Mass Deletion Leads To LiveJournal Revolt 436
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."
Keep up the good work (Score:5, Insightful)
Incest? (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of the children! To hell with the rest.
Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
These sites are allowed to censor whatever they wish whenever they wish because it's their site. If you're upset with the service find somewhere better or stop complaining. It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. If the journals are lost for good then it really is the users fault for not backing up their own stuff.
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Incest? (Score:5, Insightful)
User-created sites (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe that what you say is that important that it simply has to be on the internet, then you will make it happen.
The owners of livejournal have the right to do whatever they like with their website, provided that it is within the law.
Shopping mall analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
MySpace, LiveJournal, ... They are the Internet equivalent of the mega shopping mall. They represent convenience but convenience comes at the price of freedom. Have you ever tried protesting outside a shop in a mall? You can't. The mall is private land and you will get removed by security. Similarly with LiveJournal and the other "communities" based on a centralised website, they are private space and the owner can boot you out on a whim.
Why not stick with the public spaces on the Internet? If you need a chat room: use an email list, Usenet or run an IRC server. If you want to share your photos: put them on your web server. If you want a pretty home page with lots of "friends" put a home page on your web server with a guest book. These are the online equivalent of the local shopping strip. It's a public place and no-one can force you to bend to their whim. The public spaces of the net are better than web2.0. They are just as customisable, do the job as well or better and you don't have to take it on trust that your freedom will be respected.
Deleting content based on keywords? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. A cheap hosting account and WordPress. Problem solved. NEXT.
Re:Incest? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think humans aren't wired right for the Internet. If only a few decades ago you knew a few hundred people doing something, it was probably something common and (so mostly) accepted in society. Your odd desires were maybe shared by one or two, tops. Now you got the Internet, and the rules have changed completely but we haven't. On the Internet, you can find confirmation for roughly anything. There's always a social circle somewhere that agree with your practises, if you look hard enough.
For the most part, this is a good thing, the freedom to associate with people that think like you and want to live life like you. But you should be aware what happens when you let your highly distilled social circles decide your social norms as opposed to checking out what your average neighbor and townsfolk are thinking about it.
Re:Shopping mall analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. They are closer to some kind of Eastern bazaar, where everyone sells and buys. LJ depends on users' postings, or it is better to say LJ is its users. Ban some topics/users and it will be discussed somewhere else. There is nothing unique in LJ
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
On the spectrum of free speech from the least protected to the most sacred you have:
Sure, this is just livejournal. But then Fox will ban it, then the BBC, then they'll ban talk about it in pubs and on street corners, no more right to peaceful assembly or incest rallies, then it'll just be a goddamn Orwellian society where incest is a thought crime.
When people in power try to enforce their warped view of morality on good, freaky citizens it's time to found a new government.
Re:discussing incest is illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As much as I would like to NOT think about this (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the 40-somethings who want to read/write about this stuff, well thats fine. Writing about sex with a 14 year old is a long way from actually doing it, and the large number of people who have written and read such fiction indicates that it is far from abnormal for the healthy imagination to wander in this respect. I would say that writing or reading about paedophilia/incest/bestiality etc no more makes you a pervert or a threat to society than playing Quake makes you a murderer.
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:5, Insightful)
Law != ethics (Score:4, Insightful)
So basically you're saying that the law is the law? That's rather unhelpful... Do you really mean to suggest that if something is legal, it is not wrong? Or that even if it is wrong, attempting to change it is a waste of time? (Never mind that the statement collapses the rather important distinction between rights and freedoms.)
I just want to clarify, becuase I often see this legalistic claim on Slashdot. I think it's incredibly harmful, but I'm not certain how many of those who make the argument fully understand what they're saying (I hope not many).
Re:Incest? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Incest? (Score:5, Insightful)
--
Support EMI and iTunes Plus, show the big labels
that DRM-free music works. Boycott the rest.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
I think raising a big fuss about it is actually a better response, accompanied by or followed by a move to another provider. The bigger a noise is made about, the bigger the message that is given to the industry as a whole.
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:1, Insightful)
Personally, I haven't used LJ since...uh...um... I can't seriously remember. I used it for a year or so and dumped it when I moved my own WordPress site. If this type of thing would have happened when I was a member, I would have posted "incest" in a second.
