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archerships) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
getting_started2021-05-28 04:53 pm
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. ![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
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 Many of the founding documents are outdated with references to policies that don't exist any more (such as invite codes).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!
no subject
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:
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.
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.)
no subject
no subject
Another useful thread:
https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38065.html
Relevant excerpt:
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.)
no subject
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 subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
"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".
no subject
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."