Ok allow me to clarify here...
Another poster put a pretty good summary in place of the events leading up to it so I'll just quote him/her...
This all started when Reddit, shutdown r/pizzagate after someone with a gun went inside of Comet Ping-Pong ( a pizza shop caught up in a lot drama stemming from a fake news article about Hillary and Co running a child pronography ring in the basement), fired a round, and refused to leave until he was certain there were no children being harmed.
The shutdown of r/pizzagate, a sub-reddit mainly consisting of believers in pizzagate and seemingly propagating violence, caused members from r/TheDonald (another seemingly problematic subreddit) to, en masse, create hundreds, maybe thousands of posts full of hate speech and obscenities specifically targeted at Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman.
You see, there is criminal activity here.
Someone went to a pizza shop and fired a round. They did this because they were told that children were being harmed. This isn't tort, it's criminal. When they were shutdown they got nasty. They were inciting violence. That's not tort, that's criminal.
A psychologist is going to assess this person that fired the shot and at the same time a forensic investigator is going to go through his entire computer, his browsing history and his social media accounts.
His entire digital life. They will also be pulling in the digital footprint of anyone who had any connection to this guy. He committed a terrorist act. If you were in a forum with him, you're going to be looked at. If you encouraged this, it's not civil liability, instigating violence by urging it on is criminal.
As it stands now, there is a very good chance, that this person's history on reddit could be called into question by a defense attorney. Evidence, his history of posts on reddit and the history of a huge number of people he interacted with have been tampered with.
The CEO of Reddit tampered with evidence that he had good reason to believe would be part of a criminal investigation. That's the law that was broken.
Someone pops off a round in your neighborhood, you don't go and collect the shell casing, get it engraved and keep it as a souvenir. If you do then it's tampering with the evidence.
But this isn't strictly about that. This is about the fact that this danger is on every social media outlet. Words can be put in your mouth that you never said and you have no way to prove you didn't. Some words now carry with them extreme liability. Some are just tort.
Frankly I'd rather be certain that anything out there that says "williambanks" was put out there by williambanks. No matter how stupid or inane those words might be, at least they're mine.
Ya know ,it doesn't even have to be this severe.
What if Twitter decided to strike a deal with pepsi to replace all references of Coke with Pepsi? Every time you mention Coke it's replaced with Pepsi. It would imply an endorsement that isn't there. But it will come, if this person walks away scott free with no consequences. In the meantime he made the investigators and prosecutors jobs much, much harder.
You make such a clear argument. both sides are interesting, but from my "newbie" perspective - only one is right. lol