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ask.fm bans "rude words"

ask.fm does not allow "rude words", "trolling", being "mean", being "upset[ing]", or "to provoke or antagonize people". also nothing "shocking", and no advocacy of anything illegal (drugs, torrents, etc)

fucking wow man.

they don’t enforce this consistently or objectively at all. people constantly use rude words and troll on ask.fm

so everyone is guilty and the site admins actually follow some other, hidden policy which they refuse to state in public.

i looked this up cuz i got asked a question about incest, answered it, then saw it was deleted. and the question wasn’t even anonymous, so i asked the submitter, and he said he didn’t delete it.

i received no notification of any kind about it being deleted, and i don’t have a record of what i wrote. (contrast with youtube where, in my experience, if your video is taken down, it becomes private so you still have it, just no one else. and of course youtube notifies you and gives a reason, and has a system for you to challenge the takedown)

http://about.ask.fm/terms/
When using the Services, you must not post or send anything which:

• Is mean, is bullying someone or is intended to harass, scare or upset anyone;
• Is deliberately designed to provoke or antagonize people, especially trolling;
• Uses rude words or is intended to upset or embarrass anyone;
• Encourages dangerous or illegal activities or self-harm;
• Depicts horrible, shocking or distressing things;
• Is obscene or pornographic, contains any pictures of naked people, is sexually explicit or depicts graphic violence;
• Contains any threat of any kind, including threats of physical violence to yourself or others;
• Is racist or discriminates based on someone’s race, religion, age, gender, disability or sexuality;
• Infringes other individual’s privacy rights;
• Is illegal, could expose Ask.fm to legal liability, or encourages people to get involved in anything which is illegal (for example, drugs, violence, or crime);
• Is defamatory or violates any third party’s rights, including breach of confidence, copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, moral right, privacy right, right of publicity, or any other intellectual property right;
• Constitutes spam, attempts to sell anything to other users, or competes with the business of Ask.fm;
• Contains any computer virus or other malicious code designed to attack, damage, divert, take over, disable, overburden, or otherwise impair the Services;
• Collects user content or information, or otherwise accesses the Services using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our prior permission;
• Violates any robot exclusion headers of the site, if any, or bypasses or circumvents other measures employed to prevent or limit access to the Services;
• Shares, recompiles, decompiles, disassembles, reverse engineers, or makes or distributes any other form of, or any derivative work from, the Services;
• Attempts to scrape or collect any personal or private information from other users or from the Services;
• Pretends to come from someone other than you, or where you are impersonating someone else;
• Intercepts or monitors, damages, or modifies any communication not intended for you;
• May cause any harm or damage to you or anyone else;
• Otherwise breaches the TOU; or
• Attempts to do any of the foregoing.

We reserve the right, at any time and without prior notice, to remove or disable access to any content that we, for any reason or no reason, consider to be objectionable, in violation of the TOU or otherwise harmful to the Services or our users.

Elliot Temple on June 26, 2015

Messages (5)

ask.fm disabled my account's ability to tweet out my answers and deleted the following answer i wrote:

> i disagree

the question itself was racist:

> > wtf!! You don't care if blackies, brownies and tiny eyes rule the world? We need to stop that. Colored people have low IQ. No offence intended, No Racism intended.

so you aren't even allowed to *disagree* with racism on ask.fm


curi at 9:20 AM on September 2, 2017 | #8971 | reply | quote

fuck censorship


Anonymous at 9:25 AM on September 2, 2017 | #8972 | reply | quote

ask.fm silently deleted another 26 of my answers. i no longer have any answers less than 3 months old. some of the deleted content wasn't even political.

fortunately, after the first answer was deleted, i saved a copy of all my answers. here's the pdf:

http://curi.us/files/curi42-ask-fm-sept-2017-archive.pdf


curi at 9:34 AM on September 2, 2017 | #8973 | reply | quote

eww


Anonymous at 10:05 AM on September 2, 2017 | #8974 | reply | quote

I discovered that ask.fm leaks identity information about *anonymous* questions

they selectively don’t tweet out your answers to questions from some anonymous askers and not others, based on some internal blacklist. this provides meaningful info to help you guess who asked a question. it lets you divide all askers into two groups, and one of the groups may very well only have a single person in it.


curi at 10:18 AM on September 2, 2017 | #8975 | reply | quote

Want to discuss this? Join my forum.

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