Re:As much as I would like to NOT think about this (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say it is largely made up of reliveing "the glory days" when said 40 year old was actually fairly attractive. Most people are never more physically attractive than they were when they were 16-17. Now they are fat and old and want to imagine that they and/or their lover are still young and buff. And if finding girls in their late teens sexy is so rare as to be a perversion, why is the working age of female models 16-25? http://forums.models.com/viewmessages.cfm?Forum=2
Don't forget discussing rape (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, of course, discussing something must mean actively encouraging and promoting it, right? If the context of the post/account/community says otherwise clearly enough that anyone without anencephaly could figure it out, why, that could be a ruse and we shouldn't take chances!
(God, won't someone please stop thinking of the children?)
Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
New Trend for User Created Content Sites? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
I call bullshit.
Just as all those companies have the right to do whatever damn thing they please, we have the right to call them on the carpet for it, in public and out loud. Sure, go ahead and vote with your dollars, or your feet, but that doesn't mean people should not speak up for what they believe is right too. In fact, its axiomatic that your vote won't count, your boycott of a handful of dollars won't make an iota of difference, because there are another hundred thousand ignorant people standing in line to take your place.
But one voice speaking the truth can be magnified by the internet so that it makes an impression on millions. None of these companies would exist without us, the little guys, creating the content that they repackage and load up with advertising. Speaking out is the only chance we've got to actively make them sit up and behave like good internet denizens.
Not every protest will make a difference, but acquiescing into silence because it's "their website" is guaranteed to make no difference at all.
Eyeball$ (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's what is going on here then LJ has it "wrong".
The users are buying LJ's service, it's just that the users "pay" in eyeball hours and personal trivia rather than dollars. Regardless of wether LJ sells advertising on their site or not, their one major asset is a database chock full of demographically mapped eyeballs that can be exchanged for real $$$ in more ways than I can imagine.
Wether LJ choose to call the eyeballs "users" or "customers", the GP's point remains valid: failure to maintain (preferably grow/diversify) their primary assest will end badly for them.
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Insightful)
"we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity." [livejournal.com]
And will they unsuspend you if you'll remove the interest? Nope:
"Our legal counsel advises us that it would increase LiveJournal's liability if we were to allow your journal to be unsuspended for you to delete the illegal interests from your profile. This is because if someone were to remove the illegal interests from his or her profile, but was in fact using LiveJournal to coordinate, solicit, or participate in illegal activity, LiveJournal would most likely be considered to have foreknowledge of that activity and thus become liable." [livejournal.com]
So although no one's being prosecuted (which itself is interesting - if we really were talking about pedophiles are, shouldn't LiveJournal and/or the 3rd party which reported the accounts to them be, I dunno, talking to the police?) they're acting under the belief that it's illegal to talk about, or write fiction about (in the case of fan-fiction, which counts for many deleted accounts) things which are illegal.
And it's people like this 3rd party ("warriors for innocence") who try to make it actually illegal to talk, write fiction or draw pictures about illegal things, and even extend that to consensual adults acts which have nothing to do with child abuse (e.g., adult incest, or things like BDSM). I'm in the UK, and I see a similar fight here with the Government and pro-censorship groups such as Mediawatch-UK wanting to criminalise possession of various adult porn [backlash-uk.org.uk].
In that sense, this is more than simply accounts on LiveJournal (although that in itself worries me, as a paid user of the service). It's a fight about freedom of speech versus censorship, and I fear the belief that freedom of speech shouldn't extend to things some people personally find distasteful when it comes to sex is all too strong.
Re:Incest? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Normal" is a well defined statistical term. Specifically in most circumstances, "normal" refers to the statistical mean of some value among individuals in a population.
What most people don't understand is that the normal, in and of itself, is not really very representative of the population. In fact, in almost all cases, there are no individuals in the entire population who's value agrees with the normal or mean. Best example, families have on average 1.69 children, but there is no one family with 1 and 69 hundredths children. Normal height could be, say, 6ft, but if you went around measuring people's height with a laser, you would likely never find someone who was precisely 6ft. They'd be ~5.999ft or ~6.0001ft.
The probability of finding an individual conforming to the mean, or indeed any value, is statistically zero. (Specifically, the normal is a point on a probability distribution of Lebesgue measure zero, but I digress.)
