Sorta. It's part of their terms: http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.terms "MySpace may reject, refuse to post or delete any Content for any or no reason, including Content that in the sole judgment of MySpace violates this Agreement or which may be offensive, illegal or violate the rights of any person or entity, or harm or threaten the safety of any person or entity." "Content/Activity Prohibited.... constitutes or promotes information that you know is false or misleading or promotes illegal activities or conduct that is abusive, threatening, obscene, defamatory or libelous;" This approach is pretty much the industry standard in the U.S. They have the right to remove anything that advocates illegal activities. At the same time, the industry norm is also to ignore most conversations concerning drugs (especially those questioning the logic behind the legal statutes and other policy-related debates). The only time that I've seen a company act on its policy wrt drugs is when dealers have set up pages or when people are talking about how to buy drugs. When it comes to these things though, there's another policy that's typically invoked: no right to commercial activity. In general though, free speech has typically trumped in this space, but the companies do try to protect themselves. That said, most community managers have the attitude of "if you're so stupid as to talk about that in a public place, go ahead and do it... it's not us that'll be down your neck, but those whose punishments are much more severe." I have no doubt that companies have been subpoenaed for data concerning drug-related posts by users. As for the conversation... to the best of my knowledge, except in the case of LiveJournal, there's not a big public discussion of these terms. At the same time, there are a bunch of us who are regularly involved in helping the companies develop sane terms that protect them, while giving users freedom to do as they please (even if that means legal trouble for them). danah On Mar 10, 2008, at 11:45 PM, Monica Barratt wrote:

Just wondered if anyone researching SNS's had come across policies that deal with drug discussion in their travels? I've only just started exploring MySpace and haven't had any luck finding any documentation about any rules or policies, if they exist. I've also not noticed anything on Facebook.

In my PhD research with online forums, most of the ones in Australia where drug discussion occurs have developed guidelines or rules to manage this - so I'm wondering if this has also happened on social networking sites

thanks in advance monica

Monica Barratt PhD Student National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne, AU) +61 407 778 938 http://db.ndri.curtin.edu.au/staff.asp?persid=650 http://www.ndri.curtin.edu.au/drugsonforums/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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