Topic: [e621 Code of Conduct] Official changes, questions and answers

NotMeNotYou said:

Changed the title so it is in alphabetical order.
Also added that admitting to, or being convicted of, bestiality or other serious crimes anywhere on the page will lead to their permanent removal. Neither do we need to deal with legal implications of people who actively partake in illegal activities (for Arizona/US), nor do we need to endanger our users by allowing known convicted felons to be on our page.

Note that US Supreme Court just struck down a North Carolina law which banned convicted sex offenders from having any profiles on social media sites where minors are known to be present, on 1st Amendment grounds. If this is a legal mandate from a jurisdiction in US, it is arguably unconstitutional. ( https: slash slash www.supremecourt.gov slash opinions slash 16pdf slash 15-1194_08l1.pdf ) I don't know specifically to which US/Arizona law you're referring to which causes your policies to now require that you close the accounts of anyone who discusses or has ever been convicted of a felony.

FYI, California convicts people of felonies All The Time. People who have paid their debts to society are now having to deal with ongoing ostracization? If you want to drive them to commit more felonies, that's the best way to do it. They need to be brought back into and included in society, not permanently marked with a Scarlet Letter for having had a lapse in judgment.

(Someone very close to me is in prison right now, for shooting someone. I'm aware of the situation surrounding it, and I am confident that a physician-induced benzodiazepine dependence and subsequent withdrawal psychosis cannot ever happen to him again. When he is released, he will be able to be bonded. He would be a fan of this site. But according to you, he can't participate because he would "endanger your users"?)

Are you going to start requiring legal name, birthdate, and other information so that you can look up your users' conviction data to enforce this rule? Or are you going to accept allegations made by other site users? If the former, how are you planning on keeping the personally-identifible information private? If the latter, how can one prove the lack of such a conviction? What happens in the case where the user had a conviction for a felony but the conviction is later reduced to a misdemeanor, dismissed, or pardoned? What policies or procedures exist to prevent this from becoming a site-legitimized means of harassment?

Also, under which jurisdiction's laws would a felony have to be a felony to trigger the removal of the user account? The most restrictive laws that your site can reach? (Guess what, if you have any users from the Muslim nations of the Middle East, all your homosexual users would be felons in those places -- and thus all discussion of homosexual sex would likewise be felonious.) The jurisdiction(s) of your administrators and moderators? Which jurisdictions are those? The jurisdiction where your servers are located? Which jurisdiction is that? The jurisdiction where the user is located? You don't even know or track that (unless you do, in which case your privacy policy needs to be updated), so you can't even make judgments based on that.

Does the Arizona law purport to say that anything that's a felony in Arizona cannot be discussed on any computer system anywhere, even amongst users and a site which are all located completely outside of Arizona and for which none of the traffic touches Arizona? I am not a lawyer, but that appears to me to be gross legislative overreach, and amounts to lawfare (the attempt to impose political or legal change on other jurisdictions with no standing to make or enforce any laws upon or within).

I respectfully request:
1) the "convicted felon" rule be struck because it's impossible to enforce with the data available to you.
2) the "discussion of felonious activity" clause be redrafted to more closely align with the actual mandates involved, combined with the realities that different jurisdictions define different things as felonies, that there is no way to identify which jurisdiction's laws the user is actually subject to, and that you are too small to have a legal staff with full knowledge of the entire world's felony codes.
3) you give users the necessary information to help them help you comply with the law, so that you don't apparently arbitrarily start lowering the banhammer.
4) that you cite the actual laws which you claim require you to change your policies to conform to them (such as the Arizona law you're alluding to).
5) that you consult with a lawyer to figure these things out.

Updated by anonymous