Reddit may be bringing back deleted comments

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.

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.

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.

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
- 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
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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ]