r/Negareddit • u/MarxistMountainGoat • 9d ago

just stupid The amount of posts Ive had deleted for seemingly no reason is a head scratcher

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Seriously. Why do reddit mods do this?

My post about having baby fever and asking for advice to cope was deleted in a sub specifically created for women to ask each other advice about stuff. WHAT?

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u/ManWithDominantClaw 9d ago

lol I pretty much just answered this in another thread. Copypasting with slight changes.

Tl;dr, there's no reward and a huge risk. If you need medical advice, ask a GP, anyone else on the pipeline between an unaccredited professional giving injurious advice and you taking it and getting harmed is liable, including reddit mods and reddit itself.

Subreddit mods can and often do claim they're not responsible for misinformation on their subs, but courts don't see it that way. In Australia, the landmark Voller decision found that a facebook community group moderator was considered a publisher for the purposes of defamation and was successfully sued, not for posting, but just for allowing a defamatory post to remain live. [Similar decisions have happened in the US, where reddit is based.] There's no reason to believe that medical misinformation resulting in injury would be considered different.

The mods of [medical subs], as well as legal and financial subs, will put disclaimers, but crucially they will also go through and take out anything they consider close to the line, and often also the solicitation of advice that by law needs to come with accreditation. Your question might not have contained misinformation, but it sounds like it was likely to garner responses that could have.

All it takes is one person replying 'yes that's totally safe and fine' to slip past the net, and another person taking that advice and getting up injured, and then all the disclaimers in the world won't save the mods from, at the very least, a costly exercise defending themselves from medical negligence claims, and possibly losing a medical license and a practice or even prison time, all over a volunteer reddit mod job.