*cracks knuckles* Okay, you are the winner of the next massive word dump, heh!
The distinction we use in cases like that is really subtle, and sometimes people misinterpret it as "they support Nazis" or "they support pedophiles" (for the record, we are neither pro-Nazi nor pro-pedophile). Fundamentally, it boils down to whether you're harassing people or are trying to recruit people to join you in horrible things or act on your beliefs: "advocating or inciting", for the most part. It'll probably be clearer if I give you a sliding scale of Okay vs Not Okay. I'll use "being a cat owner" as the example, not to trivialize the sort of beliefs that neo-Nazis espouse but because nobody wants to keep hearing about Nazis. (Fucking Nazis.) This applies to anything like hate crimes or sex crimes or what-have-you, but I don't particularly want to keep talking about those, either.
* Saying, in a journal post or in your profile, that you're a cat owner (self-identifying as a Thing): okay * Saying, in a post to your own journal, stuff like "I don't know why people look down on cat owners so much; they're right, life is better with fur everywhere" (agreeing with some/all of the beliefs of Thing, without any encouragement to act upon them): okay * Saying, in a post to your own journal or in a comment to someone else's post, "Everyone should have a cat. Who's with me in our plan to spread cats everywhere?" (organizing, inciting, or trying to recruit others to do something other than just talk about Thing in their own space): Not Okay, will have penalties ranging from suspension of the entry/comment to suspension of the account entirely based on how many times we've had to talk to the person about it/how much of their account is devoted to it * Commenting to someone else's journal, "FUCK YOU DOG LOVER CATS FOREVER" (contacting someone to harass them on the basis of the commenter's Thingitry): depends on what percentage of the account's comments are Thingitry-based harassment and what aren't, but generally, the first-line solution to getting unwanted comments is to ban the user from contacting you and see if they escalate to inciting others to harass you on their behalf (in which case, see previous step) or create alternate accounts to get around the ban (which is a straight-up ToS violation, although we usually deliver one warning before starting to suspend accounts over it).
Does that make sense? Basically, and for a lot of the same reasons we allow "pornography" that crosses some people's lines of That Is Not Okay, we don't try to judge beliefs, we look at what people are doing or advocating with those beliefs. It's still a fuzzy line sometimes, but we've taken out as much of the fuzz as we can.
(All of the above is theoretical, btw. In practice, we don't have anything to the best of my knowledge that even comes close to the line, aside from one non-English-language country-specific community that reflects the local prejudices of the country in question and is still pretty far off from anything like the major Nazi infestation problem Twitter and Tumblr have. But after having been doing online ToS enforcement for almost twenty years oh GOD I feel old I've learned that it's best to have your content policies set up to cover the worst-case scenarios ahead of time and communicate them to your users as clearly and as often as you can, so that people can make their own decisions about whether your site's content enforcement policies mesh with what they want from a site.)
If you want to read more, there's a whole bunch about our content enforcement philosophy in this older news post and in comment replies to people asking for clarification. (Oh, and porn bots fall under the category of "spam and the like" in my statements above: any account that exists only to promote or advertise something, whether that's porn site or money making scheme or even their dentistry practice or whatever, is suspend-on-sight.)
no subject
The distinction we use in cases like that is really subtle, and sometimes people misinterpret it as "they support Nazis" or "they support pedophiles" (for the record, we are neither pro-Nazi nor pro-pedophile). Fundamentally, it boils down to whether you're harassing people or are trying to recruit people to join you in horrible things or act on your beliefs: "advocating or inciting", for the most part. It'll probably be clearer if I give you a sliding scale of Okay vs Not Okay. I'll use "being a cat owner" as the example, not to trivialize the sort of beliefs that neo-Nazis espouse but because nobody wants to keep hearing about Nazis. (Fucking Nazis.) This applies to anything like hate crimes or sex crimes or what-have-you, but I don't particularly want to keep talking about those, either.
* Saying, in a journal post or in your profile, that you're a cat owner (self-identifying as a Thing): okay
* Saying, in a post to your own journal, stuff like "I don't know why people look down on cat owners so much; they're right, life is better with fur everywhere" (agreeing with some/all of the beliefs of Thing, without any encouragement to act upon them): okay
* Saying, in a post to your own journal or in a comment to someone else's post, "Everyone should have a cat. Who's with me in our plan to spread cats everywhere?" (organizing, inciting, or trying to recruit others to do something other than just talk about Thing in their own space): Not Okay, will have penalties ranging from suspension of the entry/comment to suspension of the account entirely based on how many times we've had to talk to the person about it/how much of their account is devoted to it
* Commenting to someone else's journal, "FUCK YOU DOG LOVER CATS FOREVER" (contacting someone to harass them on the basis of the commenter's Thingitry): depends on what percentage of the account's comments are Thingitry-based harassment and what aren't, but generally, the first-line solution to getting unwanted comments is to ban the user from contacting you and see if they escalate to inciting others to harass you on their behalf (in which case, see previous step) or create alternate accounts to get around the ban (which is a straight-up ToS violation, although we usually deliver one warning before starting to suspend accounts over it).
Does that make sense? Basically, and for a lot of the same reasons we allow "pornography" that crosses some people's lines of That Is Not Okay, we don't try to judge beliefs, we look at what people are doing or advocating with those beliefs. It's still a fuzzy line sometimes, but we've taken out as much of the fuzz as we can.
(All of the above is theoretical, btw. In practice, we don't have anything to the best of my knowledge that even comes close to the line, aside from one non-English-language country-specific community that reflects the local prejudices of the country in question and is still pretty far off from anything like the major Nazi infestation problem Twitter and Tumblr have. But after having been doing online ToS enforcement for almost twenty years oh GOD I feel old I've learned that it's best to have your content policies set up to cover the worst-case scenarios ahead of time and communicate them to your users as clearly and as often as you can, so that people can make their own decisions about whether your site's content enforcement policies mesh with what they want from a site.)
If you want to read more, there's a whole bunch about our content enforcement philosophy in this older news post and in comment replies to people asking for clarification. (Oh, and porn bots fall under the category of "spam and the like" in my statements above: any account that exists only to promote or advertise something, whether that's porn site or money making scheme or even their dentistry practice or whatever, is suspend-on-sight.)