getting_started | Moderation / Censorship on Dreamwidth?

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Moderation / Censorship on Dreamwidth?

I was a longtime LJ user back in the day, got sucked into the Facebook borg, and am now returning to my roots. Many thanks to the staff and volunteers for creating/maintaining Dreamwidth.

I'm still finding my bearings, so apologies if this is not the right place for this kind of question.

As y'all are probably aware, Facebook heavily censors a wide variety of topics, from porn, to vaccines, to erotic Bernie memes. (Ask me how I know about that last one). I've been banned (temporarily) and seen friends banned (temporarily and permanently), sometimes for posts they made years earlier that were consistent with Facebook's rules at the time.

As a result, I've become increasingly angry at being treated like a child by Facebook's Dolores Umbridge algorithms. One of the main reasons I've fired up my account on Dreamwidth is the founder's stated commitment to free speech:

"With servers in the US we're obliged to follow US laws, but we're serious about knowing and protecting your rights when it comes to free expression and privacy. We will never put a limit on your creativity just because it makes someone uncomfortable — even if that someone is us."

...and from the site's Operating Principles:

"We will not place limits on your expression, except as required by United States law or to protect the quality and long-term viability of the service (such as removing spam)."

While I'm heartened by the apparently vigorous commitment to free speech here, many sites that claimed to support free speech at their founding, grew to support censorship of a wide variety of topics. For example, when reddit was founded, it claimed to be a "bastion of free speech". Over the intervening years, however, it has censored or banned thousands of communities, on topics ranging from drugs to sex work to conservative politics.

The founders of Dreamwidth also don't seem very active on the site any more. denise hasn't posted publicly since 2015. mark hasn't posted publicly since 2013. Many of the founding documents are outdated with references to policies that don't exist any more (such as invite codes).

As a result, I'm hesitant to invest in a site that seems to be on autopilot, and de facto controlleded by volunteers who may not share the founder's commitment to free speech.

So, before trying to recruit my friends here, I'm trying to get a sense of the real boundaries of free speech on Dreamwidth.

To help clarify, I've made a list of topics that have been banned on other major services. Note, to be clear, I don't necessarily support the communities that were banned on other sites. For example, I'm not a Trump supporter, and I'm certainly not a Nazi. However, I'd like to occasionally be able to discuss those topics without fear of being banned.

Which of these topics, if any, is likely to put my Dreamwidth account/communities at risk of a ban/censorship?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this matter!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You may want to check through recent posts on

dw_news, which are happening a couple of times a year on average, and highlight various issues, some of which are relevant to your questions.

Reading through at least the top-level comments is useful - people often bring up other questions there and when possible someone (often

denise) gives at least a brief answer. (Some stuff is "put that in a support request, please.")

(Short on time and well-behaving Internet tonight, so please accept this 'wave in the right direction' rather than my digging through for specifics.)

I'd also note - and this goes for

denise and

mark, but also lots of other people - that visible posts in someone's journal are by no means a complete picture of activity on the site. A lot of people may post differently than previously (people's lives change over time), and that may mean more posts in direct response to specific issues, in DW communities rather than their journals, in locked posts, etc.

It's not that "how involved are these people and what does that mean for policy?" isn't a potentially useful question, but "when was the last post in their public facing 'owner of the place' journal" is not a fantastic metric.

Thanks for the response! I'll check out dw_news.

I'm aware that the absence of public posts doesn't mean that they're not actively involved. However, the absence of public posts is a red flag, the same way that a lack of twitter posts on a company's corporate account is a red flag that the company is defunct or on life support. And I see enough of those signs that it worries me that the DW's original support for free speech may have waned.

Edited 2021-05-29 01:23 (UTC)

As another example of cause for concern for mission drift, the last post here on getting_started was almost 2.5 ago. This during a time when many folks were getting censored heavily on many other sites. There is only one community each that has "Trump" or "covid" as a hashtag (and neither of them seem especially related to those topics). Why aren't there more FB/Twitter/Reddit refugees like me here? Is it just because folks just don't know about it? Or because they're being actively driven away somehow?

