Reddit bans SonyGOP subreddit and users for sharing leaked Sony documents, deletes posts after receiving DMCA takedown request
and a week to remove nude celebrity photos Nathaniel Mott / PandoDaily : Reddit quickly bans users for sharing Sony Pictures' leaked documents. If only it had done the same for #celebgate Andrew Griffin / The Independent : Sony hack: Reddit seeks to shut down Sony leaks after company's requests John Kennedy / Silicon Republic : Reddit starts blocking users from sharing hacked Sony documents CNNMoney.com : Hacked Sony ex-employees sue for privacy violations Sean O'Kane / The Verge : Reddit has started banning users sharing Sony hack documents Davey Alba / Wired : Leaked Emails From Sony Hack Reveal Snapchat's Big Ambitions Rebecca Ford / Hollywood Reporter : Sony Hack: Carmike Cinemas Cancels ‘The Interview’ Screenings See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Days into the Sony hack fallout, Reddit has moved from hosting to deleting: it removed the SonyGOP subreddit, banned participating users, and purged posts containing leaked documents after Sony Pictures filed a DMCA takedown request that also preceded its legal threats against other platforms. The speed is the story — PandoDaily notes Reddit acted quickly here after taking roughly a week to remove the #celebgate nude photos, and hacked Sony ex-employees are simultaneously suing over privacy violations, raising the stakes of what circulates.
The takedowns are also unlikely to contain the archive: WikiLeaks went on to publish the full cache of 276,394 Sony documents in 2015, and Reddit itself would later handle a strikingly similar dilemma when it banned accounts tied to the leaked US-UK trade documents in 2019 — making this an early data point in a recurring playbook rather than a one-off.
First-order effects
- SonyGOP's subscribers and posters lose their community and their accounts immediately, and every Reddit thread quoting leaked emails is deleted on Sony Pictures' DMCA notice — enforcement lands on users, not on Sony.
- Reddit's fast compliance here sits awkwardly against its slow response to #celebgate, handing critics a concrete inconsistency to cite about whose takedown requests get honored.
Second-order effects
- Sony extends the same legal pressure beyond Reddit — threatening to sue Twitter over tweets containing hacked emails within days — turning one DMCA win into a multi-platform containment campaign.
- The ex-employees' privacy lawsuit gives the leaks' subjects their own litigation track independent of copyright enforcement, pressuring every host of the documents on two legal fronts at once.
Third-order effects
- Copyright law becomes the default instrument for policing leaked corporate material on user-generated platforms, even as mirror publishers like WikiLeaks keep the archives permanently available — enforcement shapes visibility, not existence.
- The pattern repeats: five years later Reddit again bans accounts and a subreddit over leaked government trade documents, suggesting platforms have institutionalized rapid takedowns of politically or legally sensitive leaks as routine moderation.
The trend: Leak containment is migrating from the breached company's lawyers to platform moderators themselves, with DMCA notices as the standardized trigger.