Can we freely delete our questions and answers?
<p>I was wondering what would happen if a high rep user decides to shutdown their account and take down their answers and questions. </p>

<p>I imagine stack exchange would want to stop that from happening because high rep users often have popular questions and answers. But can they?  </p>

<p>Is there a legal doctrine that stack exchange can avail itself of?</p>

<p><a href="https://stackexchange.com/legal">Condition 3 in the SE Terms of Service</a> says that</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the
  Network is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange
  under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. You grant
  Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use,
  copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative
  works and store such Subscriber Content and, except as otherwise set
  forth herein, to allow others to do so in any medium now known or
  hereinafter developed (“Content License”) in order to provide the
  Services, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and
  subsequently removed by You.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Your use of SE is predicated on agreeing to those various terms, and therefore they can prevent you from deleting your content. They can of course decide to allow you to delete content, but legally need not.</p>

copyright terms-of-service