Bear with me. I’m angry but I’m trying to be rational.
First, since most of the people who ever read my blog don’t know much about Livejournal, LJ is a free blogging site that allows for users to pay in order get more features. It is also quite possibly the largest gathering place for those involved in a fandom anywhere on the web. As a result, there are many people who use their LJs to keep track of friends, fiction, and news, and a lot of people even use it to archive their own works.
Recently, LiveJournal, at the request of a group called Warriors of Innocence, banned hundreds of LJs in order to get rid of child molests and such. That’s a good thing, right?
In this case, no.
First, a warning. I’m not linking to the Warriors of Innocence website for three reasons. One: They do trackbacks, and I have no desire for them to find my blog. Two: Their site is filled with spyware. DO NOT VISIT UNLESS YOU WANT YOUR COMPUTER INFECTED. Three: If the spyware doesn’t give away some clues about what that site is about, I’ll explain. Although it seems to be site concerned with keeping children safe on the internet, a little research shows that the person running the site is a radical, extremist fundamentalist. I’m talking, anti-homosexual, anti-anything other than Christian, “lets go and better the world by protesting at soldier’s funerals” kind of fundamentalist. Yeah. Problem.
LiveJournal has a feature in which a user can list interests! Normally, you would think that interests such as “incest”, “pedophilia”, and “rape” would be bad as interests. Not always so; many survivor support communities use those words as interests so that other survivors can find them. Livejournal, at the encouragement of Warriors of Innocence, began banning LJs with objectionable content.
Except they didn’t actually look at the content. They banned mostly by looking at the keywords.
Sure, a lot of real pedophilia journals and such were found. However, many more communities and journals were also found and deleted or permanently suspended. Among those hit include:
- Fanfiction communities
- Erotica communities and journals
- Survivor support communities and journals
- Roleplaying journals. (Note, while the connotation outside the internet pushes roleplaying as sexual, for the most part, roleplaying on LJ is not sexual. Most RPs even ban any form of sex, as it’s mostly teens roleplaying as book, tv, game, anime, and movie characters. Roleplaying is not about playing out someone’s sexual fantasy, as the misconception seems to be.)
- Communities discussing literature. To be specific, Lolita.
- A few fashion communities; Gothic Lolita is a style of clothing in Asia. It’s quite cute, in my opinion.
It isn’t just a few journals. It’s several hundred, and the list seems to be growing, although deletions may have cooled down by now. (It’s difficult to judge, since there is new information coming in all the time.)
What we, the userbase, is upset about is not the fact that LJ is trying to take steps to protect the children, but rather that they are going about in a completely irresponsible and idiotic way that censors a good portion of the userbase.
Rumors have it that it’s spreading to hunting any type of erotica or violent fiction as well. For the most part, it seems to have slowed down, no doubt thanks to the huge backlash of negative commentary aimed at SixApart, the company that owns LJ. I mean, when an anti-predator organization slams LJ for their idiotic response to online predators, you know they’ve done something big.
Anyway, links with more information for those interested.
http://roaring.livejournal.com/70304.html
http://www.greatestjournal.com/community/fandomtossed/1338.html
http://fandomtossed.greatestjournal.com/
http://news.com.com/Mass+deletion+sparks+LiveJournal+revolt/2100-1025_3-6187619.html?tag=item
http://catrinella.livejournal.com/151812.html
EDIT: LJ issued a formal apology to its userbase. Frankly, I’m happy as they’ve acknowledge the issues that were bugging me. Others, it seems, aren’t as much.