How to get a damaging forum post removed

01What you can and cannot force

Decide which lever you are pulling before you write anything. A volunteer moderator can remove a post inside one community and nothing beyond it. The site operator can delete it site-wide. A host or registrar acts against the whole site but will not edit one page.

Work outwards from the narrowest route, and keep every case number.

02Read the board rules first

A post that breaks a published rule is removed as moderation, with no argument about truth. Match the post to a rule before reaching for a statute.

• Reddit says do not engage in behavior that bullies, intimidates, or targets other people or communities with abuse, and lists severe personal attacks and unwanted sexualization. Report the post with the report button next to it.
• Reddit also prohibits posting someone's personal information or links to it, including screenshots where names are still legible, and states that doing so will get you banned.
• Report a personal information breach at reddit.com/report, not only to the community.

03Moderators or the site operator

Moderators are unpaid users of the community itself, often the people the post was written to please. The operator enforces the site-wide rules and is the only party that can act when the moderators are the problem.

• Moderator route: on Reddit, mod mail, reached through message the moderators or the envelope icon.
• Operator route: the site-wide report form, for when moderators refuse or stay silent. Never send a legal threat through mod mail; it reaches volunteers who cannot act on it.
• On an unmoderated imageboard there is no middle layer, only one operator address.

04A notice that gets actioned

A report saying this post is false and defamatory is a conclusion, not a notice. What is reviewed is whether you located the item and identified which words are wrong, and why.

05Section 230 in the United States

Section 230 of the Communications Act, codified at 47 U.S.C. 230, states at subsection (c)(1) that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

The operator did not write the post, so a defamation claim against it for another person's words does not normally run. Subsection (c)(2) also protects it when it does remove material it considers objectionable. Your leverage is its rules, not a cause of action.

06The UK notice of complaint route

England and Wales run the opposite logic. Section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 gives an operator a defence that it was not the operator who posted the statement. It is defeated if you show that you could not identify the poster well enough to bring proceedings, that you gave the operator a notice of complaint, and that it did not respond as the regulations require.

Under section 5(6) the notice must state your name, set out the statement and explain why it is defamatory of you, and say where it appears. The Defamation (Operators of Websites) Regulations 2013 then impose fixed steps, each on a 48-hour clock.

Where two or more earlier complaints about the same statement each led to removal and you say so in the new notice, the operator must remove it within 48 hours and the intermediate steps fall away.

07UK Online Safety Act duties

The Online Safety Act 2023 is not a defamation remedy, but it reaches boards the old rules ignored. Ofcom states that over 100,000 services are likely in scope, from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum.

• Even a small, low-risk in-scope service is expected to have findable terms, a tool for users to report illegal material with a process for handling complaints, the ability to take content down quickly where there is reason to believe it is illegal, and a compliance contact.
• Ofcom has said reporting and complaints functions should be easy to find and use, with appropriate action taken in response.

A complaint to Ofcom is about a service's systems, so it is leverage over a board with no working report route. It will not decide whether a post about you is true.

08The EU route: DSA Article 16

In the European Union the Digital Services Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, applies to intermediaries serving users in the EU. Article 16 requires hosting providers to run notice and action mechanisms that, as the Regulation puts it, are easily accessible and user-friendly.

1. Use the service's illegal content mechanism, not its generic contact form. The notice should be sufficiently precise and adequately substantiated: why the content is illegal, and exactly where it is.
2. Expect a decision in a timely way and to be told of it without undue delay; no fixed number of hours applies to an ordinary notice.
3. If refused, use the internal complaint system, open for at least six months after the decision. A certified out-of-court body can then take the case, though its outcome does not bind.

Where the post is about you as a person rather than defamatory, Article 17 of the GDPR can be used. The Irish Data Protection Commission describes erasure as due without undue delay in defined cases, but not where processing is necessary for exercising freedom of expression and information.

09When the operator ignores you

Silence is normal on boards that advertise their refusal to remove anything. The ladder does not ask the operator again; it goes to the companies the site depends on.

1. Registrar. Find it through ICANN Lookup and write to the abuse address in the Whois record. Under the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement a registrar must publish an abuse contact and take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond to such reports.
2. Hosting provider. The host is the only party in the chain that can delete files.
3. CDN. Cloudflare states that for its pass-through security and CDN services it does not host content, that it forwards a complaint to the website operator and the hosting provider, and that it gives the host the origin IP address.

10Review sites and gossip boards

Reviews run on policy, not on dispute. Google is explicit that you should not report a review merely because you disagree with it, and that only reviews breaching its content policies can be removed.

1. Open your Business Profile, select Read reviews, use the report icon, choose a reason and send the report.
2. Evaluation usually takes several days; track it in the Reviews Management Tool.
3. If the report is rejected you may submit a one-time appeal, up to 10 reviews at a time.

A gossip board has no such form. Identify the published rule the post breaks, usually personal information or harassment rather than falsity, and keep to it.

11De-indexing and court action

When the post cannot be removed, the question is who finds it. Google Search Help states that Google does not remove content from the web itself and can only remove things from Google Search results; to take it down you must contact the site owner.

• The personal information removal policy covers contact details, government identity numbers, bank or card numbers, images of your signature, medical records, and doxxing content, meaning personal information shared to harm you.
• Submit the URLs. Only the URLs you give are reviewed, and Google may ask for screenshots. Google may also keep a result up where it judges the content newsworthy or of public interest.
• Removal can be full, hiding the page from all of Search, or partial, hiding it only for searches containing your name. Partial is the usual result on a thread.
• Unlawful rather than merely private content goes through the legal removal request route, per URL.

A claim is the right tool in three situations: the poster is identified and continuing, an operator subject to notice duties has ignored them, or you need a disclosure order to identify who posted. SARAZIM LLC handles the administrative side above and does not practise law.