Who is responsible for the community site content? Web Master or site members!
Apart from being useful in sharing content, social networking sites have become one of the best platforms for buyers and sellers to meet in a free open market strata, where they get to engage in commerce. The sellers promote their business by posting their items for sale in a site marketplace. If people surfing the site, find a particular item useful, they will buy it. All the posting and purchasing processes involved in the execution of the sale are done online.

But the downside to this is that fake companies utilize this opportunity to post counterfeit items. People trusting such sites purchase products blindly, only to find out that their purchase was ‘not such a good idea’. Once they come to know the truth about the product after usage, they seek legal assistance to help them out in such cases. The result, often reflecting badly on the site involved and its administrators. They are charged as responsible for posting such content on their site and fined heavily.

Even in the recent lawsuit between Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH) and eBay (eBay is The World’s Online Marketplace®, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis), a French court ruled that eBay was responsible for counterfeit items sold on the site and for selling genuine products outside of authorized channels. The court ordered eBay to pay around 40 million Euros, which works out to approximately $63.2 million. The auction website has also been ordered to stop selling fragrances and cosmetics from those brands immediately, or face more fines. (Source).

Now arises the question of who is actually responsible for the content posted on a website. If one argues that web masters are responsible, you can always come up with the counter-argument that it would be tedious for the site owners to control the content posted by millions of users. So the responsibility lies solely in the hands of the site members who contribute to the content.
Similar situation can be seen in the content posted in networking sites. People upload inappropriate content such as porn videos, racist slurs, copyright content etc without the knowledge of the web master. Due to such irresponsible posts, the site is rendered unsafe for the genuine users. Even though such sites take necessary actions by hiring teams that work solely for the purpose of approving uploaded content and installing special software to restrict uploading of such content, such illicit material still finds a way to surface through. Also, such efforts end in vain due to delay in processing as millions and millions of bytes content are uploaded every day. With the constant threat of losing customers to competing sites looming large, the web owners relax the measures taken against such uploads, which paves way for posting inappropriate content.