Well. The last 24 hours have been interesting ones over on Livejournal. What started out as a simple task of searching out and removing LJs that promote pedophilia and child abuse, LJ managed to fuck up and delete a whole bunch of innocent sites as well, including abuse survivor communities, fanfiction journals, even a literary discussion group about the book “Lolita”. They said it was to do with having listed interests like “incest” and “rape”. Except there’s at least one case of a RPG character journal getting deleted because the interests list said “beating people up”, and LJ wrote back to them to say that because the interest was an illegal activity they can’t have the journal back. Even when it was pointed out that the LJ was for a roleplay villain? Still no.Well, then Fandom fought back and threatened to leave in droves and droves. Over twenty thousand people united in solidarity, withdrawing their dollars.

This morning LJ posted what appears to be an apology and a promise to fix the problem, and restore LJs that were wrongly deleted.

Something bothers me about all this though. It seems that the only criteria LJ/6A are actually looking at is the interests list and user profile information. Of course this makes it easy to fix for the RPG and fandom communities to say that they’re RPG/fandom etc. Except that most of them already stated that anyway, which makes me wonder if the LJ mods can even read.

It seems like that policy of going by user profile info isn’t going to change, so how easy is it going to be for somene who is a real pedophile, to just slap a RPG disclaimer on their user profile, and carry on just as before? Come on people it’s not user profiles you need to be looking at, it’s ACTUAL CONTENT.

Second, they are not making clear where the line is drawn between legal and illegal. It was initially supposed to be anything related to pedophilia and somewhere along the way it got distorted into anything illegal. (which begs the question, illegal in which country/state?). So I wonder what other “illegal” activity gets weeded out? “Beating people up” already got the boot. What’s next? Admission of liking to smoke pot? Supporting gay marriage (which is still illegal in some US states)? Writing fanfic using other author’s characters (copyright breach?) If there’s a line they’re drawing between what they’ll ban and what they won’t, they need to state very clearly in their TOS where that line is.

Which brings me to another interesting point: The TOS states that it bans anything “that falls under the US legal definition of Indecent”. Now one thing I learned yesterday is that there is no such thing. There’s a clearly defined definition of “Obscene” but there’s no definition of indecent because it’s always taken on a case by case basis in context with the community affected. Which is why a book may be banned in one state or county but not in another. So in order to follow up this policy they would have to argue every single individual case in court. I wonder if they can afford that?

The bottom line of course, is money. Up until a year or so ago LJ subsisted on user subscriptions alone, and promised “no ads, ever!” Then they got taken over by 6 Apart, and backtracked on their promise, and added ads. Which is not entirely voluntary either: while a user may volunteer to not have any ads on their own LJ, they can’t stop seeing other people’s ads without taking out a paid subscription. Plus, if you’re logged out you’ll also see ads, including on the main page.

My bet is that very recently, LJ/6A crossed a tipping-point, where the revenue from advertising now exceeds that of paid subscriptions. This recent purge only happened because a vigilante group called Warriors for Innocence badgered 6A’s advertisers (I won’t link WFI here because I’ve heard rumours that their website installs spyware on your computer). According to WFI’s blog, they tried to pressure LJ prior to this week, but were ignored. So WFI changed tack, and contacted their advertisers, who were presumably concerned and threatened to withdraw their support unless something was done. It was very telling, to see that money and advertisers won, at the expense of innocent users.

The bottom line is that basically, money wins and LJ don’t actually have the loyalty to their users that they claim to have. I don’t believe that LJ is a safe place any more to archive fanfic of any sort, and particularly not anything that’s R or NC17 rated, or that contains non-original characters. It’s only a matter of time before the Purity Police turn their eye to porn in general, or to copyright issues, and taking proactive extreme measures for fear of litigation.

I have an LJ, although to be brutally honest the only reason I have it is because so many of my friends are there, and if they were all to leave and go elsewhere I’d be happy to delete it, post here and read my friends blogs wherever they happen to be. In fact really, I wish they all would.