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Thousands of LiveJournal customers are rebelling against the company's recent decision to censor hundreds of sex-themed discussion groups, a broad swath that has led to the removal of literary critiques and fan-written fiction about Harry Potter.
LiveJournal, which is owned by San Francisco-based Six Apart, confirmed Wednesday that it deleted around 500 journals this week in hopes of better "protecting children." It said the deletion was prompted by activist groups, including one called Warriors for Innocence that claims to track sites promoting pedophilia, the sexual abuse of minors, and other illegal activities.
"We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up," Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart, said in a telephone interview. The site boasts about 13 million journals.
Some deleted LiveJournal communities went by names like childlove and little_children (a community permits multiple LiveJournal users to post entries, while an individual account is limited to one user). Others, however, broadly fall into the category of science fiction, fantasy or user-written "fandom" stories--and it is those that have sparked the outcry.
"As a queer, feminist writer who explores the darker aspects of human nature, many of my stories deal with incest, rape and child molestation," a LiveJournal member named "bitterfig" wrote. "As such, I belonged to and contributed to several of the communities which have been suspended and frankly I'm pretty offended. I don't like being lumped in with rapists and pedophiles and other 'monsters on the Web.'"
Practically any attempt to sort works of fiction into tidy piles of acceptable and unacceptable material, of course, is likely to invite controversy. Works by noted authors such as James Joyce, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs have been lauded as masterpieces--and at other times prosecuted as obscene.
What has outraged the LiveJournal protesters is that the purging of discussions and accounts went far beyond what they say was necessary to target pedophilia. One post noted that two journals were deleted on the grounds that "they in some way encouraged illegal behavior" even though the accounts belonged to clearly labeled fictional characters in a role-playing game. Another deleted community was reportedly home to Spanish-language discussions of Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita.
Complicating matters is the fact that the science fiction and fantasy communities have long enjoyed amateur fiction about well-known characters--think Buffy the Vampire Slayer or pretty much anyone from the Star Trek universe. Some of those stories are parodies; others involve sex. A related genre includes "shota" or "shouta," which generally refers to depictions of romantic relationships between teenage boys or between an adult and an underage boy. (One user quipped: "Fandom is not about porn any more than the gay rights movement is about Teletubbies.")
One LiveJournal user named "omen-chan" acknowledged once being victimized by a pedophile, but nevertheless warned that the mass deletion went too far. "Pedophilia is disgusting, and I can understand deleting these," the post said. "However 'shouta' is simply fiction written about two underaged boys getting together, usually in a non-graphic way. There is absolutely nothing illegal in that. Fourteen-year-olds hook up together all the time. It's called high school."
One now-deleted group called "pornish_pixies" focused on fan-written fiction, frequently sexually explicit, about characters in the Harry Potter novels. "The distinction between fiction and non-fiction could not be made any clearer in a place like the Harry Potter fandom, and this oversteps the boundaries that the LiveJournal abuse team has," said a pornish_pixies member who identified herself as Maria in an e-mail. (A related group, "erotic_elves," has survived the purge.)
For its part, LiveJournal's abuse staff has defended pulling the plug on the communities by saying: "Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk." That led one user, "femmequixotic," to reply: "I list 'gay marriage' among my interests--that is illegal in my state. With this wording my journal could be deleted, without warning, for the fact that I support equal rights of marriage for all."
See more CNET content tagged:
LiveJournal,
Six Apart Ltd.,
journal,
fiction,
deletion
Either you did a **** poor job of cleaning house or they're lying.
Livejournal are making every possible move; from
calling Jane, head of PR at her desk (yes she is
answering calls) to writing the ACLU and even
spreading it to those who may not have heard to
being away for school, etc.
This is a horrible mess and I am proud and happy
to be a part of the solution and have no
intentions of backing down. If this is where it
starts, where will it end?
~The Original Subversive Submissive
http://asexualdreamer.livejournal.com
http://community.livejournal.com/whydoesljcensor/
livejournal and sixapart and she has promised a
statement in the next 1 1/2 - 2 hours. For a
transcript of the conversation, please
see:http://community.livejournal.com/whydoesljcensor/8158.html?style=mine
Usually cases of internet predators, such as those that could possibly (and are definitely) lurking on blogging sites such as LJ, are taken seriously and quietly. By LJ and WFI announcing what was going on, they basically shouted 'ready or not here I come' before going in. All that is going to do is tip off these people to go further underground and **** the innocent people off.
And where are the law officials in all of this? If you ask me, this isn't being handled right at all.
Something is up with WFI. Why aren't we looking into the illegitimacy of that?
