Livejournal fandom gets trashed

[matgb]

Pretty sure that most of those involved in fandom and RPGs will already be aware of this, but for those not...

LJ Abuse has shut down a massive pile of journals for simply listing illegal interests in their profiles, and they won't unsuspend, at all:

In particular, the interest that you had listed on your profile that qualify as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity was "incest".

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.

A group of people called "Warriors for Innocence" have been trawling interest searches, and doing so publicly, liz_marcs has been in contact with them and received a full reply. no_lj_ads has a link summary as does catrinella.

Ultimately; the lunatics running this "protection" campaign have been doing so publicly, and given we know that the online abuser community is going to be paying attention, this means tat fandom has been TOS'd but the real abusers will have locked down their interests and will now be even harder to find if they're out there. As shaysdays quotes approvingly: If you have a fic community that uses keywords that might offend these little crusaders, take the keywords off temporarily so that your comm can't be found for a while. Becausee some of the accounts shut down are 'bad guy' RPG characters. Some of them are simply goths who like 'loli'. One is a Nabukov reading group. Yes, they're being that unsubtle.

Just think of the children?  Yeah, right, doing more harm than good isn't helping anyone.

Comments

[liadnan]

The views of 6As lawyers strike me as a load of old balls. The whole kerfuffle is predicated on the idea that listing a one-word or short phrase as an "interest" can only mean one thing: that one is interested in and in favour of the most straightforward meaning of the word. This is patently rubbish. Most people don't even stick to the "I like" theory when putting in their interests (ie that the syntax should be based on an imaginary "I like" in front of the interest). To act like this on the basis of an interests list rather than on content in context is ridiculous.
Personally I decided "interests" were no longer a useful tool for me ages ago, and deleted the list, though a large proportion of them were re-used as tags.

[liadnan]

PS I still maintain that the term pedophile, unlike paedophile, ought to mean a foot-fetishist.

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

You're right on that one.

[matgb]

Oh, agree completely; that's my principle complaint really, it's a very blunt instrument.

I rarely use interests for searches, but do like it when I look at a profile and see interests in common bolded, especially when looking at friends of friends, etc.