Reddit may be bringing back deleted comments

So section 230 protects social media platforms regarding content users post.

If they reinstate a user deleted post who owns it?

Hoping this blows up in their faces as it's a really shitty course of action to take.

I also don't think GDPR looks to kindly at this.
- It really doesn't. Right to be forgotten from the Irish Data Protection Commission.
- GDPR
  
  The real PowerDeleteSuite is always in the comments.
- Legally, they are probably fine. They’ll delete your account and disassociate your comments from it if you ask and that likely has them covered.
Oh, that's a really interesting take! I wonder if there's even any precedent for this sort of thing...

Someone mentioned invoking GDPR's right to be forgotten. Although comments are not strictly personal information, it could still work. I think I'll try it soon.

they are your IP that you can rescind permission to publish at any time
- I think if that works it would be a great solution! Processing copyright claims is pretty time-consuming, so they‘d have to put a lot of work into it
  
  But the Reddit ToS states that by submitting content to their Services you
  
  grant [Reddit] a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content
I think you should definitely try, but I don't think it'll work. According to this stackexchange question they could argue that deleting your comments would break the cohesiveness of the discussion and make the available information incomplete.

Art.17, 3a states that the right to be forgotten is not applicable if processing of the data is required to exercise freedom of information. So I don't think posts or comments are affected by the GDPR as long as they don't contain any information that would identify a user
- So what you're saying is, mass-edit all your comments to contain your full name right before requesting deletion.
- deleting from a database isn't processing. It's literally what right to be gorhotten requires
- Reddits privacy policy itself states that you can use GDPR or California's CCPA and has instructions for invoking it (basically just sending them an email). https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy
I don't think they can just restore all comments and bypass the GDPR, that would be insane. It's a very serious law in Europe.
Depends on how they store the comments, IP is within GDPR, but even then, I will just claim that i have posted personal information on comments so it still applies. If the comment is connected to my user in anyway, it's GDPR..

Fuck. I really don't like this.

So many trauma and support subreddits get deeply personal and identifying posts and comments about horrific shit people (me included) lived through and were trying to cope with, which got deleted several hours after posting for privacy reasons.

If this content gets revived by reddit, it puts a lot of vulnerable people in danger as it this type of 'content' is often harvested by users of other platforms who share these stories with huge audiences.

There's no "may" about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.

Mine are back as well! WOW, talk about being a scummy company.

Edit again with reference to gdpr or coppa in every post. Or send them a gdpr right to be forgotten request for extra work

Would this be a GDPR violation? Serious question as I don't know

My belief is that no, it wouldn't - because the posts don't contain identifiable information about people. I'm not an expert, though, and I'd love for someone to come and correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: I just saw that @S4nvers gave a more detailed answer than me a bit lower down, essentially agreeing with me but quoting the relevant part of GDPR to explain why.
- gdpr includes your tlright to be forgotten and your ownership of your own IP, including posts, and right to erase your own content.
  
  https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/individuals/know-your-rights/right-erasure-articles-17-19-gdpr
  
  USA has something similar in coppa

What's more likely is there was a database syncing issue

That is really bad of Reddit.

I just deleted Apollo off my phone. I loved Apollo but I kept mindlessly opening it, I just can’t use Reddit anymore. I’m here now. I had a 17 year Reddit badge, but no more.

RIF user here, and I had to move it off my home screen (replaced with Jerboa for Lemmy) but I still can't bring myself to delete it yet :(
- Might as well wait until it dies on July 1st.
- I uninstalled it on Wednesday. Reddit had become a time sink for me more than something of benefit, and unless Apollo is going to do a federated app, I'm back to just checking in periodically when I think about it (which is fine really).
- Same here - but Boost user. I am strongly considering editing all of my comments (I'll have to look around and see if there are any ideas of a copy/paste format I can just use) which I think could be more valuable than deleting
  
  But I'm not sure if the next step, deleting my account, would be more hurtful than my edited comments. It would be something like "this comment has been wiped in protest of spez's api changes that blah blah dont want free profit from our shared knowledge" compared to the comment still existing but my username being removed
  
  I'm just so torn on deleting the account with all the history and people I've helped and met along the years. I guess I just need to hear a convincing enough argument to help me pull the trigger lol
Yeah me too. I added a block in my pi-hole setup to the whole Reddit domain. That may get removed later for search results reasons… maybe.

This is a new low.

No matter what side of the argument you're on, posts and comments should not be allowed to be restored without the author's permission. Reddit is only ensuring more people will go away or stay away.

