[WikiEN-l] IWF blacklist

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Yet Facebook provided no means of appeal, and my own efforts to contact them
> and seek reconsideration fell on deaf ears.
>
> The problem is bigger than IWF.
>
> http://durova.blogspot.com/2008/12/who-watches-watchers.html

Facebook is a private company. They can do what they want. The same
ability that allows them to censor your gallery allows Wikipedia to
give Archimedes Plutonium the boot.  If you don't like it you can
leave or fork.

Oh wait. You can't fork. The data you and your friends have submitted
into Facebook is stuck there. You don't have a realistic choice, just
like most UK residents don't have a realistic choice to choose an
uncensored ISP.

I don't have a solution for the UK's censorship other than to point
out that perhaps sites like ours ought to find ways to be more
friendly to user-controlled truly voluntary filtering if we want to
avoid outright censorship.

But for facebook, there is a path out of that:
http://opendefinition.org/ossd?action=show&redirect=osd

I don't have a high opinion of facebook, so I can't suggest an open
alternative… there may not be one yet. I know there is identi.ca vs
twitter.

Of course, an open service doesn't change the fact that you are
already invested in facebook, nor does it resolve all the problems,
but it's a necessary start. The [[network effect]] of sites like
facebook means that breaking from them is hard, but when you use it
you're adding to the problem, compelling others to join in giving up
control to the faceless-website-company. But… Change has to start
somewhere, someone needs to raise concerns and advocate it. To me it
looks like facebook as nominated you.