The Wonderful World of the Gundampilotspaz

 (As a warning, this is going to be an abnormally long post with the majority of the linked to article quoted. I think this subject is important as it deals with the freedom of speech on the internet, and it should be given special treatment.)

 

Thousands of LiveJournal customers are rebelling against the company’s recent decision to censor hundreds of sex-themed discussion groups, a broad swath that has led to the removal of literary critiques and fan-written fiction about Harry Potter.

LiveJournal, which is owned by San Francisco-based Six Apart, confirmed Wednesday that it deleted around 500 journals this week in hopes of better “protecting children.” It said the deletion was prompted by activist groups, including one called Warriors for Innocence that claims to track sites promoting pedophilia, the sexual abuse of minors, and other illegal activities.

“We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn’t think met our policies and didn’t think they were appropriate to have up,” Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart, said in a telephone interview. The site boasts about 13 million journals.

Some deleted LiveJournal communities went by names like childlove and little_children (a community permits multiple LiveJournal users to post entries, while an individual account is limited to one user). Others, however, broadly fall into the category of science fiction, fantasy or user-written “fandom” stories–and it is those that have sparked the outcry.

So this group goes to livejournal and points out these communities and journals… and livejournal fearing the backlash this might cause panics and goes on a rampage to try and get rid of all these journals.

Clearly, they feared the backlash. They make it sound as if the y didn’t know what was happening on their own side…. that’s just silly. They had knowledge before this and they were bullied by these so called “Warriors of Innocence”.

“As a queer, feminist writer who explores the darker aspects of human nature, many of my stories deal with incest, rape and child molestation,” a LiveJournal member named “bitterfig” wrote. “As such, I belonged to and contributed to several of the communities which have been suspended and frankly I’m pretty offended. I don’t like being lumped in with rapists and pedophiles and other ‘monsters on the Web.’”

Practically any attempt to sort works of fiction into tidy piles of acceptable and unacceptable material, of course, is likely to invite controversy. Works by noted authors such as James Joyce, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs have been lauded as masterpieces–and at other times prosecuted as obscene.

What has outraged the LiveJournal protesters is that the purging of discussions and accounts went far beyond what they say was necessary to target pedophilia. One post noted that two journals were deleted on the grounds that “they in some way encouraged illegal behavior” even though the accounts belonged to clearly labeled fictional characters in a role-playing game. Another deleted community was reportedly home to Spanish-language discussions of Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel Lolita.

There are some  of groups on livejournal that seem to support pedophilia… but they are few and spread between tons of fandom.

One LiveJournal user named “omen-chan” acknowledged once being victimized by a pedophile, but nevertheless warned that the mass deletion went too far. “Pedophilia is disgusting, and I can understand deleting these,” the post said. “However ’shouta’ is simply fiction written about two underaged boys getting together, usually in a non-graphic way. There is absolutely nothing illegal in that. Fourteen-year-olds hook up together all the time. It’s called high school.”

One now-deleted group called “pornish_pixies” focused on fan-written fiction, frequently sexually explicit, about characters in the Harry Potter novels. “The distinction between fiction and non-fiction could not be made any clearer in a place like the Harry Potter fandom, and this oversteps the boundaries that the LiveJournal abuse team has,” said a pornish_pixies member who identified herself as Maria in an e-mail. (A related group, “erotic_elves,” has survived the purge.)

As a big anime geek I know girls who are absolutely obsessed with Shorta. Is this a bad thing? No, it’s fiction done for enjoyment not out of a desire to harm children. While I don’t see the appeal in it, I can’t defend any action that would call such fiction vulgar of illegal.

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.”

Again, we can point directly to the group “Warriors for Innocence” involvement and livejournal pointing at their terms of service to attempt to justify them bowing to an outside group. This really is a sickening practice by any organization but as a service that offers Blogs; a generally free medium; it’s sickening.

Then Berkowitz talks about non-existent legal issues, ones that the Cnet article debunks right away, and goes on to talk about the community “They want to build.” Claiming that a website has any control of the community that develops around it is insane, just with the Digg case earlier this month, if you piss off your community then you are going to get backlash. There are people dependent on your service and they don’t really care what you want; nor should you care what you want when a massive group of people demand things a certain way. What serious business would say no?

Hopefully this and the digg situation is going to wake these sites up and have them realize that the community is so very important to their existence. Right now I’m not very pleased with Livejournal and regert spending what little money there that I have during my time there. I guess it’s time to move my personal journal to Vox.

Source: Cnet 

Tags: Thought crime, free speech, internet, news, technology //