This is messed up. I just recently deleted my account (used poweredeletesuite first to edit all my comments to a ".") before finding out about the API stuff. With it deleted, if they've restored my posts, I have literally no way to ever delete any of it again. It's not the end of the world for me fortunately (it could be bad for some people that may have revealed things that are too personal or could get them doxxed), but there were definitely things I'd like to have removed permanently.

This is why I'm not deleting my Reddit account, it's all the "power" we users have over what's going on, they're gonna have to ban me to stop editing my stuff... and then we're gonna do the GDPR dance.

This is why I'm not deleting my Reddit account, it's all the "power" we users have over what's going on, they'll have to ban me to stop editing my stuff... and then we'll do the GDPR dance.

Can confirm this, my comments are magically reappearing as well. I used PowerDeleteSuite and used the edit before delete function.

This will make Reddit worse. Some people will start to edit their comments to make them nonsense. Trust will erode further. Search will slowly become nonfunctional.
From a users perspective, coming across a nonsensical thread (because comments have been edited), is much worse than see deleted comments. Not only does trust disappear people, but people become angry that the comments are outright random/bizarre/lies.

I sanitized all of my comments before I deleted them. They’re welcome to bring them back. it’s all just a protest message anyway. But for those who didn’t, this is really shitty.

Unedited messages were restored to my profile. You might want to check yours.
- no profile to check-- i also deleted my account. but, like I said: I sanitized all of my comments first.
They are going into their database and restoring the original comments. No just un-deleting them. This is exactly why I left my account active.
- they don't retain comment edit history. they literally don't possess this capability-- it's a GDPR requirement.
  
  it's possible that some of your comments were missed when you tried to sanitize them. i ran into this issue myself and had to re-run the sanitization script a few times to get all of my comments.

This is turning into such a shit show. I can see some group deciding to do some form of attack on Reddit, just for shits and giggles.

When the api stops being freely accessed, loads of bots will stop. The only ones using Reddit will be ones they have created, and that will be interesting to see what rubbish they spout. I bet we will see one bot going on the rampage saying 'Spaz is wonderful'.

It will be interesting to see how they deal with GDPR for us EU users.

This is the first morning I haven't had any zombie comments pop back up on my account.

Funny thing I noticed was if I tried to edit my comments to "fuck you piss baby spez", it would log me out every few seconds and force me to log back in. But editing with random words worked fine. looks like they have some filtering set up to protect his ego lol.

Edit: I take that back. Now there's a bunch of year old, unedited, comments popped back up in there. Oh well, redact.dev goes brrrrrrr

That is why you never edit anything in your database, only save a new version of it so you always can have a paper trail back with all the edits. Same with deleting, you just mark it as deleted. This data is worth a lot of money, they'd be stupid if they let the users destroy it.

And yes it's against the GDPR and so on, but which one of us will sue them?

Google, ChatGPT, and all those language models are going to have a very hard time with this. People will change their old comments to random nonsense, so search results that use Reddit will become random nonsense.

What if, instead of deleting all our comments, we edit them instead?

I was wondering this, leave the info for future people who may need support (like random IT threads), but edit a message in like:

[ Reddit has done X, Y, and Z, and I will no longer be commenting here. Come join the future over at join-lemmy.org. If this shows up in an AI result, know it was used without my knowledge or consent. ]

Now I'm thankful I've been editing and then deleting them for half a year.

I notice when I Google "[username] reddit" all of my deleted post are still there. It just has my username as "[deleted]" any images are also gone.

I only deleted everything yesterday though so it may just not have caught up?

New plan, replace all your comments with threats of violence so the moderators delete them.

I'm not there yet but i am re-overwriting all my comments as many have been restored. I will be keeping this script on repeat over writing them over and over and over until the API changes.

Has anyone had comments restored that were deleted.or edited before the blackout? I'm noticing a trickle of comments being restored to my profiles, and an emerging pattern seems to be that when they show up, they are from the same subreddits. Did /r/funny and /r/science just open back up? The comments that restored most recently were primarily from those subs.

Sharing this idea if anyone wants it. I didn't have the heart to do it myself.
But if you were contributing meaningful things to discussions just... change it into incorrect stuff instead of "fuck spez" or anything that might give them the suspicion that they were edited in mass.

Other then lemmy world is there any other instances we are connected to that I should know about? I am gonna add them to my old comments.

lemmy.blahaj.zone and beehaw.org are 2 good ones

edit: just found out beehaw.org is defederating from lemmy.world 🤦‍♂️