Mass Deletion Leads To LiveJournal Revolt

Green Monkey writes "LiveJournal has been suspending accounts suspected of promoting incest — except that many of them were communities for survivors of abuse and people discussing Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Even after being informed of the problem, LiveJournal apparently refuses to reinstate the banned accounts. LiveJournal's official news blog has filled up with hundreds of complaints protesting the decision, so we could have another Digg-style user rebellion brewing." Update: 05/31 11:50 GMT by KD : strredwolf writes to let us know that in their offical blog LiveJournal admits to botching the suspension, saying "We made a mistake and now we are going to try to fix it."

Comments

"Warriors for Innocence"?

[sehlat]

Apparently it started with a group of professional trolls who call themselves "Warriors for Innocence" and whose website, I am told, is baited with enough spyware and malware to lay waste to a continent. They complained and LiveJournal caved without so much as a whisper of investigation.

Who are this bunch, exactly? Anything like those "family-friendly" folks who complain en masse to the FCC whenever the word "sex" is so much as whispered on the television or radio?

Re:"Warriors for Innocence"?

[seasleepy]

They're even worse than that -- they seem to be buddy-buddy with a lot of hard right wing Christian dominionist type groups. The same community has a bit of peeking through records in an attempt to get some info about the site's servers (and thus location), but it looks like all they came up with is that they're hosted through GoDaddy.

Re:Oh well

[Aerynvala]

It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. Well, actually, some of us are paying for the services.

WTF?

[interiot]

From the LJ abuse team:

We recognize that many people list these types of interests for shock value, as a method of expressing opposition for these illegal activities, or to indicate fictional activity. Unfortunately, the Abuse team does not have any discretion in these cases; if a journal profile contains interests that support illegal activity, we must suspend the journal. Journals, on the other hand, may express or imply interest in illegal activity or express or imply a desire to meet and/or interact with others with similar interests, but only if the journal clearly (1) is in opposition to or condemnation of the illegal activity, (2) does not encourage the illegal activity and (3) is not used in furtherance of any illegal activity.

So now every time mentions something that might be illegal, they have to pause, look at the camera, put on their most convincing "I'm serious now" face, and say "this is fiction, not real life, we're not encouraging anyone do this in real life, and if you do this illegal act, you'll be in big trouble"? Does LJ really expect people to say things like this with a straight face for very long? I mean, yeah, many actual real-life illegal activities are real downers, but when people have to start saying a blurb after things that are almost certainly legal, but they still have to say the blurb so they don't get caught up in suspensions where LJ has "no discretion", then those blurbs aren't going to be something anyone takes seriously, but instead will be an outlet for users to continually mock LJ's policies.

Re:discussing incest is illegal?

[Frogbert]

Just a warning about the above link. The WfI site is loaded with spyware, Firefox only folks.

Six Apart's CEO Speaks Out...

[Valen0]

Repost from http://news.livejournal.com/99159.html ...

Well we really screwed this one up...

For reasons we are still trying to figure out what was supposed to be a well planned attempt to clean up a few journals that were violating LiveJournal's policies that protect minors turned into a total mess. I can only say I'm sorry, explain what we did wrong and what we are doing to correct these problems and explain what we were trying to do but messed up so completely.

What we did wrong;

1) Over the last couple of days we have suspended (not deleted) about 500 journals out of many millions on LJ.
2) It is now clear that in an unfortunate number of cases these journals were suspended for easily correctable problems in their profiles that would then allow them to be reinstated and that this was not communicated to the journal or community owners at all.
3) Further, because of miscommunication these journals were taken down before review could be completed to avoid mistakes.

How we are fixing it.

1) Over the next few hours we will review the journals that were taken down and wherever appropriate we will restore these journals or communities before 12 noon PDT. Sorry it will take that long but we do not want to reinstate true and clear violators of community policy.
2) In some cases Journals that were restored will be asked to clarify their profiles to avoid the appearance that they are soliciting or encouraging illegal activities.
3) Journals that we do not restore will be journals that we are fairly sure are actually intended to encourage activities that put minors at risk but we will review them if requested by their owner to be certain that we did not make a mistake.
4) In cases that we ask owners to clarify their profiles and they fail to do so within 7 days we will suspend their journals again.

So what were we trying to do when we messed up so badly?

As most of you know, LJ has a zero tolerance policy toward content that supports child abuse, pedophilia, or sexual violence. In implementation of this zero tolerance policy there were two issues that made it hard to apply these policies consistently;

Issue one was profiles.

There were a number of profiles that expressed "interest" in activities that most of us would agree put children at risk, notably pedophilia and child rape. Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of "I like x", "I'm in favor of x" or "I support x". As many profiles are the only public part of a private journal and profiles serve partly as an advertisement for people of like interests, it is important that the content of a profile can be evaluated as if it stands alone. If your profile were to express interest in pedophilia with no other content that describes this interest as in helping survivors or protecting children from it we must read the profile as "I like or I support or I'm in favor of it." For this reason we suspended profiles that meet this criteria.

Another issue we needed to deal with was journals that used a thin veneer of fictional or academic interest in events and storylines that include child rape, pedophilia, and similar themes in order to actually promote these activities. While there are stories, essays, and discussions that include discussion of these issues in an effort to understand and prevent them, others use a pretext to promote these activities. It's often very hard to tell the difference. As such, we have suspended reported journals that do not clearly and substantially object to these activities while at the same time portraying them.

We recently received a complaint from outside the community about a number of journals. When we receive such complaints it is our obligation to look into them but it is our sta

Re:Let me be the first to say "incest"

[DavidTC]

Egyptian pharaohs used to marry their own sisters.

To be fair, they didn't actually have sex with their siblings, they just married them because of obscure power-sharing rules and stuff. Both the men and the women in such arrangements had other people to share their (separate) beds.