If you want to further investigate: Link to Reddit post
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.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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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.
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
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
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.
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.
your post is your IP and you own the rights to it and the right to have them deleted.
https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/individuals/know-your-rights/right-erasure-articles-17-19-gdpr
Would this be a GDPR violation? Serious question as I don't know
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.
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?
What's more likely is there was a database syncing issue
More likely?
No what's more likely is that they want to show a lot of posts and comments in their statistics before they go public. They are trying to make the protests look like it's nothing.
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.
There's no "may" about it. People are reporting that their posts and comments are being restored already.
That is really bad of Reddit.
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.