Edited 2021-05-29 03:03 (UTC)

A comment from denise in 2018 that's re-assuring:

https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38929.html?thread=5779473#cmt5779473

I don't want to speak in absolutes, because absolutes are unrealistic and "we will never shut down or change policies!" is a promise that is so impossible to guarantee that just the mere act of someone making it is enough in my eyes to file them as making pie-in-the-sky promises and therefore untrustworthy! So instead, let me talk a bit about how we roll, which I hope will let you appropriately calibrate your risk tolerance. :) You may already know a lot of this, but I figure it's worth a repeat and it'll be good for anybody else who's reading the comments!

The site (and its associated LLC) is owned by me and [staff profile] mark -- that's it. Upside: we're the only ones who can change policies or decide to shut down and run off cackling with everyone's data trailing merrily behind us. Downside: progress/development can sometimes get slow when we're both held up. (He's got a dayjob and a young kid; I'm hella disabled.)
We have two part time contractors to back us up: Jen is my backup, and Robby is Mark's. That increases the chance that progress will not grind completely to a halt when we're both held up, and -- more importantly -- it means that there's much better chances that somebody will be available to fix an urgent problem if it happens. Or, let's face it, "when" it happens, because there's no such thing as an uncrashable system.
All of us (me and Mark, and Jen and Robby) have been working in tech for a long time. (Over twenty years in my case, actually, which blows my freaking mind sometimes.) So, even though it's just us, "it's just us" encompasses a lot of professional and technical experience, and we put that experience -- and, more importantly, the knowledge of "what not to do because it caused problems last time" -- into our work here, on both technical and social levels. In short: you can pretty much have confidence that we know what we're doing.
When Mark and I started DW, we had a number of very (very) long talks about how we wanted to run the site, what we wanted it to be like, and -- most importantly for your questions -- whether or not we were on the same page about things like content policies, development philosophy, core ethical principles, etc. We agreed then, and most importantly, we still agree even after ten years of doing this. We believe that DW should remain independent, should never accept advertising and venture capital because it changes the entire dynamic of a site and what a site's acceptable content policies should be, and should only place restrictions on what users could post if those restrictions were required by US law, and neither of us forsee those beliefs changing in the future!
Part of those pre-launch (and even pre-announcement) talks involved our commitment to radical business transparency -- that we should always explain what we're doing and why, and that anybody can ask questions and get an answer. We've tried our best to uphold that over the last decade, and while we aren't always perfect at it, we try our absolute hardest. We wrote down our guiding principles back then at the beginning, and while you'll have to check with people who've been here for a while to see how well we've been able to uphold them, they still apply today.
We do have some evidence of walking the walk, though -- back when we were first starting, PayPal suspended our ability to accept user payments until and unless we implemented additional content restrictions such as disallowing "adult content" (they meant sex, people always mean sex when they use that phrase). Instead of doing that, we went without any income at all for 3 months while we set up an alternative, and we'd be prepared to do that again if we had to.

I can't promise we'll never change policies -- we may have to, for any one of a number of reasons. I can promise that if we do, we'll tell you with as much notice as we can give, solicit feedback ahead of time if it's not an urgent change stemming from some outside factors, and tell you the reasoning behind why we have to make changes instead of waving around some bullshit like "making these changes to empower the vibrant community blah blah blah" (and that we'll listen to your feelings about the changes, carefully think about any problems that people foresee, and change anything that we can change if you convince us we got it wrong). You can read back through [site community profile] dw_news for some examples, if you want!

Likewise, I won't promise that we'll never shut down -- I can think of a few scenarios where we would have to, unlikely though they might be. Mark and I have our backups in Robby and Jen, and we discussed ahead of time what we'd do if one of us had to step back from day-to-day operations of the site for a while; we have a really strong volunteer community who helps with things like support, and we're open source and our volunteers contribute a lot to site development. But even if we've tried to reduce the chances, we are as vulnerable to the good old "what if both your company principals get hit by a bus at the same time" hypothetical as any two-person LLC would be, and progress does slow when both he and I have less time and energy to put to things.

