Reddit ducked being held liable for hosting child pornography yesterday as the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a case on the matter filed by a child pornography victim, reported CNN. The development comes after the Court’s recent landmark decisions that refused to roll back safe harbour protections for Twitter and Google held under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Remember: safe harbour protects platforms from being held liable for the third-party content they host. Why it matters: As we’ve previously reported, the Court’s repeated reluctance to shift the Section 230 status quo could indicate that it is deferring this task to a more-than-eager US Congress. What that means—as is the case in India, we could soon be seeing stateside debates on whether to retain safe harbour and to what degree. If Congress decides to limit safe harbour, then it may end up shaking “the bedrock” upon which Internet innovation has happened the world over. Tell me about the Reddit case? A “Jane Doe” alleged that her former boyfriend took videos of them having sex when she was a minor, sometimes non-consensually, and posted them online. The content was taken down “days” after it was first posted to Reddit, however, it then resurfaced on the platform. While Jane Doe argued that Reddit “knowingly benefits from child sex trafficking” through hosting child pornography, a district court and a federal appeals court held that the website was protected by Section 230. Reddit submitted that it “works hard” to prevent child…
