Starting a Mastodon instance? Then you might have worried a bit about the potential legal issues and liability that come with operating a public international forum online. As a lawyer involved with online communities and tech, it’s fascinating to see this area evolve and I’ve become quite interested in the issues of operator liability and user safety for smaller social media sites.
It used to be that only huge social media companies had to worry about this stuff—now smaller startups, hobby groups, and individuals who are starting up social media sites have inherited the same concerns involving privacy, moderation, and compliance. Smaller decentralized social media may provide a measure of public safety from the destructive and bizarre whims of billionaire owners, but also puts the issue of managing public online fora largely on the shoulders of people who aren’t familiar with the regulatory and legal complexities involved.
Specifically, the popular Mastodon platform lets anyone set up a social media “instance” that then becomes part of a “federation” with other instances when users follow each other. Posts and user content is traded between these independent instances, each operated as a unique social media platform with its own rules. A major concern for the individuals operating instances should be how the user content traded back and forth will be managed. Even if each instance remains small, it’s not clear how the system as a whole can scale up as the popularity and number of instances grow. Moderation standards and technical issues are of course obvious concerns, but there are also very real legal implications regarding the complex global regulations on internet privacy, legal compliance, and platform liability. Unlike major social media companies, each instance is navigating this landscape largely alone and with far fewer resources than larger social media companies.
This environment and lack of standards threaten to grow into a bigger problem for instance operators who will have to deal with issues of content ownership, privacy, and liability for illegal user content as Mastodon grows. If Mastodon and its community want to replace large social media companies they will need to address the same scalability issues around online harassment, privacy, and exploitation that bigger providers have struggled with for years. The first step in that process is addressing initial usage documents: Terms of Service and Privacy Policies.
Unfortunately, the Mastodon community so far seems relatively unprepared for even the first steps in creating a working set of usage standard—functional Privacy Policies and Terms of Service. Instead, the Terms of Service and Privacy Policies for Mastodon instances I’ve been looking at show confusion. There are plenty of well meaning efforts that create potential risks, or have borrowed language designed for entirely different types of web services. Both of these quick fixes create potential risks, especially where they don’t address the realities of content sharing through federation.
There’s no reason for this, setting up a new instance while maintaining a significant degree of legal protection is largely a matter building an instance with good bones. Knowing what laws might apply, creating a sound set of moderation rules, and avoiding a few pitfalls in the initial usage documents. If you’re interested in the subject or have concerns about it, consider reaching out. The process of preparing most usage documents is neither especially time consuming or costly.
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