I have to say, if fandom was gonna pick something to get all self-righteous about, the ability to network with other people interested in pedophilia, incest, rape, and murder wouldn't have been my first choice.

Well, but if you cast all fiction that deals with murder or rape as something that should be shunned, there go Sam Spade and half the Harlequin Romance catalog.

You have memories from back when you were 2? **blinks in awed and envious amazement**

Brief memories of specific events. Things don't really cohere into a day-to-day picture until age 4 when I started spending days at my Aunt's.

Additionally, it's clear that an awful lot of fiction that doesn't involve rape or pedophilia or incest got caught up in the mix.

In addition to the Lolita reading group, which @@

The thing is, this is absolutely NOT about the content of the journals -- LJ Abuse has made this very clear in writing to people who have had journals deleted. The fundies found something that LJ hadn't considered, which is the way the interests function serves as a networking tool, and made a reasonable case that by allowing people to have interests listed -- and again, this has ONLY been about the interests people list, NOT the content of their journals -- which are illegal, LJ can be said to be facilitating illegal activities. In particular, allowing people with an expressed interest in the sexual exploitation of children to collude with one another could leave LJ open to RICO prosecution. To maintain its safe-harbor status under current US law, LiveJournal had to act. Should they implement an appeals process? Possibly. Did they do the right thing under the circumstances? Absolutely.

Myself, I would RATHER have my service provider take a hands-off, no-grey-areas approach than feel obligated to look over my shoulder with my every post, which is LJ's only other option under the current extremely restrictive laws.

And what's more, WTF with listing "pedophilia" and "rape" as interest in a tool specifically designed to help other people on the site find you? Are you looking for every creepy molester in town to come hang out at your LJ? Yes, there are evil moralists out there, but people need to have a little internet savvy too.

I don't know what the search criteria is, but I do know there are or were comms of rape survivors and incest survivors--both, obviously, attempting to deal with the results. Those terms were listed in interests, as a way for the victims to network.

Would the search and delete be selective enough to recognise the difference between a journal that lists "rape crisis counseling" and one that lists "rape" in its interests?

I think that's the problem. They really need to use a more human (i.e less automated) approach to deleting, if that's what they are going to do.

I read in a comment about a child molestation LJ. *IF* that exists, I'm all for deletion, but I'd like to know that someone actually made sure that's what was going on.

Would the search and delete be selective enough to recognise the difference between a journal that lists "rape crisis counseling" and one that lists "rape" in its interests?

From what little I've followed of the issue, it doesn't seem like that was a situation that arose.

By the way, the only legal scholar I know who follows these issues called LJ understandably overcautious, which I think is exactly right.

This post in (in catrinella's livejournal) may help clarify exactly which communities have been affected. There are definately non-fandom ones there, as well as fanfic groups and at least one Lolita discussion community.

But those were also groups that had explicit names, like pornish_pixies (rest in peace, you crazy-ass community) or explicit interests.

The Lolita discussion group I don't know what to say. On the one hand, well known work of literature. On the other, infamous for a reason. *shrugs* That one shouldn't have gotten suspended, I don't think, but falls just within the boundaries of overcautious as well.

I'm not defending the suspensions by any means, although I do think fandom is pretty jumpy and paranoid right now. But this is one interesting component of livejournal--using a feature that isn't well supported and underused, or used in a cheeky fashion for something other than what it was intended for; mixed with the very real lack of searching options on livejournal, especially when compared with something like Vox. The search/interest tagging feature is extraordinarily underdeveloped, and brings back communities/users by most recent posting date. Which is why such an odd and apparently unrelated mixture of communities have been suspended--they may have all be related by a stray user interest, and this community of watchdogs, or whatever (if you self-describe as a "monster hunter" you have much bigger problems than I can understand), basically got a random selection of journals/comms and just clicked on links until they found ones with possibly illegal/TOS/restricted material.

Conversely, the average fanfiction writer and most fanfiction/fandom related communities are not at risk for precisely the same function. It is impossible to search livejournal with any real depth or classification because there isn't anything like that built into the system. Even other things like using a site: search on google, or ljseek, is largely imperfect because LJ is so massive (apparently bigger than the state of Illinois!) it's -- not impossible, but very low on the LJ feature/repair list -- to fully index all the servers, journals, communities, etc on livejournal to make such a search possible. And even then you're only viewing public data (you = nutso watchdog people) and smart journalers and comms lock that stuff down, thereby not making it publicly available. And while I don't know how that weighs in legally, or TOS-wise, it certainly cuts down on whatever miniscule possibility the majority of fandom has of being suspended.

I mean, I've already been through this exact issue with a bunch of the aheming communities I follow. If you make the name something obscure, keep the interests tame, and lock it down, there is barely a chance in the wind that you're going to get deleted. So far the policy of the LJ moderators has been a "don't tell us because we don't want to know" attitude. If they don't know it's there, they're not going to mess with it. And they're not going to know it's there if you do the above, because it's difficult to search and appearances can be deceiving, especially if you go out of your way to make them deceiving. It's only been when the sketchy-type comms are shoved in their faces--like this watchdog bullshit--that they will deal with something as a protective measure for themselves, to keep LJ around. And even then they are reluctant to do it. Even then, they won't go looking for more people to shut down just because they can.

But aheming communities, and RPF comms, and 'cest comms and everything else under the sun are still around, because the users got smart and didn't make a trail for someone to find. At the end of the day, though I firmly believe that LJ is on the side of fandom, LJ is a private company open to all kinds of legal issues, and they have to protect themselves so that they can stick around.

It's funny that this issue crops up right at the same time as fanlib backlash means that people are thinking about publically supporting fanfiction and the legal grounds/archives to do so. They aren't related, I don't think, because the watchdog wasn't targeting fanfiction or fandom, per se--they were targeting whatever they felt was in their construct of "wrong."

LJ is a private company open to all kinds of legal issues, and they have to protect themselves so that they can stick around.

I agree, generally. But every hour that goes by that LJ doesn't address what happened -- it just strikes me as insane. That's another hour for people to work themselves into a frenzy, swear they're going to leave LJ, etc. I would respect a post that said, "Look, this is why we had to do this. We're sorry, we think it sucks, but we have to protect ourselves and the larger community." I would respect a post that said, "We're aware of our users' concerns. Please be patient while we put together a statement, and we'll do our best to address your questions."

Right now, I am not respecting the big pile of silence.