Let me ask a question here..that I hope gets answered. I am on myspace, and I run some bigger accounts, and am getting involved in some media issues. Censorship is a big deal to me.

What exactly do you mean by running some bigger accounts? Some of the key factors when it comes to media and information resource manipulation are identity, trustability of sources, and using multiple (fake) sources to make something look like it has more people power behind it than it actually does.

People using a system in bad faith to artificially create false or untrue backing for an idea, product, service, et cetera, is an issue. Misuse comes in many forms. Not all misuse consists of using too many resources and flooding garbage, like spam. False representation is a issue that will cause major problems in this entire social web space.

I want to note, that i'm not sure about censorship. I have some youtube words in my account. Are they still censoring, because I have 2 youtube videos.

Unsure about censorship in terms of if MySpace is still doing it? So am I. I don't pay that much attention to MySpace at any given time. I doubt they could keep up filtering out things without people getting more and more pissed off about it. I'm waiting to see what their next screw-up will be.

Blocking the ability to publish, spread, and share ideas is the central issue to censorship. Blocking the ability to utilize tools and resources that facilitate information sharing is tangentially connected, but in a very important way. Being able to link between resources on the web is a key thing that the web brings to speech; It makes speech more powerful.

Also.. There are security issues present in MySpace that have already proven significant, which exist because they _don't_ block the ability to do certain things. Being able to include script in pages is bad. They have already had a worm rage through their system. However, they have seemed willing to block sites in order to get some kind of unfair advantage over another website. That, is a complete load of shit when you think about it. Reckless ignorance combined with disrespect.

When it comes to content that should and should not be blocked, I find it useful to look at the problem from the perspective of spam. In general, content should never be blocked. However, there are situations where it creates genuine resource problems, its all bull generated garbage, and it can be eliminated. In those situations, I think its safe to make the call and block it without getting anywhere close to the realm of censorship. I'd also find it appropriate to block individual users using multiple accounts to cheat ranking systems.

The misuse of multiple false identifies issue could blow up and lead to more steam behind getting very bad law drafted. It's of the things that highly concerns me. The simple wrong solution is to eliminate anonymous publishing on the Internet. We can't let that happen.

RE: Myspace stumbles