Just realized official moderation appeals are a dead end, so I tried filing a GDPR data request instead

After Reddit nuked my 5-year-old account for a joke in a cooking sub (no warning, no explanation), I got nowhere with their standard appeal form for 3 weeks, so I submitted a GDPR data access request through their EU legal contact and got my content back within 48 hours - has anyone else used privacy laws to bypass content moderation black holes?

3 comments

3 Comments

blairc908d agoMost Upvoted

So filing a boring legal form got your stuff back faster than their actual appeals system. That's wild, but honestly not surprising given how Reddit handles things. Yeah, the GDPR thing is smart, but do you think it's weird we have to use data protection laws just to get a human to look at a moderation mistake? I mean, it's not like they deleted your stuff because of a data breach, they deleted it for a joke about cooking. What does that say about how broken their whole moderation setup is if we gotta go nuclear with privacy law just to get a conversation with someone who actually reads the case?

hayden_craig958d ago

Hear me out though, maybe the problem isn't that we had to go nuclear, maybe it's that people are just too quick to cry broken system when a joke about cooking gets flagged by an automated filter that obviously can't tell context from a hole in the ground.

carter.joseph8d ago

That's actually kind of brilliant, even if it feels like you hacked the system with a boring legal form... Reddit's whole appeals process feels like shouting into a void, so it makes sense the GDPR route actually works. Maybe I should try filing one just to get my old comments on r/grilling back from when I wore my "dad bod with a spatula" jokes proudly.