quoting
“Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk. When journals that contain such material are reported to us, we must suspend them. Because LiveJournal’s interests list serves as a search function, and because listing an interest enables other people also interested in a similar topic to gather and/or congregate, we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity.”
does that mean that listing anything having to do with marijuana puts your journal at risk, or am i just being paranoid?
“expressing interest in” and “free speech” are two seperate things. If Livejournal think they that merely talking about something is a problem, they should think carefully about their own existence value.
It is a criminal offence to be caught in possession of plants or prepared cannabis. It is not an offence to talk about it.
It is time that Livejournal moved their server to a country more liberal if it is in a region where talking about cannabis is illegal. This means that not only will vast amounts of money that region gets dissappears but they will undoubtably be embaressed by the following news items that will go international, based on Livejournals prominence across the globe.
I am so glad I live in England where rules such as these couldn’t have any legal basis. Sort of reminds me of a series of scifi novels by David Feintuch (RIP) where one rule amongst humans was that no one was allowed to talk about nuclear weapons upon pain of death. This sort of big brother ruling is pathetic and inconsistent with the free world.
I would venture that if they went that far, they would lose 90% of their accounts. And I am sure the priority is ‘free’ accounts.
fuggum
That’s a good question. Although marijuana isn’t illegal everywhere. So whose “laws” are they using as a base line I wonder?
Is it also only listing such things as an “interest” that is the problem? Because even though I’m not exactly sure how it’s done, I know it’s possible to search through journals themselves looking for key words. Even if you have your journal set to not be crawled by search engines.
I know this because I ended up “friended” by a person gathering data for a “surgery experiences” website. I’ve still no idea how this guy managed to track me down. But I think he may have worked for LJ at some point and had access to tools that not everyone does.