We're also entirely user-funded, and while it hasn't been a problem in the last ten years (or rather, it was only a problem when we had three months of not being able to take payments due to PayPal fuckery), it's certainly possible that someday, we wouldn't be able to afford to keep the site running. If that should ever happen, though, we've got a number of contingency plans that we could activate, none of which involve "sell user data and/or the site to some big conglomerate". If it ever comes down to "sell out or shut down", which I fiercely hope it won't, we would choose "shut down in an orderly fashion with tons of notice and have the world's biggest farewell party with as much time as possible for people to make their plans and pack their stuff." Barring that, well, I've been saying for the last decade that we're keeping this place open until the eventual heat death of the universe, and I fully plan to be writing tl;dr news comments in another 40 years. :)

Mirroring important content or stuff you'd be devastated if you lost in multiple places is always smart, because there's always a chance of disaster, even only of the "shit I deleted the wrong post" kind. (We have backups! But our backups are server-wide and can't be used to restore individual posts or accounts.) We've planned around things like disk failure and servers suddenly deciding not to work anymore as much as we can (and y'all generally don't even notice when stuff fails unless it's a failure in one of the systems that we don't control), and we've tried to reduce single points of failure as much as possible, but there's an extent to how much we can failure-proof everything. But in terms of stuff we can control like major changes to the site philosophy or our plans for the future, I can pretty confidently assure you that we ain't going nowhere.

Edited 2021-05-29 03:11 (UTC)

The most common method of getting banned from the site seems to be: be a bot and/or spam other people's journals.

I think there are aren't a ton of refugees because we are small and most people aren't doing long-form blogging as much. Also, the built in audience isn't really there for (some of) the more controversial stuff. There's a pretty strong social code toward civility. Historically the user base hasn't been terribly interested in the more video based pornography (and porn-bots, like other spam, are ruthlessly squashed), more in the artistic or written erotica type. (visual media support also isn't terribly strong, you cannot host pics natively).

The community also tends to skew female, liberalish, geeky, and I would bet mid 20s-mid 40s. Not really the target audience for most mainstream porn, or most severely conservative politics.

I think there was a code-push not that long ago, so development isn't abandoned, just v. v. slow. :P

you cannot host pics natively.

Not true, you can host photos, just not use them elsewhere.

ish? I probably should've said can't do it for most practical uses :P.

I've had a looooot of people who didn't even know there was photo hosting, so I do want to make sure it's know that there is.

I am a spamwhacker, and can confirm that spamming gets people banned from the site. (In the sense of commercial advertisement and SEO and bot-testing preparatory to an actual spam campaign. Being merely obnoxious to others sometimes collects a personal ban from a community or specific other user, but that's not antispam's lookout. Terms of Service might not have much to say about it unless it rises to the level of harassment, and since I'm not in ToS I don't know where the lines are drawn.)

Linkblogging, as in the collection and discussion of fascinating links, is an honorable tradition and it is very hard to mistake linkblogging for spam.

In my opinion,

changelog is the best place to look for confirmed development activity. The code tours in

dw_dev can lag a little, but Changelog is automated. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that's visible offsite, on Github, but some projects over there have been in progress for years and there's not necessarily a clear date when they'll be ready.

Edited (woops, syntax) 2021-05-29 06:09 (UTC)

Thank you! I have no plans or interest in spamming, harassing anyone, or even communicating with people who don't want to see what I have to say. However, some people think the mere act of allowing "Nazis" to speak their mind is harmful, and they have a very expansive definition of "Nazi" that includes everyone from actual Nazis to nativists/Trump supporters. (Neither of whom I like or support in any fashion, but whose views I want to be able to discuss freely.) On other sites, this "punch a Nazi" crowd has infested the staff and moderation teams, and vigorously tried to drive out anyone whose politics they dislike.

I am curious about how you are coming up with your age estimates. I think that my own circle goes from probably thirties to probably up close to seventy, but that may reflect my own age.