How thick and arrogant can she be??
http://rc3.org/2005/01/entry_6699.php
"On the other hand, Danga was a casually-run company that existed to keep Livejournal running, and its founders cupboards full. SixApart is a venture-capital backed organisation that has a much more concrete appreciation of the concept of return on investment. It?s inevitable that at some point, someone will look at the statistics and realise that fewer than one in fifty Livejournal users are actually contributing to its upkeep."
Contrast with
"What would be more interesting is why they're NOT buying LiveJournal: they're not buying the site to spam you, screw you, destroy the community, or convert you en massé to their other paid services. They just want to double our efforts and have a part in all types of blogging."
http://news.livejournal.com/82926.html
So... Where *are* people going with their fandoms? Does Journalfen cost money? :/
In other words, if you can't shell out the cash you need to know someone.
First there is my personal account with my run ins for LJ first claiming they could do nothing about supposed pedophiles, because there was no proof. Mine was not the only case.
Then, it is apparent that people who have been banned without warning are now getting copy-and-paste statements from LJ stating they did this because they showed interested in illegal content.
More in my post, which is, again, here: http://roaring.livejournal.com/70304.html
current membership: 9746
complaining to Six Apart for some time with no results, so she
screen capped companies ads [on LJ] being displayed next to the
objectionable content, and sent those caps to the companies
with her complaints. Those companies are then purported to
have complained to Six Apart and threatened to pull their
advertising.
That being the case, it's pretty obvious what Six Apart's other
concerns beyond legality are. Advertising has bought policy,
exactly like they promised it wouldn't when they implemented it.
But hey, they promised not to implement ads, too. They don't
care about the user "revolution," because users aren't paying the
bills like advertisers are.
Oh, and it's 10,809 now. (And I type fast.)
I'm an author in the USA, and I've had stories published in mass market magazines with incest between twins. It's not illegal.
Pornish_pixies has been around for almost 5 years. It had almost 3,000 watchers and a limited membership. The membership was invitation only and included the best of the best in fanwork authors. Some of them do real work elsewhere. And the funny part of it is... Only about 10% of all the fiction and art on the journal was incestuous or featured characters under the age of 15. It was a massive gathering of the best artists in fiction in the fandom and it should be immediately reinstated. It didn't fall under the pedophilia groups, some of which were sort-of-rightfully deleted. But has Six Apart done a single damn thing about it?
Of course not.
About a week ago, LiveJournal suddenly disabled my account claiming I had ignored a warning from them about this post I had made a year ago. I checked and re-checked and found no such previous warning sent, they simply disabled my account.
They said that I had violated the individual's privacy by giving his name and linking to a website containing even more private information. The offending website was the website of the courthouse he was tried and convicted in.
They continually refused to answer my questions as to why LiveJournal wants to protect violent felons from their own public records.
I thought this was some random thing, but reading this, it may have been part of this broader campaign to delete websites. If so, for LiveJournal to claim its trying to prevent illegal conduct is complete and utter hogwash ... in my case they were trying to help a convicted, violent felon get away from his own public record!
After a couple hundred suspensions and two days of panic and confusion among the LiveJournal userbase, I am pleased to see that you have finally deigned to comment on this fracas. Admittedly, your first comments are directed to CNet rather than to your userbase, but you commented nevertheless. You had your chance to explain yourself, to apologize to the users whose journals contained no illegal content and were wrongly suspended. But you chose not to. Instead, you had this to say:
Those are your words. They are printed in bold red type on the CNet article. With those words, you have made it clear that the responsibility for this debacle lies squarely with you—not with the nutters at Warriors for Innocence, whatever their involvement, but with you. And your userbase is going to remember them for a very long time, with any luck. After the LiveJournal abuse team has spent all day telling the owners of suspended journals and communities that the decision to suspend them based strictly on items in their interest lists was a move made to protect LiveJournal from liability, you contradicted them and disclosed that the actions taken against those journals were "not based on pure legal issues." No, they were based on the loftier goals of what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not.
Who is "we," Mr. Berkowitz? Do you really mean just "you"? Do you mean SixApart's board of directors? The administrators and support team of LiveJournal? Or is it really your advertisers you mean? One thing is for sure, Mr. Berkowitz—you are not speaking for me.
So, whomever you're speaking for, you say that you're doing this on the basis of what community we want to build? You've suddenly had a new epiphany about what community we want to build? You changed your mind remarkably quickly; what is appropriate within that community now seems to be a rather radical departure from what was appropriate a few months ago. And you've decided to move forward with this new vision of what community we want to build without any announcements on the news page? Without any requests for feedback from the members of said community? Without any warning whatsoever? Overnight, LiveJournal's long-standing commitment to freedom of expression is thrown out, to be replaced with what we think is approprate within that community?