A better statistical measure of a population is it's variance, in conjunction with its normal or mean. With both of these values, you can give accurate estimations of the probability that someone's height will be between 5.5ft and 6ft, or whether they will have 1 or two children. Variance is almost never quoted, but it is as vital a statistic as the mean itself. Without it, the mean is a relatively useless statistic.
The mean of a randomly selected number between 4 and 8 is 6, the same as the mean of height in most populations. Height is not random, and has a different variance, but most modern junk news reports essentially do not distinguish between a random variable and a normally distributed one.
Effectively, when most people hear a statistic about the normal, average or mean, they probably implicitly assume that the variance is close to zero, in other words that the vast majority of the population hugs very close to the mean. In the age of mass production, it's easy to see why people who see row upon row of identical goods would think that human beings are essentially all equivalent with only exceptionally minor difference and the occasional "dud" here and there.
But humanity is much more diverse than most people are willing to admit. Yes we mostly have two hands and two eyes, etc, but the variation in our habits, temperaments, preferences, heights, weights, talents and skills. I'm not a eugenicist who only sees a one dimensional bell curve of humanity. I see a distribution with thousands if not millions of axes, and I think that the variation and diversity in humanity is a benefit to everyone, and that everyone can potentially put their individual talents to good use. Most people don't agree with this. They think we should try to shift the mean to "improve" the whole population. Instead what we should really be trying to do is increase the variance, on all the axes.
The internet is helping to increase the variance in our populations. People are better able to find things they enjoy and are good at rather than be corralled into the bottom end of a bureaucrat's bell curve. The internet enables people. Some people don't like this. They want "normality". They want a smaller variance. They want to feel secure. They'll use examples like incest, pedophiles, terrorists, etc, etc to frighten others away from the potential of the internet. They say they want to make "the children" etc, safer, but what they really want is the entire population to have a smaller variance, to be like those rows and rows of perfectly identical widgets. They don't do this because they are evil, they do it because they are afraid.
All across the world the internet is being censored, reduced and reigned in by both governments and by companies like Livejournal. They are getting away with it because people have put their trust these entities, and by and large, support their actions. Most people don't want that higher variance. Most people you speak to will support Livejournal here. It's a depressing statement but the fact is that the majority of the population will never see the connection between the hysteria over "deviant" groups online and the slow loss of their own rights in that sphere. A great number of them simply will not care.
Re:As much as I would like to NOT think about this (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm ACing this so it won't come back to haunt me: At least for girls, their body is the finest just as their tits have grown to full size and their hips widened for that tight ass. For the rest of their life, women try to avoid sagging and hanging but at best they stay on the level a while. Rest of the body isn't that obvious, but it rarely gets better than young unblemished skin anyway. Sorry, but I just call it like I see it. -- Whale biologist
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:3, Insightful)
Fandom constitutes a great part of the lj stakeholders and it's fandom that SixApart have annoyed by deleting discussion, fanfic and adult communities. Those are the people buying paid accounts for their communities, themselves, and their friends. If SixApart don't do anything to alleviate the situation, all those people are just going to claim they are 18+ and move over to JournalFen (a lot have done it already).
Forgot to add another point: fandom is a raunchy little beast and if darker adult themes are threatened by deletion, it will move. I just don't think it will happen though because SixApart will not keep this up.
Re:Freedom of speech or? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good idea. All the humans in the world will police the internet, and try to remove any objectionable content. In fact, I think we should have this internet-neighborhood-watch group centered in one country for easy administration. I pick Iran. The Mullahs can help determine what should be off-limits. Any objections?
ps - your ideas frighten me
Two Conflicting Responses (Score:2, Insightful)
On the other hand, as a person disgusted by sites screwing their users at the first sign of outside pressure, be it from "decency" advocates or overzealous DMCA users, I would like to see them badly hurt by this blunder so that others learn the lesson, respect their own TOS, and treat their users fairly.
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you've got it wrong. I have a paid LJ account, that makes me a customer, but not an advertiser.
Re:Freedom of speech or? (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sure they'd be interested in hearing more about your thoughts on thoughtcrime.
Re:Freedom of speech or? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hang on, for emphasis, let me quote you again.
