"Innocent until proven guilty" - Anybody remember that one?

[serai]

.

OK, let's just chill out, people. Those of you going around waving your arms about supposed censorship and journal deletions, how about you step back and take a look at what evidence there may be for such accusations?

Journals get deleted for a number of reasons, and as far as I know, censorship has never been one of them, at least here on LJ. For me to believe that LiveJournal has suddenly decided to start interfering with its members' freedom, I'll have to see quite a bit more than hyperbole and finger-pointing. Does anyone actually have any proof of this?

Statements by LiveJournal? Emails from them to the community owners? Replies to inquiries? Anything at all? If so, then trot them out. Otherwise, let's just stow these rumors where rumors usually belong, why don't we?


ETA: Okay, having seen a couple of things that've been pointed out, it looks like those journals were deleted for listing interests that could encourage illegal activity.

I gotta a couple of words to say about this which will no doubt piss some people off, but you know me. I can't keep my trap shut.

Basically, it boils down to this: If you expect me to cry over LJ's owned by people who are dumb enough to list an illegal activity quite boldly as an interest, you're barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, yeah, freedom of expression and all that happy hooha. But have none of these people noticed the rather, um, hysterical tenor that tends to accrue to any discussion or even mention of pedophilia, incest, etc., these days? Discretion is the better part of valor, as they say, and if you're going to list something like "incest" in your stats...well, what the hell kind of reaction do you expect?

YES, I KNOW a lot of people listed it in connection with RPG's and other such things, but the fact remains that it's there listed as an INTEREST. That's leaving your comm open to exactly the kind of moronic vampires that are pulling this off, and brother, if you're really living in the kind of Happy Fairyland that says you can say or do whatever you please, no matter how much it might piss off the ignorant, without consequences, then all I can say is - c'est la vie. Life hands out these kinds of smackdowns all the time, you know, and it behooves people to take a look around and think with their brains before they do something like that. I mean, I might decide that I'm terribly interested in cannibalism, but I'm not about to proclaim it to the bloody world, thank you.

As far as LJ's actions, well, depends on how you look at it. They're absolutely right when they say that kind of things opens them up to legal risk. That's the kind of litigational world we live in these days. Every asshat with a chip on his shoulder and an overdeveloped sense of his own superiority can drag you into court if he feels like it. He may not win, or even get a hearing, but just the implication that LiveJournal harbors or approves of things like incest could start a media shitstorm, so in business terms, they certainly have more than a leg to stand on.

Not that I think it's a good idea. Personally, I think it may backfire on them. Maybe. We tend to think of fandom as a huge part of life, but I don't know how much impact this is going to have on LJ as a whole, since I don't know what percentage of LJ is taken up with fandom. But something tells me that there won't be that much kicking going on, since most people tend to take the view of "That's got nothing to do with ME." I'm aware of the slippery-slope argument (though I'm usually suspicious of it) and I'm aware that it could attain here: i.e., if they start censoring over this, where else could it spread? And maybe it will do that. But then, there are other places on the internet.

But speaking for myself? I've always been rather bemused by how "free" people seem to think the internet is. They think they can just say anything they damn well please, and anybody who objects or contradicts them can go hang. Well and good, for the most part; it's a view I take myself. My home is my castle, as they say.

However, no matter how much we want to view our LJ's as our "homes", they're not. We don't own them - we rent the space from LJ, just like one rents an apartment. If you take care of the place, keep the yard clean and play nice with the neighbors, no problem. However, if you break the rent conditions in some way, or do something that may get the landlord in legal trouble, you may well find yourself out on the street. It's the same way on the internet. No matter how much we may think we have complete "freedom of speech" (and I'd like to cane every nitwit who thinks that idea pertains to private enterprises like LJ - for fuck's sake, haven't they ever READ the Bill of Rights?), WE DON'T. We have the freedoms we're allowed by the communities we're part of, whether the U.S., the Brotherhood of Lions, the Girl Scouts, or the Commonwealth of Freedonia. You may want the freedom to burn down some great public building, and you may cry a great deal when you're hauled off to jail for doing it, but that doesn't mean you'll get that freedom. Groups are like that: they have to have rules or else they won't function. Members play by the rules or they're out, for the same reasons. Way of the world, sorry.

And when it comes to those very few Sins Of Humungous Importance That Will Destroy The World, it doesn't take commission to get you in trouble. Just the appearance will land you in a world of hurt. (Which is why LJ is doing what it's doing.) If you're going to put the terms "incest" or "child love" or any such thing up as any kind of identifying mark on your website, you're just going to have to deal with the consequences. Which, in this particular era, can be considerable. Certainly one can just sit in the corner with one's playmates and very quietly have one's community. But you can't expect that you'll be left alone forever. I mean, if we get flamed just for writing about consensual sex among adults, what are the chances of fics about kids fucking not getting you a world of trouble? Seriously?