It's mostly a guess. My entire rlist is pretty much in their 30 and 40s and when I expand that out to my network, it also tends to be people in their 30s and 40s with the occasional venture up or down (which could certainly be all of us compounding selection bias). On top of that, my observation of the initial user base often came from a part of livejournal fandom 10 years ago, which was mostly late teens to 30s or earlyish 40s and the tumblrers I've seen migrate also seem to be more 30s with a smattering of 20s. It's very non-scientific.

Sorry if this is butting in, but DW does have a stats page that seems to back up your anecdotal impression of the age distribution of accounts--mostly people in their 20s to 40s. ^^

Thanks!

Two major things, I think.

a) People don't know about it, and/or burned out on long-form before the effective death of LiveJournal.
b) When Dreamwidth started up, there was a major schism in the people who were making the jump to Dreamwidth and the people who were not. Some of the Dreamwidth early adopters made themselves so obnoxious to people who were on the fence that they decided strongly against Dreamwidth.

I observed a small but noticeable reactivation of friends' journals that had been dusty for a while in 2020-ish, who would have been people who signed up on or around the founding, drifted away, but who came back thanks to covid/other things. So they would have had less reason to look for new user resources.

That sounds plausible. I made my DW account in 2018, but didn't fire it up again until now when FB's censorship became intolerable.

Edited 2021-05-29 06:38 (UTC)

I've been here since beta, and I don't feel it's on autopilot. Also, unlike probably all the sites you're comparing it with, Dreamwidth has no advertisers that it needs to keep happy, no interest in selling your data, and no corporate masters to placate. I see no reason to think that they won't hold to their principles in the future just as firmly as they have in the past -- which is very!

Thanks! That's great to hear!

And, to be clear, I don't care much if DW is on autopilot, as long as the site operates as advertised. I'm more concerned about the risks of censorship, as I've seen many other sites that started out with a nominal commitment to free speech, drift into heavy censorship (Reddit/Twitter).

Edited 2021-05-29 01:42 (UTC)

The crucial difference is, you are the customer Dreamwidth is serving. But you are the product Reddit and Twitter are selling.

Yes, that definitely improves their incentives. That doesn't mean they won't censor. Parler was a paying customer of Amazon, and was shut down with 24 hours notice.

My sense, and maybe I'm off base, but as someone who's been here since the beginning - I don't think the founders of this site are Not Paying Attention. They are, for the most part, not posting frequently because, well, they don't have to. You have the ability to limit who sees your posts and those people who find you can also limit what you see in return. That goes a long, long way towards making sure people feel safe posting content.

Over in my corner of DW, I haven't been exposed to the mass insanity that other social media sites seem prone to - but I also don't go seeking it out here, either. What I suggest to you, then, is to see how active you'll be here, what kind of people connect to you and so forth - and then decide whether you want to upgrade and support it.

Thanks for the feedback, it's good to hear.

I've already bought a year's Premium membership. What I'm concerned about is spending a lot of time building communities here only to have them deleted instantly without warning or recourse based on some admin's whim (which DW's TOS currently allows them to do). This has happened to many communities on Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, Tumblr, etc. If DW has already turned into a censor-fest, then I don't want to bother with building any communities, and I'll use it just for my own personal blogging.

What I've seen of denise's posts suggests that she has a strong commitment to free speech, but if she retires, or steps back from operations (as I understand it, her health isn't so great), I not confident that the future stewards will be so committed.

I don't know if anyone can guarantee that change won't happen when the original stewards of something are no longer in charge. However, I have faith that Denise and her team will ensure, as much as they reasonably can, that whoever comes next remains committed to the original principles upon which DW was founded.

Thanks! That's reassuring to hear.

Is this the thread you're looking for?

Thanks for the pointer! For future readers, here's the link:

https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38929.html?thread=5758737#cmt5758737

Here's the current content:

cracks knuckles Okay, you are the winner of the next massive word dump, heh!

