Oy vey.

[changeyourstars8]

I don't want to have to try and move over to Greatest Journal, darnit.

But if something doesn't get done about this situation, I might.

Basically, the gist is that some "but what about the chiiiiildrun?!!?" professional freakout group started reporting the livejournals of people who had 'questionable interests', related to things like incest, pedophilia, etc. Several communities/lj accounts have been permanently suspended. Including a group focused on discussion of the novel Lolita, some ljs listing "lolita" (as in, a type of clothing fashion) in their interests and, most infuriating of all, some rape/incest survivor communities.

As of right now, there's not a statement from livejournal about all this, though I am hoping for a reasonable one soon. I've never had a problem with this place before-- when we had that blackout of service, they even gave paid users an extension on their time to make up for what was lost. Maybe this will be handled equally well. *fingers crossed*

ficangel also has a lot of information up about what's going on, what can be done about it, etc.

And, an absolutely classic response to the freakout group and their "OMG anything having to do with incest/bad topics must be banned immediately!!!" twittering: Right here.

ETA: Statement and apology.

I'm still unthrilled that this happened, but at least the journals are not completely gone, and if there is an appropriate follow-through and the people who are clearly not involved in any wrongdoing get their journals back, then I'm willing to chalk it up to a huge 'oops' and be done with it.

Comments

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

Including a group focused on discussion of the novel Lolita, some ljs listing "lolita" (as in, a type of clothing fashion) in their interests and, most infuriating of all, some rape/incest survivor communities.
See, I totally don't care if they ban the actual, you know, promotion and glorification of incest and pedophilia because that could easily fall under "obscene," but this sort of collateral damage is pretty irritating.

[allthelivesofme.livejournal.com]

Oh, exactly. I am all for lj cooperating with actual law enforcement agencies to set up sting operations to zap the people who have either hurt children or are setting up plans to do so. But all this has done is freak out a lot of innocent people and make it harder for the guilty ones to be caught. Not a good handling of the situation at all, and I'm really hoping that'll turn around.

[shadefell.livejournal.com]

I'm tentatively moving to blogger, and might set up wordpad on my own personal webspace that my portfolio etc is on.

LJ has so many features that I love, and so many of my friends (including IRL friends) use it, but damn.

[allthelivesofme.livejournal.com]

I know . . . I don't have any of the current buzzwords in my interests, so I'm not too worried about getting deleted, but that's the thing-- current buzzwords. If they set this precedent, what's going to cause a mass deletion next time?

[shadefell.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Part of me is all "Oh, don't be so freakin' paranoid!" but another part is "well, you write about stuff! Words! You use them! They are saying that certain words are not acceptable no matter what the context is!" And that's just... it hurts me to limit myself that way.

[jediknightmuse.livejournal.com]

I don't want to move to GJ either. But if a good percentage of all of my LJ friends move over there, I guess I'll have to. I have a GJ set up but I haven't used it like...at all. The communities aren't nearly as good over there. x.x Half of the writing ones are from like...2003.

[allthelivesofme.livejournal.com]

Ouch.

And yeah, I don't want to have to move, which is why I'm going to give lj every chance to explain themselves and fix things.

[jediknightmuse.livejournal.com]

Same here. I hope they make a post about it REAL soon. Making us wait forever isn't going to make things much better.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't worry about it. Ultimately, I think LJ will do the right thing.

[allthelivesofme.livejournal.com]

:-) Which is why I haven't jumped in with the group of people who are on the lj news latest post saying that they're definitely not going to renew, or that they'll never get a permanent account now, etc. I don't like one bit that this has happened, but fortunately right now it's still in the realm of "can be fixed".

[particle-person.livejournal.com]

Some people got official responses from the LJ Abuse team (but not Six Apart) saying that Six Apart gave them no discretion at all. Six Apart apparently determined that any journals with Interests that are possibly pedophiliac would make LJ liable, because Interests perform a search function that allows people to gather. It seems to be very specifically the Interests that they care about, because of the searching ability. Ultimately, I think this is a reaction to the state Attorney Generals that are seeking information on MySpace users right now. Six Apart is afraid they'll be next. I think this is pretty much the definition of a "chilling effect."

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

Yep, you can read a letter here (http://ataniell93.livejournal.com/818441.html).

After I read that, apparently, "beating people up" is an actionable interest, I edited my interests to be "legal car chases" and legal explosions."