Survey Reveals Americans Support Blog Censorship

renai42 writes "A new survey has revealed that Americans overwhelmingly support strong censorship for blogs, even though a substantial amount have never actually been to one. Eighty percent of the 2,500 respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens. However, more than one-third of respondents had never heard of blogs before participating in the survey, and only around 30 percent of participants had actually visited a blog themselves."

Comments

Re:But how?

[Maestro4k]

Banning people from publishing the personal details of others is perfectly fair. This is nothing to do with 'unsuitable' content. While the article goes into more detail this appears to be more about privacy than regular censorship based on mature content. This just appears to be slashdot trying to kick off a load of censorship arguments and get more ad hits.

• So you think we need to stop the phone companies publishing people's addresses and phone numbers in their phone books? What about the county courthouse, they have your warranty deeds and trustee deeds on file with your addresses on those as well. Do we make the Register of Deeds an armed guard making sure no one can read the _public_ information stored in the warranty and trustees deed books?

• This isn't about unsuitable content or privacy, it's a poll with questions designed to stir up trouble. Addresses are public information. You may not like someone posting your address on their blog, but you can't stop them, or anyone else, from figuring out what your public address is. If it's information that is private, sure this is an issue of privacy, but that's not what the article says, it says "home addresses", starting us off right away with the main bit of personal info being totally public.

  The problems occur when you have sites/blogs that are encouraging others to commit violence/etc. against the people they're posting about, but current laws cover this. I remember an anti-abortion website getting in trouble because the courts found they were actively encouraging people to kill the doctors they provided info about on their site.