Unlike the growing masses of anti-free-speech bigots around the world who subscribe to censorship on their terms because they don’t want people to say anything negative about them, we believe that free speech is inherently important. People should bend over backwards to allow it, even if it upsets some of them. They should also grow out of their hypersensitivity, too.

FreeJabber is here to provide a place where people can talk freely about what’s on their mind and to do it anonymously.

Why anonymously? Even in supposedly free nations like the USA, people are cyber-stalked by their opponents (co-workers, ex-spouses, dirty cops, nasty neighbors, etc.) making it really hard to discuss certain topics.

It’s especially risky if they have real names, real email accounts, or anything resembling them attached to their posts.

It is upsetting to be discussing something important anonymously, not naming names, and getting some entertaining or useful responses only to find yourself hauled into court being accused of harassment, defamation, or some other accusation that will cost thousands of dollars of attorney fees to overcome just because some overly sensitive psychopath is upset with you for talking about his or her moral turpitude that has caused you much aggravation.

Our goal is that people will stay anonymous unless for some reason they don’t want to do so. We’d suggest you stay anonymous as you possibly can and support your right to do so.

Of course, if we’re subpoenaed to provide information, we’ll have to comply.

That’s why we’d suggest if you’re really intent on being anonymous, you use our site with tools that will help keep your IP address hidden. We hope that you’ll learn to use the site so that nobody, including some spook attempting to watch your every move, will be able to prove it was you who leaked some bit of information that will piss off a politician, judge, cop, or other person who can wreak vengeance upon you.

If you’re going to discuss some really controversial or scandalous topic, you may want to go all-out with such tools. One of them we’d suggest you investigate is the TOR Project that provides the means to anonymously reroute Internet traffic to protect your IP address. This was created by the US Government (hardly trustworthy folks, but here they did finally do something useful with American tax dollars!) to enable people to securely use the Internet without revealing their IP address and the contents of their communications.

We’ll be posting your detected IP address on our pages soon so that you can verify you’re truly anonymous if that’s important to you.

We expect people to exercise some self-control, meaning don’t use the site for criminal activities, terrorism, identity theft, or similar ill-intentioned endeavors.

So long as you keep away from criminality, you’ll not be overpowered by censorship so common on other web sites.

What do we mean by censorship? For starters, we’re adamantly opposed to Craigslist’s practice of blowing away whole discussion threads simply because a few people degrade into bickering or post negative ratings because they don’t like your opinions.

We will not take down posts simply because they are unpopular.

We’re also ticked off at the inability to post links on many sites. If you care about a topic, you probably have some links you’d like to share with other people. We won’t get in the way of that unless it clearly crosses the boundaries of criminality.

We do intend to delete spam. We’ve read enough about Viagra and other drugs for a lifetime and don’t want to see the site polluted with advertising for yet another black market source for phony drugs.

Initial comments by a new poster will be moderated. This will help us keep spam out and criminals away.

Remember that even when free speech is allowed as we intend to do, being an ass about it isn’t likely to win you any points in a debate.