Moderation / Censorship on Dreamwidth?

[archerships]

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 Many of the founding documents are outdated with references to policies that don't exist any more (such as invite codes).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

• Reddit Bans ‘Watch People Die’ Subreddit After New Zealand Mosque Video Is Posted to the Site
• Trump is banned permanently from Facebook
• Facebook Deleting Coronavirus Posts, Leading To Charges Of Censorship
• Hours After FOSTA Passes, Reddit Bans 'Escorts' and 'SugarDaddy' Communities Note, for some reason, reddit hasn't banned the main sexworkers subreddit yet.
• Stormfront, the internet's oldest major racist website, has domain suspended
• YouTube Bans DIY and Commercially Focused Gun Videos
• Reddit bans ‘deepfakes,’ pornography using the faces of celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Gal Gadot
• Twitch, Reddit crack down on Trump-linked content as industry faces reckoning

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this matter!

Comments

[jenett]

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.

[the_shoshanna]

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!

[alexseanchai]

Is this the thread you're looking for?

[yourlibrarian]

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.

[altamira16]

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.