Thank you for some of the insight into the DT system as I had never heard of the stuff you mention before. I didn't realize there were legal limitations to it, whether they are real or not. [...] I think that you are right that a lot of these things can be related back to the trust system and that is because a lot of these issues are intertwined and involve multiple systems. That is one of the reasons finding a solution is quite hard, as a lot of the time it's hard to even identify where the problem is originating from.
Section
230 of the Communications Decency Act gives protection to platforms such as this forum, Twitter and Reddit in that they are not held accountable for the posts of their users. This means if you break the law in one of your posts, theymos (the owner of the forum) will not be criminally liable for you breaking the law, and it also means if you defame someone in a post you write, theymos is not liable for
libel. The later is important because when two people are
Joinly and Severely liable for a tort, the victim will go after the person with the most assets, and theymos (by all accounts) is very rich, and has a lot of assets.
There are limits to section 230, and there may be instances in which a platform such as the forum is actually a publisher.
There was a case called
Enigma Software Group USA, LLC v. Bleeping Computer LLC in which a software company was defamed on a forum by one of the forum's users who also happened to be what can be described as a moderator. The person who wrote the defamatory posts had "elevated" privileges that "normal" forum users did not. The district (trial) court found the forum user was acting as an agent of the forum due to an implied agency relationship (the fact he was a "volunteer" did not matter). This was only a trial court, not an appellate court, so the ruling is not
case law, but it does not appear the ruling was appealed. This case appears to have been
settled, in which the forum agreed to remove the defamatory posts (possibly among other things, I am not sure).
The above case is not "apples to apples" to the DT system, but it is somewhat similar. Certain users have the ability to have a warning displayed on a person's profile, the ability to have comments displayed on a person's profile prominently, and other (sometimes overlapping) users have the ability to give out "points" that can be used to "vote" on who gets the above "trust" abilities. The algorithm to determine which users have the above abilities is chosen by the forum.
If rules in regards to trust are enforced, there could be a stronger argument that those on DT are acting as an agent of the forum, depending on the specifics as to how they are implemented. Although courts have ruled that platforms can have community guidelines as to what can be posted and still maintain cover under section 230.
Someone on DT being an agent of the forum is not, in itself a problem for the forum, except there are many on DT who are defaming other forum members left and right in recent years, which IS a problem.