goals and guidelines

[barakb25]

As promised, I want to clarify any confusion there may have been about our policies regarding your content on LiveJournal.

Our number one goal is to encourage and promote a free and open community. We will only intervene to the extent needed to avoid the site being used as a vehicle for illegal activities. The policies are simple.

• We do not review content until it is reported to us.
• With regards to illegal or harmful content, our policies are:
• No illegal content. There is little content that is truly illegal in the United States but it is an important note that SOME content does violate the laws of the United States where our data is kept. Child pornography is a clear example.
• No content that is created to plan, encourage, or advocate hate crimes, the abuse of children, or rape. I understand that there may be some that believe that the advocacy of these things may be valid discussion, but we simply do not have an interest in hosting this type of content.
• No content which is meant to plan, solicit the commission of, seek customers for, or provide instructions for serious illegal activities which could cause harm to others.
• Political, philosophical, religious and artistic discussion is encouraged and protected as long as it does not violate any of the guidelines listed above.

Your profile is part of your journal. If your profile, taken as a whole, breaks these policies, we will treat it the same as if it were in an entry or comment. For years, we have had these policies, but there were aspects of them that were not as clear as desired. We are making no major policy changes, we have made no changes to the TOS, and we do not anticipate making any changes in the future.

We are also reviewing our internal procedures and the communications we use to explain those procedures. We will also work on ways to make it easier for the community to report abusive or offensive content. I hope this makes things a lot clearer for everyone.