurious ‘Slumlord Millionaire’ Lawsuit
French News Agency Sues Ex-Twitter For Not Paying Snippet Tax
Judge Blocks Unconstitutional Book Ban Law Passed By Arkansas’ Self-Proclaimed Free Speech Warriors

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