The distinction we use in cases like that is really subtle, and sometimes people misinterpret it as "they support Nazis" or "they support pedophiles" (for the record, we are neither pro-Nazi nor pro-pedophile). Fundamentally, it boils down to whether you're harassing people or are trying to recruit people to join you in horrible things or act on your beliefs: "advocating or inciting", for the most part. It'll probably be clearer if I give you a sliding scale of Okay vs Not Okay. I'll use "being a cat owner" as the example, not to trivialize the sort of beliefs that neo-Nazis espouse but because nobody wants to keep hearing about Nazis. (Fucking Nazis.) This applies to anything like hate crimes or sex crimes or what-have-you, but I don't particularly want to keep talking about those, either.

Saying, in a journal post or in your profile, that you're a cat owner (self-identifying as a Thing): okay
Saying, in a post to your own journal, stuff like "I don't know why people look down on cat owners so much; they're right, life is better with fur everywhere" (agreeing with some/all of the beliefs of Thing, without any encouragement to act upon them): okay
Saying, in a post to your own journal or in a comment to someone else's post, "Everyone should have a cat. Who's with me in our plan to spread cats everywhere?" (organizing, inciting, or trying to recruit others to do something other than just talk about Thing in their own space): Not Okay, will have penalties ranging from suspension of the entry/comment to suspension of the account entirely based on how many times we've had to talk to the person about it/how much of their account is devoted to it
Commenting to someone else's journal, "FUCK YOU DOG LOVER CATS FOREVER" (contacting someone to harass them on the basis of the commenter's Thingitry): depends on what percentage of the account's comments are Thingitry-based harassment and what aren't, but generally, the first-line solution to getting unwanted comments is to ban the user from contacting you and see if they escalate to inciting others to harass you on their behalf (in which case, see previous step) or create alternate accounts to get around the ban (which is a straight-up ToS violation, although we usually deliver one warning before starting to suspend accounts over it).

Does that make sense? Basically, and for a lot of the same reasons we allow "pornography" that crosses some people's lines of That Is Not Okay, we don't try to judge beliefs, we look at what people are doing or advocating with those beliefs. It's still a fuzzy line sometimes, but we've taken out as much of the fuzz as we can.

(All of the above is theoretical, btw. In practice, we don't have anything to the best of my knowledge that even comes close to the line, aside from one non-English-language country-specific community that reflects the local prejudices of the country in question and is still pretty far off from anything like the major Nazi infestation problem Twitter and Tumblr have. But after having been doing online ToS enforcement for almost twenty years oh GOD I feel old I've learned that it's best to have your content policies set up to cover the worst-case scenarios ahead of time and communicate them to your users as clearly and as often as you can, so that people can make their own decisions about whether your site's content enforcement policies mesh with what they want from a site.)

If you want to read more, there's a whole bunch about our content enforcement philosophy in this older news post and in comment replies to people asking for clarification. (Oh, and porn bots fall under the category of "spam and the like" in my statements above: any account that exists only to promote or advertise something, whether that's porn site or money making scheme or even their dentistry practice or whatever, is suspend-on-sight.)

the conversation downthread is useful too, as is who exactly made the comment to begin with, and you will observe that you are no longer able to edit the comment you just made now that I have replied to it

Edited 2021-05-29 06:41 (UTC)

Another useful thread:

https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38065.html

Relevant excerpt:

So, what is your acceptable-content policy, then?

I've seen people wondering about this, and several people have asked us about it directly, so I thought it would be a good time to go over it again! For the most part, and with a very few exceptions, our content policy is as hands-off as possible. As long as content is legal in the US, and specifically in the state of Maryland where we're incorporated, we generally don't care. Likewise, we don't require people to flag any of their content as 18+ or NSFW: we give you the option if you want to, since lots of people don't want to worry about minors reading their content or want to let their friends know not to unfold that cut tag behind which gloriously smutty fanart lies at work if they're someplace their boss could look over their shoulders, but we'll never force you to flag a particular entry or flag it for you.

