zlacker

That's a popular equivocation when this topic comes up, but that's not quite what's going on (or at least not quite what happened). I'm sure that Reddit's current owners _do_ support censorship, and plenty of it, but the early Reddit owners, admins and even moderators did strongly oppose it. They were pushed into it by heavily implied threats of legal action if they didn't.

Did you know that movie ratings aren't based on any law? There's no law on any book, anywhere, that prevents theaters from allowing children under 18 to view R-rated movies. Instead, the MPAA and the theaters enforce a fairly rigid soft-censorship regime to avoid what would definitely be a legally mandated, government-run censorship regime.

So, while you are _strictly_ correct and Reddit is legally "allowed" to choose its current heavy handed censored approach, they were never really legally "allowed" to avoid it, either.