It covers reddit retaliating against me (seemingly illegally) for being a long-time public critic of theirs. They did something similar to the /r/WatchRedditDie founder.
Is anyone familiar with US laws related to Reddit admins using their position to try to harm me in an act of revenge? Surely there are some limits on what they're legally allowed to do. I imagine it would vary from state to state. My state (CA) bar referral services haven't been very helpful in finding someone familiar with this situation. Recommendations for how to find a lawyer specialized in this would be appreciated.
Your rights are basically limited to that they are not allowed to engage in activities that are already illegal in common law, e.g. publishing your residential address and inviting people to go teach you what-for. They cannot claim copyright over content already copyrighted, but they might have a claim over original content, but so do many other social media sites.. fine print may say something like they have the right to use images for their advertising, etc.
The bar to proving harm when there was no business relationship is high. My advice to you is to forget about the site and not want to be a member of a club that doesn't want you.
Yes, I am not a lawyer, and my advice is not legal advice, but it is common sense that you will lose against venture capital money if you cannot prove a violation of existing state or federal law.
Also, I can't believe it would be legal for a Facebook employee, for example, to use their position to harm a public figure, journalist, critic, politician, etc.. That seems very illegal.
Really, y'all need to stop this stuff. You scare people from action and so things only get worse.
As long as they're not defaming you or hiring assassins, they've pretty wide leway. You say "seem to be using their power & platform to harm me, my community, and our organization, by allowing a highly disreputable group, and other general trolls, to blatantly violate Reddit's rules against us"; that's generally entirely legal. They make the rules, they pick how they're enforced, and they can change the rules.
They can do whatever they want on their platform (including what would arguably be considered abusive), and we can continue to bring attention to their mistreatment of us outside it.
Reddit is broken from top to bottom, from the front end to the back end.
