Beltway Area Indymedia

Beltway Area Indymedia Policy

People are in the collective if they contact the collective to express an interest in being involved in the collective and nobody objects at or before the next meeting. In the event of an objection, the collective member(s) objecting must provide, to the collective mailing list, their reasons for the objection and how those reasons relate to the draft indymedia principles of unity.

The center column on the front page will contain only local, Beltway Area stories, plus any global story that has been promoted to the main page. Anyone may propose a global story for promotion by emailing beltway-imc at lists dot indymedia dot org. One second from a collective member will result in it being promoted to the front page - but if there is a block from any collective member, it will be demoted.

Collective members may hide articles from the newswire as the editorial policy allows, but if there is an objection to the hiding from another collective member than it shall be unhidden until consensus is reached.

Beltway area collective reserves the right to hide posts that:

• the poster requests be hidden.
• have been posted by someone pretending to be someone else.
• have been posted by someone who claims affiliation with a group with which he or she is not affiliated. (In cases where the editoral collective suspects someone is impersonating another individual, we will try to contact the person suspected of being
  impersonated.)
• are duplicate posts
• lack content other than advertisement for a business or website.
• are "garbage" (have no real readable content).
• are comments to a post that do not pertain to the original post.
• contain information that is not true and could cause confusion about an event in the future (time/place/cancellation etc)
• have no relevance whatsoever to our area (ie., an IMC meeting in Germany).
• advocate specific criminal activity with a specific time/place/manner.
• are direct threats.
• posts that include ONLY a link or ONLY a cut and pasted story from another website.
• all comments off topic from the original story.
• promote racism, sexism, or homophobia. (Clarification made 09/18/2004)