LiveJournal (political)

[rgraham666]

I'm hearing on a Yahoo loop about mass deletions at LiveJournal.

I don't have an account there, but I know some people who do.

Any one affected by this? What's your opinion?

 

[jomar]

I don't have a live journal either. I'm all for weeding out pedophilia and for allowing of age material. Sounds like they made a business decision. Maybe they couldn't absorb the software upgrades (are there any) or lawsuits.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Well, as the moderator of three communities, I have some archiving to get done-- not to mention my own LJ.

The two trigger topics seem to have been Incest and underage sex -- and, probably, popularity. One of mine touches on teen sex although we don't really give ages, and it's fairly obscure, so I imagine we're semi-safe.

That's the practical side of it.

As far as civil rights and such, the internet isn't civil. Every portal, every domain is owned by someone; there are no commons, and people need to remember that. If someone wants to talk genuine pedophilia (AS opposed to harry POtter fanfic, for instance) they need to register a domain and find a host for it and keep it private.

It behoves us all to take care of our shit. Don't assume that LJ will keep your cosmic thoughts safe for posterity, keep an archive somewhere. You can download your LJ (month by month-- groan) by starting from this page; http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml

I bet it's running the servers a good deal tonight! I have logs from 04 onward to download.

 

[rgraham666]

Apparently, this decision has cost them.

They didn't just smack the pedophiles, of which there aren't many, they deleted every thing the 'Warriors of Innocence' fingered. Anything with erotic content at all. Anything that hinted of breaking the law even in fiction. They even clobbered a group discussing Lolita for Christ's sake.

And from what I've heard this business decision has cost them 20,000 paying users, so far.

This was way past dumb.

 

[JamesSD]

On the one hand you have the admirable desire to discourage pedophilia and exploitation of children.

On the other hand, you have the desire for Livejournal to exist as a place for people to express their thoughts and feelings openly.

It sounds like communities were targeted more than individual journals, which is probably for the better. It also sounds like they really were trying to target pedophilia. It ALSO sounds like they made some mistakes, but presumably will fix those.

Their biggest mistake was probably not inviting input from the LJ-community before making the deletions.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I've never seen such a complete and explicit apology from a corporate head;

2007-05-31
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...

 

[TheeGoatPig]

I have a journal there, but I'm not a part of any communities.

I would have been outraged though if I had been affected by this.

But I am not, and they appear to be fixing their mistakes, so I guess all is well. At least they listened to and heard the outcry, fixing what they wrongs, unlike so many other groups that have authority over whatever that just ignore everything that didn't originate in their puny little brains.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I have a journal there, but I'm not a part of any communities.

I would have been outraged though if I had been affected by this.

But I am not, and they appear to be fixing their mistakes, so I guess all is well. At least they listened to and heard the outcry, fixing what they wrongs, unlike so many other groups that have authority over whatever that just ignore everything that didn't originate in their puny little brains.

They deleted personal journals as well as comms.

I was outraged even though I wasn't affected. Because, you know, they could have taken exception to some one of my interests instead. Or yours, Thee.

I am relieved that they are fixing things. Last night, there was no such assurance (and that silence is something else he apologises for).

 

[Stella_Omega]

LJ is completely offline right now-- not too surprising.

 

[TheEarl]

I was outraged too when I first became aware of the furore, but the complete and total apology of this morning has made me feel a lot better about LJ. It was pointed out that there were quite a few users were using their blogs and channels to promote paedophilia and they overreacted, probably using an automated search tool which, among other things, blocked a group that was used for discussion of a particular novel by Vladimir Nabakov. Nothing was permanently deleted and they appear to now be using humans instead of computers to sort things out one by one.

Hopefully the whole thing will settle down.

The Earl