Lakehead School Board files court order demanding Reddit release user identities

The Lakehead District School Board has filed a court order application compelling Reddit Canada to release the identities of users who it claims have made defamatory remarks on the popular social media website

THUNDER BAY - The Lakehead District School Board is taking legal action against a social media site over posts it says are defamatory.

The school board has filed a court order demanding Reddit Canada disclose information to identify users who have made posts on the platform about the school board and staff.

The order would compel Reddit Canada to remove the posts from the platform.

According to the order application filed on Sept. 14, the grounds for seeking the identities of at least two users is related to posts made on Reddit earlier this year that the school board says are ‘defamatory and abusive.’

“The Users who made the above posts are unknown to the applicant at this time and their identity cannot be obtained from any publicly accessible source of information or any other source available to the applicant,” the order reads.

“This information is in the possession of Reddit, which is a corporation that owns and operates the social media website and mobile application known as Reddit, where the defamatory posts were published. The confidentiality of the information requested from Reddit is not absolute and the John/Jane Doe(s) have no reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to the use of the internet for the purpose of publishing defamatory and abusive statements.”

The order goes on to say that there is no other process to obtain the identifying information of the users who made the posts.

The school board is seeking: “all data, information, names, email addresses, IP addresses, records, and other sources that in any way relate to identifying and contacting Reddit users responsible for the posts.”