StumbleUpon’s Censorship

Due to StumbleUpon’s horrendous new censorship policy, I’ve been forced to join it so I can continue reading the R-rated blogs. Up until Friday, the R-rated (though not X-rated) blogs were viewable to non-Stumble users, but no more, apparently because of some legal problems that have arisen across the globe.

For those unfamiliar with it, StumbleUpon is a great browsing tool that links you to other users who share similar interests. (It requires the Firefox browser, which is the best anyway.) So I now have a second blog, which isn’t R-rated itself and should thus be viewable to anyone. On the other hand, some of my networked “friends” at StumbleUpon are R-rated, and who knows, this may well end up making me R-rated by default. One of those friends, incidentally, happens to a real-life friend, Matt Bertrand, who has been on the blogroll of The Busybody since day one. So for any readers who have been following Matt’s blog (I have occasionally linked to him in posts), you will now be stonewalled from the review portion of his blog unless you join StumbleUpon. It’s bloody shameful, and I’m glad to see aggressive protests to the new policy.

My rant for the day against censorship.

UPDATE: (9/26) StumbleUpon has resolved the problem. From now on, non-Stumble viewers who visit R-rated blogs will get a message, "This profile is R-rated. If you are 18 or older, you can view the content on this page by clicking here." That was easy enough.