california
Legal damages of stupid behavior
<p>On 4chan, stackexchange and so forth mods will randomly delete content, for no reason and so forth. Even if it's not in their terms of service this is still pointless, misleading, destructive behavior. It's no different from federal hacking law where employees are charged for randomly deleting data.</p>
<p>Is there any damages resulting from this? Don't mods and employees have a duty of care to do their job in a reasonable way?</p>

<h2>You agreed to this</h2>
<p>On Stackexchange, there are <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service">Terms of Service</a>. These tell you to follow the <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/conduct">Code of conduct</a> and explicitly allow SO to throw you out if they don't want you to write here.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Stack Overflow reserves the right to refuse, suspend or terminate your access to the public Network if it determines, <strong>in its sole discretion</strong>, that you have in any way violated these Public Network Terms or are otherwise ineligible to access or use the Network or Services. I<strong>f your actions are determined by us to violate these Public Network Terms, Stack Overflow may, in its sole discretion, try to remediate that violation</strong> by working with you individually, but is under no obligation to do so, and if any such remediation efforts are unsuccessful (in Stack Overflow’s sole discretion), then Stack Overflow may revoke your rights to the Network.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You agreed to follow the rules, and the code of conduct spells out that if you don't, then you face action.</p>

<p>A site has the right to choose what data it hosts and which users may contribute to it. Yes, they may delete your posts.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It's no different from federal hacking law where employees are charged for randomly deleting data.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this case they had no right to delete the data. Mods specifically have the tools and permission to do this as part of their jobs.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Don't mods and employees have a duty of care to do their job in a reasonable way?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The site may choose to dismiss employees or volunteers whose conduct is bad for the site.</p>

<p>The operators of private sites have the right to decide what they will and will not host. Individuals have no right to post or to have their postings remain on site unless there is some contract or agreement granting such a right. In the case of stack exchange at least, there is no such agreement.</p>
<p>Nor is the presence of such a post of economic value to the poster, in general.</p>
<p>Thus there is no damage, in a legal sense, to the poster when and if such a post is deleted. No lawsuit would result in money damages, or an injunction, against the host.</p>
<p>The distinction with hacking cases is that the hacker were not granted authority by the owners of the system to delete data from it, and in some cases the system was under a legal or contractual obligation to retain such data. The moderators of social media fora are authorized, directly or indirectly, to delete content. Appropriate ToS documents recognize this authorization, and site members have agreed to post under those conditions, that is, knowing that their posts might be deleted.</p>
<p>It should also be noted that ToS documents do not usually promise that certain things will be done by the site host or operator. Rather, they indicate what the host <strong>may</strong> do, not what it must do.</p>
<p>I might add that in my experience, moderators on SE do not delete posts &quot;randomly&quot;, even when I disagree with deletions. But even if they decided whether to delete posts by flipping coins or rolling dice, they would be within their <strong>legal</strong> rights to do so. That would indeed be a &quot;stupid&quot; way to moderate, and a site that acted like that would probably lose much of its popularity, but it would not be something that posters could win a lawsuit over.</p>
