They pointed to a notification where Yolo claimed people would be banned for inappropriate use and deanonymized if they sent “harassing messages” to others. But as the ruling summarizes, the plaintiffs argued that “with a staff of no more than ten people, there was no way Yolo could monitor the traffic of ten million active daily users to make good on its promise, and it in fact never did.” Additionally, they claimed Yolo should have known its anonymous design facilitated harassment, making it defective and dangerous.
A lower court threw out both of these claims, saying that under Section 230, Yolo couldn’t be held responsible for its users’ posts. The appeals court was more sympathetic. It accepted the argument that families were instead holding Yolo responsible for promising users something it couldn’t deliver. “Yolo repeatedly informed users that it would unmask and ban users who violated the terms of service. Yet it never did so, and may have never intended to,” writes Judge Eugene Siler, Jr. “While yes, online content is involved in these facts, and content moderation is one possible solution for Yolo to fulfill its promise, the underlying duty … is the promise itself.”
Seems right to me.
Cue even more corporations dumping their DEI pledges because now they might actually be legally on the hook for them.
Think of every corporation that pushes DEI initiatives while doing things like not offering family paid leave (definitely not attracting women), and so on. Their incessant desire to pay everyone as little as possible and pay the lowest price for anything and everything literally undermines their ability to follow through on such pledges.
Unlike YOLO, corporations aren’t always beholden to “how the technology works” when they’re underpaying people, it’s a choice. They’d be hard pressed to not be held to the same standards here. So that this is precedent is pretty huge. Expect it to be appealed or reversed in some way because no way in hell will corporations stand for being held legally to bullshit corporate PR pledges.
