I don't want to target LJ

[lobelia321]

More on the suspension of LJ accounts"

ancarett has posted a <call to ring up LJ and tell them what we think about their recent suspension of LJ accounts. I like the idea of getting in touch and finding out what's going on and finding out policy and getting someone to be accountable. But I don't like the idea of targetting the wrong guys.

I love LJ. And I think it is a great pity to turn on the wrong people. LJ's TOS clearly state that they can suspend an account at any time without warning. We agreed to that when we signed up. And LJ does not like suspending accounts. They would never have suspended these particular slashy accounts if their noses had not been rubbed in it by those external groups who complained. Then they are legally obliged to.

synecdochic provided an excellent explanation of the TOS last week. This was in the context of the fanlib debate but it is also insightful about the legal reasoning behind LJ's own TOS. The TOS in fact protect our content, as far as I can tell. And, of course, they protect LiveJournal from having to be responsible for what users post.

I can't get annoyed at LiveJournal for bowing down to legal pressures not of their own making. I can only get annoyed at those idiotic people out there who have nothing better to do than ferret out these things. On the other hand, there were what seem to be genuine child porn sites among those banned LJ comms and I have to agree with their suspension.

I'm wondering, then, how to protect our own content. It was easier in the pre-internet days (I guess -- I wasn't part of fandom then!) because you just xeroxed stuff in your own back room and sent it in sealed neutral envelopes to specific people. Now, any old feeble-minded Tom, Dick and Henrietta can poke their beady eye in and choke on their own bile.

So is flocking enough to protect ourselves? As far as I understand it, the legal issues have not been tested and it's enough to stay under the radar. Is that right?

ETA icarusancalion just pointed me to some interesting pages on the Warriors for Innocence site. Warning: You may feel defiled after clicking on these links. I did.

20 January 2006

6 April 2007

It's not know whether it was this group that caused the current spate of suspensions. I have to say I am impressed with LJ's responses on 6 April.

ETA: femmequixotic posted a rational, calm response to the fact that the fannish HP comm pornish_pixies was suspended. And she is very directly affected (I think she was a mod?).

Comments

[bexone.livejournal.com]

I'm tired of giving LJ a pass because "it's all because SixApart is a big corporation, it's not really their fault blah blah." They chose to sell the damn business, and from all appearances they've done a crap job of standing up for their users since then. Any corporate lawyer worth their goddamn salt would've told them that they were going about this whole thing ass-backwards and may have opened themselves up to worse problems. Of course, any corporate lawyer worth their salt would have told them to overhaul the LJ Abuse process a damn long time ago, too.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I know very little about law although I find it an interesting field. What is wrong with the LJ abuse process, in your view, then? And how have LJ gone about this thing backwards? How do other blog providers go about this?

[bexone.livejournal.com]

The LJ Abuse team has too much power and too little corporate oversight. It always has, but it was a lot easier to forgive when LJ was a labor of love rather than a for-profit business. As for how they should have gone about it, caving to vigilantes is always a lousy idea; so is the continued radio silence from the PR arm of LJ/6A. When the threat was brought, LJ should have passed the information on to law enforcement and let LE tell them which journals were questionable and gone from there. Doing it by looking at interests lists themselves -- even with blanket suspensions -- may have opened them up to vulnerability under the Communications Decency Act.

Basically, blog providers who want to stay in business get all their users to electronically "sign" the TOS and then do their best to have no idea what actual content is being posted, until and unless law enforcement points it out to them. As a hosting service with no control over the content of their servers, they're safe from the CDA -- but if it can be proved that they "knew" and "did nothing" they can be charged.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I'm still forgiving LJ because they give me something I love for absolute free. I do have a paid account but I've had unpaid in the past and the service is the same (minus a few userpics). I am too grateful for their five years of wonderfulness to give up on them after one incident on which I haven't heard their side of it yet. So: benefit of the doubt. :-)

[bexone.livejournal.com]

The thing that's kind of making my head catch fire about all this isn't the fannish journals, or even the Lolita reading comm -- as patently stupid as it was to suspend that -- it's that incest survivors and survivor comms -- people who had the strength to get up and talk about what happened to them and work towards it not happening to anyone else -- got nailed as well.

[fearlessdiva.livejournal.com]

My personal motto is: never underestimate the power of corporate stupidity, nor the stupidity of the human race in general.

I'm just sort of shrugging and shaking my head at this. It was bound to happen eventually, and LJ was bound to handle it in the stupidest way possible. Everyone will be freaked out for a while, and some people will migrate over to the fan-run sites and/or flock, which is probably a good idea for the chan people anyway given the hysteria over child porn. And eventually everyone will settle down again and go on their merry little ways.

The biggest beneficiary of this is, as others have noted, Fan Lib, who got a get out of the hotseat free card.

[bexone.livejournal.com]

I think I'm just tired of having to refrain from kicking LJ right in the stupid. (...hey. I'm going up to SF today anyway. It's getting more and more tempting to go make a scene at the office and see what happens.)

And, yeah, it will eventually blow over, but I don't expect that LJ will ever feel like a welcoming space for those survivors again, which is. I'm trying to hold on to karma, you know, and believe that the WfI vigilantes will someday fully understand what it is they've done, but sometimes that's just too slow.

The biggest beneficiary of this is, as others have noted, Fan Lib, who got a get out of the hotseat free card.

Don't worry, stewardess has no intention of letting them off the hook. *G* You know, you could spin a pretty convincing conspiracy theory out of that...

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to know that these things peter out. Whenever a kerfuffle erupts, I always think 'omg this is it'. And then things go on as per usual. :-)

[fearlessdiva.livejournal.com]

(Sorry about the double post - needed to clarify that last sentence.)

What pisses me off, and what is getting lost in much of the discussion, is that writing *fiction* about chan/incest is NOT illegal. So in fact, dumping the comms in question is dubious in terms of LJ's TOS. The legal questions in terms of this issue have in fact been tested, and writing fiction about illegal activities is perfectly legal. Nevertheless, I doubt very much that those comms are coming back. LJ has no intention of appearing to condone child porn in any way, and if that means deleting a discussion comm about Nabokov's Lolita, then so be it. If they're not protecting book discussion groups, you can be sure that pornish pixies (who are clearly a bunch of godless perverts - long may their perv flags fly) is out of luck.

But it seems to me that this isn't the first wave of a new attack against general perversion. It's part of the hysteria around child porn and the internet specifically, and it's coming from people outside the community who don't understand the context or the difference between writing fiction about something and committing a crime. If you cull your interests in such a way that such people can't find you, you'll be fine. I don't think you'd even really need to flock. They're not reading things at random, they're just dragging nets through interest searches, looking specifically for child-oriented sexual material, not generalized kinks or homosexually oriented material.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is what came out in the recent debates of last week, isn't it: the fiction part is perfectly legal (in the US, it seems, anyway; I don't know the laws of all the other countries LJ gets beamed into; I would presume the UK, too, and most of Europe but, erm, Yemen??) I do think it is good that the real child porn sites were suspended; I was shocked to discover that such comms even existed on LJ.

[msilverstar]

If you're interested in the legal issues, fandom_lawyers is a great place to read.