We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
Eg: For companies, Gagool, BIM, Mook Tahendra, etc
For people: Gahul Randhi, Marendra Gobi, etc
Compare that with a platform like Reddit, where moderation is largely reactive. It happens after publication, in response to community feedback, policy violations, or court/ government directives. LI moderates at both stages, before and after a post goes up. So if it already reviewed the content before publishing it, how can it then turn around and claim the protections of an intermediary?
For LI to credibly assert intermediary immunity, the whole platform would have to be fundamentally reimagined. Until then, it's really just a heavily moderated, heavily censored space for anonymous commentary, one that arguably carries content liability for every thread and post published on it.
Happy to be corrected if my understanding is flawed.
In a way, over-moderation could even protect reckless posters from themselves. A far-fetched hypothetical, perhaps, but imagine LI is sued and then faces a court order seeking identifying information about a poster. Even assuming LI is technically capable of producing that information (which I doubt it is), why would it want to run that risk when aggressive moderation can nip the issue in the bud?
I'm not saying LI's approach is justified. But there is an argument that a platform where some discussion survives (even if heavily censored) may be preferable to having no platform for anonymous commentary at all.