Mr. Berkowitz, arrogant patriarchs since the dawn of history have been making decrees about what community we want to build. They've been dividing the world into what we think is appropriate, and what's not. They've drawn circles of firelight and declared everything beyond the circle the Other, the outcast, the enemy. They've used fear of the enemy to justify the arbitrary strictures they place upon the righteous, to keep the shadows at bay. Only in the modern world, illuminated not by the flickering torches of superstition but by the flourescent lightbulb of reason, have cultures rejected the arrogant patriarch and begun to accept the Other into the light, begun to realize that right and wrong, good and evil are based on a higher truth than simply what we think is appropriate and what's not. The culture of the Internet is the highest realization of that ideal, and LiveJournal was once a brilliant example of that culture. But you, Mr. Berkowitz—you have redrawn the circle and told your users that the shadows—all but a dozen of them, at least—are a thing to be feared. They are not what we think is appropriate.
Look—unlike most people these days, I trust capitalism. When SixApart bought LiveJournal, I trusted it—surely it would just increase the site's access to money and talent, and wouldn't force any kind of change to the core philosophy of the service. When the advertisements began to appear, I trusted it—it's okay to take in enough money to keep the site running and make a decent profit, and they'll be opt-in anyway, right? But today you have violated that trust. Whether it's the influence of your advertisers or your own misguided vision of what community we want to build, you have used your power as owner of LiveJournal to twist it into something it was never meant to be.
Will I leave LiveJournal over this, as so many of your users are now promising to do? No, I will not. Out of love for the friends I have here, and out of respect for the quality of the site—a quality imbued in it by its original creators and owners, not by any subsequent corporate parasites—I will stay. But—if your words today are representative of the direction of the site—I will never buy a paid account. I will never upgrade to a plus account. I will never click on the ads on any other user's journal. I will use it as it was intended to be used—freely, until you decide that my use of it is no longer what we think is appropriate.
But I want to know, Mr. Berkowitz—what is the community we want to build? What is appropriate within that community? Your users deserve more than inane vagaries. They deserve a detailed statement of principles, a new Terms of Service to go with your new vision for what community we want to build. Tell us, Mr. Berkowitz. Will it be a community where people can freely discuss and explore human sexuality in all its forms? Will it be a community where people can freely tell stories about their favorite characters from fandom? Will it be a community where people can express themselves fully and openly, without needing to fear that their identity might not be what we think is appropriate?
Or will this community continue down the road you have set it on today? Will it be a place where users need to self-censor their thoughts, their stories, even their interest lists—just in case they don't match what we think is appropriate? Will it be a place where users are suspended arbitrarily, without warning, without even a standard by which they can know what we think is appropriate and conduct themselves accordingly? Will it be a place where a tiny group of nutters with unpleasant connections can speak a few words to your advertisers, and suddenly what we think is appropriate shifts overnight? Will it be a place like most other places in this world, where only certain words, certain thoughts, certain people are what we think is appropriate, and everything else is cast out into the darkness and called Other?
Tell us, Mr. Berkowitz. The choice is yours. Your users—your customers—are listening.
Mr. Berkowitz,
After a couple hundred suspensions and two days of panic and confusion among the LiveJournal userbase, I am pleased to see that you have finally deigned to comment on this fracas. Admittedly, your first comments are directed to CNet rather than to your userbase, but you commented nevertheless. You had your chance to explain yourself, to apologize to the users whose journals contained no illegal content and were wrongly suspended. But you chose not to. Instead, you had this to say:
Those are your words. They are printed in bold red type on the CNet article. With those words, you have made it clear that the responsibility for this debacle lies squarely with you—not with the nutters at Warriors for Innocence, whatever their involvement, but with you. And your userbase is going to remember them for a very long time, with any luck. After the LiveJournal abuse team has spent all day telling the owners of suspended journals and communities that the decision to suspend them based strictly on items in their interest lists was a move made to protect LiveJournal from liability, you contradicted them and disclosed that the actions taken against those journals were "not based on pure legal issues." No, they were based on the loftier goals of what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not.
Who is "we," Mr. Berkowitz? Do you really mean just "you"? Do you mean SixApart's board of directors? The administrators and support team of LiveJournal? Or is it really your advertisers you mean? One thing is for sure, Mr. Berkowitz—you are not speaking for me.
So, whomever you're speaking for, you say that you're doing this on the basis of what community we want to build? You've suddenly had a new epiphany about what community we want to build? You changed your mind remarkably quickly; what is appropriate within that community now seems to be a rather radical departure from what was appropriate a few months ago. And you've decided to move forward with this new vision of what community we want to build without any announcements on the news page? Without any requests for feedback from the members of said community? Without any warning whatsoever? Overnight, LiveJournal's long-standing commitment to freedom of expression is thrown out, to be replaced with what we think is approprate within that community?
