getting_started | 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 Many of the founding documents are outdated with references to policies that don't exist any more (such as invite codes).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

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.)

Moderation / Censorship on Dreamwidth?

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