![]() ![]() For example, WordPress prohibits the use of PayPerPost (a service which allows advertisers to pay bloggers to post about their product) on blogs hosted on its service. We doubt a court would see a substantial difference simply based on the slight technical difference.Įven so, most hosting companies, including blog hosting companies, also have terms of service that are more restrictive than free speech limits, typically restricting hate speech and pornography, among other things. The site may call them blogs, but if they’re aggregated and allow comments, they’re still really just one big threaded discussion forum. However, the aggregation of them on the front page and the nature of the threaded comments we believe negates any such argument. To say that the boundaries of constitutionally protected free speech are applicable to any privately-owned online community is to go contrary to decades of business practices.ĭo blogs change this? What about sites like Youtube, Ecademy, or AlwaysOn, in which individual blogs or channels are aggregated or displayed in the front page and other pages? One could make the argument that blogs are somehow different because of the fact that they are an individual voice rather than a community space. Even large, open membership communities have moderators who are able to edit or delete posts and suspend or eject members who violate those codes of conduct. ![]() Online communities have for years been in the practice of having codes of conduct that were far more restrictive than constitutional protections. There is a long, well-established precedent for moderation/governance in online communities - both ones that are open to the public and private ones. Is free speech an absolute right within online communities? Can an online community, regardless of its size and membership requirements, establish and enforce a more restrictive code of conduct? The person or people raising cries of censorship and assertions of the right to free speech are usually testing or pushing the envelope of the acceptable boundaries within the community - going off topic, profanity, flame wars, and so on. Students of online communities joke that most online debates eventually devolve into either comparisons to Hitler or allegations of violation of free speech rights. ![]()
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