BE THAT SAID, I hope you all don't think I give any credence or respect to a group of sexually frustrated prigs running around making trouble for others. Pathetic is hardly the word for them. Ridiculous is better. However, this IS America, and if there's anything more American than a bunch of yahoos running around telling others what to think, I haven't heard about it. Like it or not, that's what gets noticed in this country: idiots yelling until they get red in the face. I've never held with giving people like that any attention, but I don't run this country. (CLEARLY. If I did...but don't get me started on THAT.)

Comments

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

http://lolaraincoat.livejournal.com/253978.html?style=mine seems to have a good account of what's happened. And yes, some of those comms definitely were suspended.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Hm. Well, that does change things for me. Though not the way most people would think.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

There's some back and forth with the vigilante group over here, and at the linked posts too.

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/266024.html?style=mine

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Pfft. About the kind of response one could expect.

So it's run by some overgrown Candy Striper with a bug up her ass about Teh Big Evil World? Color me surprised. Well, it had to happen eventually. I'm surprised it took this long, frankly.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

I'm a lot more pissed off that there are over 300 comms with "incest" as an interest that haven't been suspended, frankly. I don't care what the rules are, as long as they're applied evenly across the board.

If LJ was going to start suspending comms for having the interest "incest" they needed to use their own damn search function and get them all.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

I'd hazard the guess that they haven't been deleted because the prigs haven't gotten around to reporting them yet.

And LJ isn't deleting comms for having those things listed. They're deleting them for being reported as having those things listed. That's the way they've always functioned - they leave us alone as long as we don't get reported. There's waaayyyy too much traffic to police it all, and they've got a business to run, so they're not about to do some neocon asshole's work for them any more than is mandated by their legal team.

[starlit-woods.livejournal.com]

Some of the comms that have "incest" listed as an interest are communities for victims of incest and child abuse.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I know, but it's not the largest percentage by any means. But since I can't search to find out which comms got suppressed, I can't tell if any comms for survivors got washed out too. And a good many of the comms still in the list sound similar to comms which did get deleted -- they're HP or roleplaying comms, for example. It's the arbitrariness that annoys me to be honest. A little investigation on the part of the LJ abuse team might have saved a lot of people trouble, or at least given them a chance to back up their material.

[starlit-woods.livejournal.com]

It is a bit annoying that people involved with running LJ are saying "nothing's happening" when it appears it is. I agree that they should research it better, I've heard of one person's LJ being deleted because she had "incest" in her interests. If they'd looked further they would have seen she was a survivor of incest abuse and a member of an incest victim's community. Perhaps the reason LJ didn't give anyone warning was that they thought the 'baddies' would run and hide before they got caught. I know some genuine paedophile communities have been deleted, but I would think that most paedophile's are 'smart' enough to know not to list 'incest' or anything like that in their interests so they wouldn't get caught. They'll certainly be hiding deeper now.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Don't blame LJ for that, blame the assholes that did the reporting. LJ is just doing what any business would do to head off legal trouble, not to mention the media backlash that would ensue should they be implicated as "protecting pedophiles". If anyone is to blame here, it's the vicious prigs who think they have a right to play Texas Ranger To The World.

[starlit-woods.livejournal.com]

That's right, I visited the prigs website and they admit to emailing all the advertisers whose ads appear on LJ and telling them that their ads are supporting LJ's that promote incest and child abuse. No wonder LJ are panicking, why would they want to lose advertiser's/sponser's money?

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Really. To be honest, I'm rather shocked at how eagerly my LJ fellows are rushing to blame the wrong party here. All the ire seems to be directed at LJ, and I don't see much arm-waving or action directed against the assholes who actually precipitated this crisis. Yeah, LJ overreacted, but they're in a very complicated situation, and all I see is a bunch of spoiled entitlement babies crying about their FREESPEECHOMG!!! Not many people are making a schtuss about the redneck bigots who are behind all this.

[starlit-woods.livejournal.com]

I did see a lot of people getting angry at WFI for starting the whole thing, but more seemed angry at LJ. What disappoints me is how so many people seemed outraged at their loss of free speech because fan fic comms were suspended, and not outraged at the sex abuse victims comms being suspended. It's like they were only angry because they couldn't read their porn.

