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May 30, 2007 3:47 PM PDT
Mass deletion sparks LiveJournal revolt
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Legal experts say LiveJournal is clearly not liable for fictional stories and related discussions posted by its users, thanks to a 1996 federal law immunizing Web-based discussion forums from lawsuits. "If the content is otherwise legal, then LiveJournal has no obligation to police its site or remove any legal content it finds," said Eric Goldman, who teaches at the Santa Clara University School of Law.
LiveJournal's terms of service ban "objectionable" content and say any account can be deleted "for any reason." But the company also claims to "provide users with as much freedom of speech as possible."
"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues," countered Six Apart's Berkowitz. "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online)."
Berkowitz said the company would "obviously apologize" to anyone whose journal was deleted in error but added: "That's going to be a very small minority of the sites. I would be shocked if it's more than a dozen."
Some LiveJournal users have taken the abuse department's claim--that discussions of illegal activity must be deleted even if they're fictional--and tried to counter it with examples from literature. One post listed a slew of fictional works including Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (Juliet is 13- or 14-years-old when married), Mary Shelley's Mathilde, Sophocles' Oedipus plays, and It by Stephen King.
Others have tried more creative forms of activism. A "pro-fandom" protest group set up this week already counts 4,468 members. Others are touting GreatestJournal, JournalFen, or InsaneJournal as less-censorial alternatives. A petition to LiveJournal management has appeared, as have groups calling for a online war against the people associated with the Warriors for Innocence group.
Warriors for Innocence did not respond to an e-mail request for comment on Wednesday. But a recent post on the group's Web site replies to the protests by taunting the activists: "Let the caterwauling and complaining continue; LJ has chosen to enforce rules that were already in place for all to see. 'I finally got held accountable, and it's all your fault' won't fly."
CNET News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report.
See more CNET content tagged:
LiveJournal,
Six Apart Ltd.,
fiction,
journal,
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
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? :/
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.
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.
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.
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by Maccess
May 30, 2007 8:57 PM PDT
- So long...
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See all 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?