A fundamentalist Christian group called "Warriors For Innocence," led by a crazy lady who's an admitted racist and bigot, decided to go after livejournal, because there were "child molestors" on lj. They weren't working with the police, and they weren't interested in catching criminals and convicting them, they just wanted to shut down blogs with things they didn't like. The reported a bunch of blogs to lj, based on searches for pedophilia-related interests. Lj refused to do anything, as has long been their policy. It's not a crime to talk about pedophilia, just to do it.
Anyhow, WFI then put pressure on livejournal's corporate sponsors, the people who advertise on lj, and lj apparently gave in (though they don't admit to this!) and suspended the entire list of journals, without actually checking the content of those journals, basing the decision entirely on having suspect interests.
Some of the journals suspended included people who were survivors of child molestation, who had put down the interest because they were interested in stopping and preventing such things, as well as a LOT of fandom journals, dedicated to writing things like Harry Potter porn stories. (And because Harry is under age, this is considered pedophilia by some.) Also suspended were some literary discussion journals, and some fashion journals, because of the word "lolita" which can refer to several different things, manga about underage girls among them.
Lj refused to consider requests to return those journals, and also refused to make any kind of statement about the whole mess for two entire days, during which time 30,000+ fandom people joined in a crusade to get lj to reconsider and restore any journals that weren't demonstrably illegal. A lot of people pulled down their plus accounts, and some people removed paid accounts too, while many, like me, swore to never renew paid accounts until we were satisfied.
After quite a long time, and after giving statements to Cnet and others first, the CEO of lj issued an "apology" that pretty much blamed the suspended users for having the interests, saying that listing something as an interest meant you were in favor of that activity, or liked it.
Lj users weren't terribly satisfied with the apology, especially given the logical argument that people who list things like diabetes and breast cancer as interests don't like those things, they suffer from them.
Also argued was the fact that people with interests in murder, nazi-ism, etc. weren't targeted, just child-related terms like shota and lolita.
LJ, seeing the apology hadn't placated anybody, promised to restore all the fan and literary journals, and has done so. They seem to consider the matter over, but of course fandom is still not really happy.
At this point I've left the most active protest community, as it was dissolving into arguments about what we wanted next, and about wanting to try and throw out the "real" pedos from the protest, except nobody can agree where to draw the line between pedo-ish fiction and "real" pedos, so nothing's happening by argument.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2007-06-01 10:33 pm (UTC)Anyhow, WFI then put pressure on livejournal's corporate sponsors, the people who advertise on lj, and lj apparently gave in (though they don't admit to this!) and suspended the entire list of journals, without actually checking the content of those journals, basing the decision entirely on having suspect interests.
Some of the journals suspended included people who were survivors of child molestation, who had put down the interest because they were interested in stopping and preventing such things, as well as a LOT of fandom journals, dedicated to writing things like Harry Potter porn stories. (And because Harry is under age, this is considered pedophilia by some.) Also suspended were some literary discussion journals, and some fashion journals, because of the word "lolita" which can refer to several different things, manga about underage girls among them.
Lj refused to consider requests to return those journals, and also refused to make any kind of statement about the whole mess for two entire days, during which time 30,000+ fandom people joined in a crusade to get lj to reconsider and restore any journals that weren't demonstrably illegal. A lot of people pulled down their plus accounts, and some people removed paid accounts too, while many, like me, swore to never renew paid accounts until we were satisfied.
After quite a long time, and after giving statements to Cnet and others first, the CEO of lj issued an "apology" that pretty much blamed the suspended users for having the interests, saying that listing something as an interest meant you were in favor of that activity, or liked it.
Lj users weren't terribly satisfied with the apology, especially given the logical argument that people who list things like diabetes and breast cancer as interests don't like those things, they suffer from them.
Also argued was the fact that people with interests in murder, nazi-ism, etc. weren't targeted, just child-related terms like shota and lolita.
LJ, seeing the apology hadn't placated anybody, promised to restore all the fan and literary journals, and has done so. They seem to consider the matter over, but of course fandom is still not really happy.
At this point I've left the most active protest community, as it was dissolving into arguments about what we wanted next, and about wanting to try and throw out the "real" pedos from the protest, except nobody can agree where to draw the line between pedo-ish fiction and "real" pedos, so nothing's happening by argument.
And that's the short version there.