Reddit nukes 11-year account for sharing a free open-source backgammon game
Nothing says "cutting-edge AI moderation" quite like an automated algorithm wiping out over a decade of community reputation just because someone posted a link to an open-source board game.
The veteran user posted in r/backgammon about an Android port of GNU Backgammon published on F-Droid under the GPLv3 license. The submission featured a clean offline engine with zero ads, tracking, or proprietary junk, requiring zero account creation or network connections. Reddit's automated spam filters instantly scrubbed the post and slapped a permanent ban on the profile, wiping out 30,000 karma without offering a single word of explanation.
This silent ban directly clashes with Article 17 of the EU Digital Services Act, which legally mandates platforms to state clear reasons for moderation decisions. When the developer requested 11 years of user data under GDPR, the platform handed over a paltry 7.2 megabytes of heavily truncated text files where every historical submission was abruptly cut off after just a few lines.
Escalating the dispute through official European legal channels revealed that the European Commission's transparency database had registered 14,067 identical Reddit moderation actions in a single week. Attempts to report these enforcement failures directly to EU regulators stalled when the official feedback form capped submissions at 500 characters and crashed with a HTTP 500 server error.
Big tech moderation algorithms continue to treat genuine open-source software like biohazardous malware while government regulatory portals crumble under their own bureaucratic incompetence. Internet culture now rests in the hands of invisible bots and broken government web forms.
Source: Slashdot
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