LiveJournal Woes

First on May 18, Warriors for Innocence (WFI) an anti-pedophilia/child porn group, contacted Six Apart, the owner of Live Journal (LJ) regarding alleged pedophilia journals at the community. They provided a list of 500 journals alleged to be pedophilia sites. Because LJ sells advertising on its site, WFI contacted the advertisers and provided information about ads being placed in the offending journals.

About a week later Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks began. The attacks appeared to stop, then resume. There has been collateral damage, many LJ users, yours truly included, are having difficulty posting to our journals.

On Memorial weekend LJ began a mass suspension/deletion of journals (aka Strikethrough 07), based on WFI's list and Six Apart's review. Not all of the journals listed by WFI got struck, but about 100 or so more that were not on WFI's list did get struck. The you-know-what hit the fan.. It hit hard enough for Six Apart to apologize for their actions, after seeing thousands of paid LJ users switch back to basic accounts. Money was leaking out of the LJ boat.

The apology was also reported at CNet, which included a link to the Blogger site of a WFI member who has since limited access to her blog to invited readers only. CNet shared her self description;

Sues describes herself as an ardent conservative who views homosexuality as "sick" and a "twisted agenda" and lumps gays and lesbians into the same category as pedophiles and rapists.

That set off the LJ membership again, with allegations that WFI has connections to various pro-Confederacy (as in restoring the CSA) and related extremist groups such as the Redneck Mafia. Several members of the LGBT community expressed a concern that groups like WFI could ultimately pressure services like LJ to cut off their journals because living openly as LGBT citizens in some states and countries is flat out illegal. Consequently their journals would be seen as supporting illegal activity and could be deleted under the current TOS.

The last post on the subject by Six Apart's CEO has laid out to some degree how LJ will deal with the issues being raised. Reading through some journals and communities it appears that the new policy is not being applied consistently yet.

I wouldn't have noticed the mass purge because I was not a target. However I do care about this because, as I read through the fallout, it became obvious that Six Apart used a sledgehammer rather than thinking it all through. One deleted community was a Spanish group discussing the novel Lolita. It has been claimed, and partially documented, that others were owned by abuse survivors and related support groups. WFI failed to exercise their own due diligence before making their complaint, and I suspect Six Apart acted far too hastily for their own good. A possible, and all too plausible, reason for Six Apart's behavior can be found here.

Free speech is a tricky thing to deal with. How far is too far and who decides? When does it cross the line to slander or libel? Whose rules count? I don't care to have pedophiles running loose on the web, but I also don't want to see survivors and their supporters maligned in witchhunts by self appointed guardians of public safety. Then there are the fandoms, which are famous for writing erotic and sometimes sexually explicit stories. The Harry Potter fandom is allegedly one of the more prolific, and was hit hard by the purge, although restorations are occurring. Who decides what's worth reading and what isn't? Where do we draw the line? Or do we now face the very real possibility of a cyber-version of Fahrenheit 451 taking over the Internet?

I don't like what happened at LJ, and I already have learned that Blogger sites are also targeted. I wonder when they will come for me.