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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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It's not up to Reddit to decide what is libel under the law (yet), that's the court's job, but even if it were on Reddit what would you expect them to do? Ban the people? They'll make new accounts. IP ban? VPN.
Your real goal here is to make the people stop posting what you say are lies, and the only real recourse is legal. Find a lawyer, you might be able to get someone to work on contingency if your case is solid.
Supposedly they have dedicated "anti-evil" teams that deal with this type of thing.
Reddit can deal with that much easier than lawyers can. It would be a continual, massive money-sink to use legal action to continually take down the new accounts. Whereas reddit can track trends and things that are occurring on their own website much easier. They already deal with stuff like this on a regular basis in regards to spam, etc.
It doesn't appear that defamation is something lawyers take on contingency. They all asked for a retainer and hourly rate and made it sound like it might not even be possible even after spending tens of thousands of dollars.
Ideally you'd be able to simply go to a judge and show that the info was defamation and get an order for reddit to take it down, but apparently it doesn't work like that, and you have to hunt down the individual people behind the accounts and be able to get them to court.
Yes, much like HTML the law is an interpreted language and it's never certain how a judge or jury will interpret it, no matter how good an argument your lawyer makes.
Betraying your naïveté there; you have it backwards. Reddit are the ones that would be playing whack-a-mole with accounts. Proper legal discovery (yes, against Reddit, they will respond to a subpoena) would get the IP addresses and maybe personal info of the posters. Trivial to find which company owns an IP using a tool like https://mxtoolbox.com. Then, subpoena the ISP for the subscriber that IP was assigned to in a window of time, around when the comment was posted, your lawyers contact them with a scary letter and hopefully they stop. If they don't, you then have to go to court to get a court order or injunction or whathaveyou. And if they still persist, then you have to go to court again to enforce the previous judgement and probably apply stricter consequences.
That's how it works. Yes, it's expensive, and yes that bars some from getting justice. Yes that sucks, and I wish it was different. But it is the (legal) solution to your problem.
A subpoena would do nothing if they were using a VPN, and if they were in another country I expect it would be just as difficult/impossible.
Taking legal action doesn't stop a whack-a-mole.
Yes, I noted that in the OP.
Taking legal action stops the problem at the source, thus no need for whack-a-mole. The law is less about prevention and more about remedy, because this isn't Minority Report.
Regardless, if you're now going to make the argument that Reddit has or "should have" more power to stop this kind of thing than the US legal system, then I'm gonna have to bow out. I'm sorry there's not a more satisfying answer than the one you've gotten. Good luck.
It's not going to stop a bunch of anonymous people in other countries, it is likely not even viable (Eg, and it would cost me tens of thousands of dollars to attempt.