A (non-exhaustive) list of the exceptions:

How a site must handle reports of copyright violation is set by US law. You can read our DMCA policy for specifics on how we comply with that law.
We get rid of accounts that were just created for spam purposes, whether that's "leaving spam comments" (if you get one, delete it and check the "mark this comment as spam" checkbox; our anti-spam team will handle it from there!) or "posting links to other sites in order to boost those sites' search engine rankings". (If you see what you think is one or more of those, open a support request in the Anti-Spam category with a link to the journal(s), and our anti-spam team will take a look.) It's okay to use DW to host the blog for your small business where you tell your customers what you've been up to lately, for instance, but it's not okay if your account exists only to post those bite-sized, auto-generated things stuffed with keywords and links that exist only for gaming search engines. There's obviously some human judgement involved here, and occasionally we mistakenly suspend an account that wasn't a spambot or a SEO-bot (and then we apologize and fix it!), but most spam accounts are very much a case of "you know it when you see it".
We don't let people reveal other people's addresses or phone numbers. Again, there's some human judgement involved here: if someone posts their own phone number, we're not necessarily going to penalize someone else for pointing it out or linking to it. But generally speaking, "don't post other people's addresses or phone numbers" is a good rule to follow.
We will suspend accounts that were created for no purpose other than harassing or impersonating someone. This is another judgement call sometimes: it can range from things like making an account with a similar username to somebody else and posting stuff that insults them or tries to make people think the account belongs to them, to making an account that posts nothing but entries that rant about how awful one specific person is and encourages other people to go and tell them how awful they are. It does not include accounts that provide commentary and criticism about the actions of a person or organization, as long as the commentary doesn't include personal information like address and/or phone number or encourage readers to go bother them. (The line between "commentary and criticism" and "harassment" absolutely can be blurry, but we try our best to reduce it to a bright-line test with as few subjective judgement calls as possible.)
The above point applies to individual entries, too: you can post entries that are critical of someone's actions, but you can't post their personal information like address/phone, and you can't encourage other people to go pile on them. In other words: you can post "goddamn do [staff profile] denise's news posts suck, who the fuck does she think she is", but you can't post "goddamn do [staff profile] denise's news posts suck, if you agree go leave her a comment telling her that". Again: This is fuzzy! We try to take as much subjectivity out of the decision-making process as possible, but there's always going to be some.

The vast majority of our other restrictions are along the same lines: we try to strike a balance between stopping the worst of the terrible things people can do to each other on the internet and letting people post without having to worry that their accounts are going to be closed because someone objected to the content they were posting. We try to err on the side of permissiveness as much as possible, though. That means you may find people on Dreamwidth posting horrible opinions or beliefs, but it also means you can be confident you don't have to censor yourself. (And we do make it easy for you to block people from contacting you, and have plans for the future to make it more possible for you to never see anything That Person has posted anywhere on the site.)

This example is troubling:

"Saying, in a post to your own journal or in a comment to someone else's post, "Everyone should have a cat. Who's with me in our plan to spread cats everywhere?" (organizing, inciting, or trying to recruit others to do something other than just talk about Thing in their own space."

So, if someone invites everyone in their circle to come to a Black Lives Matter meeting at their house, that would be verboten and grounds for being banned? Attempting to organize a BLM protest would be banned?

No.

Inviting everyone in your circle to go participate in illegal activities is much more likely to be banned.

Protesting is legal. Vandalism, hate crimes, and harassment are not legal.

You seem incredibly concerned about censorship on a site that is pretty dedicated to free speech within the bounds of words on the internet.

Dreamwidth has been here a long enough time with a good track record.

Don't be a harasser, incitor of harassment or hate crimes, and you'll not get banned.

Edited 2021-05-29 13:50 (UTC)

"Inviting everyone in your circle to go participate in illegal activities is much more likely to be banned."

Looting and arson are illegal activities, and happened at many BLM protests.

"Dreamwidth has been here a long enough time with a good track record."

I don't know Dreamwidth's track record though. That's what I'm trying to determine.