Mr. Berkowitz, arrogant patriarchs since the dawn of history have been making decrees about what community we want to build. They've been dividing the world into what we think is appropriate, and what's not. They've drawn circles of firelight and declared everything beyond the circle the Other, the outcast, the enemy. They've used fear of the enemy to justify the arbitrary strictures they place upon the righteous, to keep the shadows at bay. Only in the modern world, illuminated not by the flickering torches of superstition but by the flourescent lightbulb of reason, have cultures rejected the arrogant patriarch and begun to accept the Other into the light, begun to realize that right and wrong, good and evil are based on a higher truth than simply what we think is appropriate and what's not. The culture of the Internet is the highest realization of that ideal, and LiveJournal was once a brilliant example of that culture. But you, Mr. Berkowitz—you have redrawn the circle and told your users that the shadows—all but a dozen of them, at least—are a thing to be feared. They are not what we think is appropriate.
Look—unlike most people these days, I trust capitalism. When SixApart bought LiveJournal, I trusted it—surely it would just increase the site's access to money and talent, and wouldn't force any kind of change to the core philosophy of the service. When the advertisements began to appear, I trusted it—it's okay to take in enough money to keep the site running and make a decent profit, and they'll be opt-in anyway, right? But today you have violated that trust. Whether it's the influence of your advertisers or your own misguided vision of what community we want to build, you have used your power as owner of LiveJournal to twist it into something it was never meant to be.
Will I leave LiveJournal over this, as so many of your users are now promising to do? No, I will not. Out of love for the friends I have here, and out of respect for the quality of the site—a quality imbued in it by its original creators and owners, not by any subsequent corporate parasites—I will stay. But—if your words today are representative of the direction of the site—I will never buy a paid account. I will never upgrade to a plus account. I will never click on the ads on any other user's journal. I will use it as it was intended to be used—freely, until you decide that my use of it is no longer what we think is appropriate.
But I want to know, Mr. Berkowitz—what is the community we want to build? What is appropriate within that community? Your users deserve more than inane vagaries. They deserve a detailed statement of principles, a new Terms of Service to go with your new vision for what community we want to build. Tell us, Mr. Berkowitz. Will it be a community where people can freely discuss and explore human sexuality in all its forms? Will it be a community where people can freely tell stories about their favorite characters from fandom? Will it be a community where people can express themselves fully and openly, without needing to fear that their identity might not be what we think is appropriate?
Or will this community continue down the road you have set it on today? Will it be a place where users need to self-censor their thoughts, their stories, even their interest lists—just in case they don't match what we think is appropriate? Will it be a place where users are suspended arbitrarily, without warning, without even a standard by which they can know what we think is appropriate and conduct themselves accordingly? Will it be a place where a tiny group of nutters with unpleasant connections can speak a few words to your advertisers, and suddenly what we think is appropriate shifts overnight? Will it be a place like most other places in this world, where only certain words, certain thoughts, certain people are what we think is appropriate, and everything else is cast out into the darkness and called Other?
Tell us, Mr. Berkowitz. The choice is yours. Your users—your customers—are listening.
Of course, I reported his journal to the LJ Abuse Team hoping they would remove him from my journal at least, if not suspend him. But their answer to me was that it's a practice of LJ to allow freedom of speech and as long as he had no pictures of himself depicting the act, I was basically S.O.L. I accepted this, ban_set him from my journal and locked my personal posts.
After hearing about the mass suspensions yesterday I went to my user page to see if he had been suspended finally, and alas, he's still there. Still perverted as ever.
Why would LJ shut down SUPPORT groups but leave this guy to share his twisted fantasies with anyone he chooses? It makes no sense.
"fetishguy5142" is an actual pedophile and child molestor. His interests list alone lists almost all of the "keywords" that LJ has been suspending. This is outrageous!
I have, again, contacted the LJ Abuse Team about this guy and if further action is not taken; I will be leaving LiveJournal.
If LJ wanted to "do the right thing" they would have shut this guy down when it was first brought to their attention; not let him continue on hurting children and preying on the innocent.
- LiveJournal just killed itself.
-
by Maccess
May 30, 2007 8:57 PM PDT
- So long...
-
Reply to this comment
-
Showing 1 of 3 pages (77 Comments)another footnote in the history of the Web.
We understand your aim, but the bot you've used to "clean out" your system, cleaned out many legitimate, and irreplaceable works.
How many people will trust you now with their blogs and postings?