And one of the main posts I saw people link to was this one:

http://lolaraincoat.livejournal.com/253978.html

This person listed a group of comms that had been banned and claimed some of them were "genuine pedophiles". I saw that some of the comms had been unbanned and had a look at one - disgusting_lust and it didn't seem to me to be about paedophilia so I asked lolaraincoat how she could call them paedophiles without proof and she just didn't seem to get my point, that labeling people as paedophiles isn't a great thing to do without evidence.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's it exactly. All this weeping and gnashing of teeth seems to have very little to do with real justice. It seems all about I CAN'T HAVE MY PORN WAAAAAHHH! It's that whole "rights = I can do whatever I want." Makes me wonder if anybody at LJ actually paid attention during Civics classes, or whether they just sat in the back drawing pictures on their Pee-Chee's.

I just can't understand how anyone could be dumb enough to list things that are considered not only criminal but completely reprehensible in their interests list, and then get all crazed when they draw unwarranted attention. HELLO!

[serai1.livejournal.com]

They don't have the option to go looking for stuff, or investigating. Their legal team dictates what they're going to do, and in this case, that's apparently deleting comms with get reported, period. Would you want them to go around deleting people who haven't been complained about? I'd be glad they're restricting their actions to the instances where they can't ignore it, and leaving everybody else alone.

In fact, you could view their actions as designed to warn other users and give them time to change their info, without actually doing the warning in so many words. That way, they do their jobs and the least amount of people get hurt. Because you know, I can't imagine they're happy about being forced to delete people's journals.

[too-shy.livejournal.com]

http://femmequixotic.livejournal.com/292480.html?style=mine

By the current mod, regarding the suspended pornish_pixies comm (HP fic). It had four years of fic and unbothered operation.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Yep. Four years. That's quite a while to go before someone gets their panties in a twist and starts hollering. What the hell do people EXPECT? (See amendment of my post above.)

[lilithlotr.livejournal.com]

Pretty clear what's been going on. I won't call it censorship - more like giving in to pressure for fear of legal repercussions. Can't say I blame them.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Nope. They're doing exactly what any company would do: namely, covering their asses. The people seeking to censor are Miss Candy Striper From Hell and her crew. And good fucking luck trying to talk sense into her kind.

[lilithlotr.livejournal.com]

It's akin to (although not quite the same as) the big Viacomm to-do over at YouTube. I don't blame YouTube in that respect either - they were also doing the CYA thing

[serai1.livejournal.com]

So what's going on with that? Did they just dump a whole bunch of videos, or are they instituting some kind of policing system to restrict what people post?

[lilithlotr.livejournal.com]

Not sure what they're up to these days, since they're fighting so many lawsuits. The Viacomm takedowns were strictly reacting to what Viacomm itself reported to them - they weren't, at least at the time, searching out any content themselves. My account was permanently deleted thanks to Viacomm and the Carmina Burana rightsholder (and the Viacomm complaint was bogus since I had none of their content - they must have just searched for specific words, and I referenced VMAs)

[oohasparklie.livejournal.com]

I agree with your rant. I was reading all of the fallout from this and thinking, "You seriously put incest or childlove in your INTERESTS? What kind of idiot would do something like that?!"

Frankly, it kind of bothers me that things like incest and pedophilia are so widely accepted in fanfiction because "it's all a fantasy" or whatever. That doesn't change the fact that people are writing sexually charged stories about children and holy squick. I mean, I get the whole freedom of speech thing, but I also don't feel sorry for people who get this kind of thing shut down on them, either.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

Nope. Having freedom of speech (if you have it) doesn't guarantee getting busted for being an idiot.

That said, I don't have a problem with people writing fiction about such things. That's because I understand their thinking - writing about something, even if you do it in a titillating way, has nothing to do with approving of it in the real world. If that were true, Stephen King would be the first guy in jail, what with all his stories about blood and gore and lunatics chopping people to pieces. Richard Matheson, Steve Boyett...don't even get me started on Clive Barker.

And the inside of someone's head is just that, and as long as such things stay there, I don't believe I have any right to tell a person what to think, or what to get off on. Hell, some of the things I get off on are things that - believe me when I say I'm COMPLETELY serious here - were I to see them in real life, would mean at the very least serious physical harm, if not death, to the perpetrator. (I was actually in a situation like that once, and it was only my husband holding me back that saved the guilty party the beating of his life.) Sexual excitement is a weird thing, and what you like in that way is no evidence of anything, believe me.

[serai1.livejournal.com]

That should read, "Having freedom of speech (if you have it) doesn't guarantee NOT getting busted for being an idiot."

Goddamned keyboard gremlins.