"You seem incredibly concerned about censorship on a site that is pretty dedicated to free speech within the bounds of words on the internet."

And why do you think that is? The President of the United States and his supporters were deplatformed from many of the sites I use! If I'm going to devote a lot of time here--and invite others to do the same--I want reasonable assurance that the same censorship happening on many other sites isn't going to happen here.

"Inviting everyone in your circle to go participate in illegal activities is much more likely to be banned."

Looting and arson are illegal activities, and happened at many BLM protests.

Okay, here's the thing: if you encourage people to go do something legal, you should be fine. If something illegal then happens at that otherwise legal rally, that's for the authorities to sort out, but if you didn't encourage it here? Should be fine.

If you encourage people to go to a rally and specify they should bring bricks, tear gas, and/or fire-starters, that's when you're getting into trouble because you are right on that fine line of inciting illegal activity.

If you encourage them to go to the rally and use said accoutrements in illegal fashion (assault, destruction of property, etc), yeah, you're now over the line, I'd guess.

All of this is speculation: I'm not a volunteer or staff here.

Thanks! That seems like a reasonable "bright line" that would satisfy me.

Allowed: Everyone's invited to go with me to a BLM protest!
Not Allowed: Everyone's invited to go with me to a BLM protest, and also please bring gasoline, fireworks, and brass knuckles!

(If someone in a position of authority at Dreamwidth should happen to see this, it would be nice to hear that this is how the line will be drawn here.)

Edited 2021-05-29 17:35 (UTC)

"Harassment", "incitement" and "hate crimes" are also very expansively defined by many people.

For example, some people think that not using someone's preferred pronouns is harassment and repeatedly doing so can result in life-changing fines:

"...a person who intentionally and repeatedly refuses to use an individual’s preferred pronoun would be subject to fines (that could reach as high as $250,000 for multiple violations) under the New York law..."

A British comedian/youtuber ("Count Dankula") who taught his pug to make a Nazi salute was convicted of a hate crime and fined 800 GBP.

I realize that DW is governed by US law, which has better free speech protections, but the same cancel culture that led to this absurd conviction is nearly as prevalent in the US as Britain. For example, youtube also removed the video as "hate speech".

Edited 2021-06-01 13:53 (UTC)

I really did not keep up with Mark and Denise's views on censorship. When this discussion came up, I wondered "How would they prevent some of the instances when LJ went sideways?"

For example, when I was very active on LJ, there was a pro-ana group promoting anorexia. There are several subcultures of people not dealing with life in a healthy way where people exposed to other people with the same dysfunctional interest can make each other worse and more dysfunctional. The part where you could not recruit people to your cause could stop that even if encouraging other people to be anorexic is not illegal.

All the Encyclopedia Dramatica nonsense from LJ where a small group of trolls were really mean to everyone was another time when LJ went sideways. I have seen a lot of online communities just fall to trolls seeking attention. At some point, no one is left but the trolls seeking attention.

I feel like the major groups on Dreamwidth so far as there are any are "people who are participating in fandom" and "people who are not participating in fandom."

All I can say is that I've had an account (which I've been active on) since the site opened and I've never heard of a case of a DW user being censored by the site owners. And given that in its early years there were many people who felt they had to take a side of being pro-DW or pro-LiveJournal, and were thus looking for things to complain about, I feel fairly sure I would have had it been an issue.

That's great to hear! And the fact that DW dropped Paypal rather than kowtow to their anti-porn rules is very re-assuring.

I think I remember you from those days and followed you here and subscribed to you. Were you crasch? I thought you tended to lean somewhat libertarianish, but my memory is hazy.

Anyway, you can unfollow people or just not let them read your stuff if they are bothering you, and that gives you control over what type of nonsense you choose for yourself.

Thanks, yeah, I was crasch. Yes, I an ancap/libertarian. I'm not worried about other people bothering me--I'm worried that I'll be censored because someone thinks it's unconscionable for a "Nazi" to be given a platform.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Moderation / Censorship on Dreamwidth?

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