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

[dainul.livejournal.com]

yay and nay. In LJ's favour, I can see that a) they're hosting it, so if they decide they don;t want to, thet's their perogative and b) having illegal things listed in your interests is somewhat asking for trouble.

However, my main issue with this, from what little I know, is not the intent, but the execution. In trying to protect the unwashed masses from actual criminals, they are succeeding only in pissing off people unassociated with said criminals. Their approach has no real effect on the people they're trying to target, and achieves none of its stated objectives. All it achieves is the unstated one of being able to say "lookit, we're doing something".

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Oh, you're absolutely right that it's counterproductive, but it's too late to worry about that now. It's done, and out there, and there's not a damn thing we can do to change it.

[dainul.livejournal.com]

bwuh?

So because it is already done, people shouldn't bother voicing their anger? Or because you don't expect a protest to change this instance, the protest is pointless? Unless I'm reading that wrong, you have a surprisingly defeatist attitude going there.

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Protest may change this instance, it may not. I think you're reading things in that I didn't say.

I'm saying that no amount of protest, no matter how well meaning, will undo the damage that has been done because of the hamfisted way that this has been gone about to legitimate law enforcement efforts which are ongoing all the time to catch ACTUAL illegal activity. RP journals are RP journals and they get deleted all the time for various reasons and they get resurrected here or elsewhere just as quickly.

The people that this was supposed to be intended to catch? They're not going to get caught by this, but they ARE going to hide themselves deeper.

Protest might affect the RP journals, it won't affect that.