Well, in a general sense, I suppose many would be better off if they thought a bit before they spoke, or didn't just blurt out any old thing, but that's not really your point is it? Your point is that we shouldn't really have freedom of speech, should we? Our declarations should be subject to approval by appropriate persons, yes?
So you're saying that only "wise and learned" people should have the ability to preach to the masses? That our fragile minds are too weak to resist "corruption" by unscrupulous fools with internet access? That we should all become police informants against people who don't tow the line?
Of course, I imagine you'll deny my observation's of your post. Say that I'm putting words in your mouth, etc, etc. You won't even have the integrity to come right out and say what you really believe in. I would not agree with you, but I could at least respect that you have an opinion and aren't afraid to say it.
People like you are the greatest threat to our society. You are the cancer within that gnaws at the foundations that previous generations worked so hard to build. The sad fact is you don't like our free society very much, or at least, while you may enjoy your own freedoms and luxuries, you feel uncomfortable about extending those freedoms to everyone, regardless of class, race, creed or colour.
I think the people in the world we loosely classify as "right wing" could be better described as those who believe in and desire a caste system for our society, where the "right" kind of people enjoy freedom, democracy, prosperity, etc, and where the "wrong" kind of people are "protected" or "supervised" or whatever other euphemisms for serfdom and slavery are in vogue at the moment. There's probably some kind of evolutionary psychology explanation for this. It would be interesting to explore why such a mentality exists.
You need to accept that you are such a person. You need to have the integrity to voice your opinions openly instead of hiding them behind insidious and equivocal language. That at least an honest person could respect. Sure your opinions might be unpopular, but at least they'll be your honest opinions, and not a false facade. You'll be better off in the long run, and so will society.
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:5, Insightful)
You also must not be too aware of how tightly knit a lot of the LJ community is. A friend of a friend being unjustly punished will still draw scorn and lots of it. As a matter of fact that's likely the exact reason you're hearing of it here.
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think anyone who lost data should get over it. There are plenty of ways of archiving your stuff, and if a conversation held anonymously in an internet discussion forum is that important to you, you need a life. Than again, I didn't lose any data either, so my opinion might be different if I were involved in any of the stuff that got deleted.
As for the advertisors being their customers, I believe LJ actually gets most of it's revenue from users with paid accounts. I haven't bothered to verify that, but it's the impression I've had for the last year or so. Most of the advertisers seem more like supplemental income to pay for the free accounts.
Re:Freedom of speech or? (Score:3, Insightful)
I totally agree. I want to report you and your posts. I hope your ability to post is quickly removed. Sorry. It's not censorship, just the neighborhood watch doing its job. Nothing personal.
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:2, Insightful)
No outcry?! I hear outcry about those (yes, more important) things all the time.
The difference here is that there was a chance of the cry being heard by the relevant authority. The TSA is not only unresponsive but kind of unreachable, the voting blacklists are implemented by folks doing it intentionally and unlikely to be swayed by complaints from the folks they intended to victimize -- in both of those cases, we have to convince others, our elected representatives, to care enough to act as intermediaries (unless we want to just skip the soapbox, the ballot box, and the jury box, and proceed directly to the ammo box). At LiveJournal, there's the possibility of directly affecting the company's well-being, either by removing our subscriptions from their revenue stream or by removing our content and thus giving their advertisers less to advertise on.
I do agree that those other outrages are more important, and that it would be good to see people get as active about them as they've been about this, but a) saying that they don't complain at all about the no-fly list and caging and such is unfair, and b) after a few cranial collisions with a brick wall, it gets harder to convince people to keep trying instead of falling prey to "learned helplessness".
Hey, who knows, maybe (putting on my biggest optimist-hat, the one with the brim that obscures my vision) maybe this episode will wind up making a bunch of LJers feel empowered and make them a little bit more likely to heed the call to push for those larger wrongs to be corrected as well...
Re:Keep up the good work (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got news for you: it's still censorship, and just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's right or acceptable. For some people, that "fucking hobby" can make a huge difference in their lives. I know several sexual abuse survivors who deal with their issues by discussing them in blogs and forums, and their support structure was torn away when some "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" asshole decided that they were offended by such things and went running to mommy screaming about some imagined slight.
Think before you open your mouth and consider the fact that sneering at other peoples' chosen form of communication just makes you look like an elitist asshole.