End Over-Censorship on Yahoo! Answers

To:  Yahoo.com Yahoo Answers

This is the online petition to encourage Yahoo! Answers to better its censorship practices of questioners' and answerers' posts. Signing this petition is a call to Yahoo for less restrictive community guidelines and less arbitrary, unilateral omissions of user content.

Case example:

** I have held an email account with Yahoo for years. I began using Yahoo Answers a few months ago. I answer a lot more questions than I ask. The first question I had censored (deleted) was about an entertainer whose name I could not recall. He told racial jokes. After a few days, the question was deleted; no one attempted to answer before the deletion. I believe I appealed this action.
Moreover, there is no shortage of ethnically, racially offensive questions and answers on Yahoo. I do not follow the endurance of these questions, but the responses and frequency are to be noted.

** The second question that Yahoo censored was concerning female on male oral sex. This one was starred twenty-four times and received about 33 answers. The violation type was "adult". At the same time this question was deleted, there rings in scores of adult sexual questions and remarks that are equally sexually explicit if not more so.

** Then another question was for the purpose of getting someone to vote on an earlier question so it may be resolved. I made the mistake of not describing which answerers needed the tiebreaker. So, I allowed the answerers to inadvertently vote and turn a two-way tie into a three-way tie. This is considered to be soliciting and I should have just sent a message to my contacts. Nevertheless, while that post was justifiably removed, one of the two questions I posted and linked into the deleted solicitation post was also deleted. So, Yahoo conducted a 2-for-1 censorship.

I have had another question deleted because it was posted twice. This was not intentional, however. Either due to a browser error or the Answers web page itself. Here is the link to the Yahoo! Answers Community Guidelines:

http://answers.yahoo.com/info/community_guidelines



I am not the only person who has noticed this trend of blatant over-censorship and so-called "political correctness" from Yahoo. I ask that you join me by signing this petition so that Yahoo, a respected and world-renown web host and site, will test one or more of the following actions:

1) Keep the site as it is except allow users to place a minimum age requirement; safe search filter; and/or a succinct Captcha-style aptitude test germane to the question before questions can be reported or answered. This will enhance safety by ensuring that minors are protected from adult content and spam bots, p.c. trolls, and point trolls are not misusing the questioners. Succinct aptitude test will reduce answers (unless they are credited more points for the hassle) but will lead to more serious answers.

2) Keep the current site as it is, but beta a spin-off version of Yahoo! Answers. The spin-off should be less censored and allow for intellectual, adult content. Make the reporting violations procedure less arbitrary and allow real-time appeals (like chat or I.M. if available). This will allow for better answers to harder questions. Adult or sexual queries will get more honest, more uncensored responses.

3) Keep the site as it is except, when a question is reported then deleted, allow the questioner's contact(s) to view the question in private (if they are of age) and vote on it. Do not simply delete an entire question that might have gotten positive feedback from a user's contacts anyway. Some groups of contacts on Yahoo Answers are solely connected to discuss mature or politically incorrect questions. I doubt if a user will lose many contacts' respect for posting an offensive question.

These are my suggestions to Yahoo! Answers. There is strength in numbers. I urge you to sign this petition against excessive online censorship.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The End Over-Censorship on Yahoo! Answers Petition to Yahoo.com Yahoo Answers was created by and written by Johnathan Larkin (moderatepop@gmail.com).  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.