User-interest suspensions
May. 30th, 2007 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenVia various people; this one was dismissed as a rumour earlier, but seems to have been confirmed after all.
Details in post here and links from there: an anti-child-abuse vigilante group looks to have succeeded in pressuring LiveJournal to suspend various personal and community journals based on the mention of illegal acts in user interests.
My understanding is that LJ are only taking down journals when they receive specific complaints about those journals (i.e. they're not auto-suspending every journal that lists something like 'child abuse' as an interest). The vigilante group in question have claimed they are only filing complaints about journals that genuinely encourage abuse, and no doubt that's their main priority.
However, there looks to be some collateral damage happening - with 13 million LJ accounts, I doubt these guys have the time to read very carefully before complaining to LJ, and LJ for their part seem to have taken a "we're not responsible for checking context" stance. Journals that mention child abuse in a fictional context appear to be at risk - for instance,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lolita07, a Spanish-language community for discussing Nabokov's novel, has gone. (If you want to confirm that that really was the community's purpose, there's a cached copy of the community info page here.)
Excerpting from a LJ support response quoted here:
Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk. When journals that contain such material are reported to us, we must suspend them. Because LiveJournal's interests list serves as a search function, and because listing an interest enables other people also interested in a similar topic to gather and/or congregate, we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity.
In particular, the interests that you had listed on your two journals' profiles that qualify as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity were: child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up...
We recognize that many people list these types of interests for shock value, as a method of expressing opposition for these illegal activities, or to indicate fictional activity. Unfortunately, the Abuse team does not have any discretion in these cases; if a journal profile contains interests that support illegal activity, we must suspend the journal. Journals, on the other hand, may express or imply interest in illegal activity or express or imply a desire to meet and/or interact with others with similar interests, but only if the journal clearly (1) is in opposition to or condemnation of the illegal activity, (2) does not encourage the illegal activity and (3) is not used in furtherance of any illegal activity.
Quite aside from the nontrivial matter of fiction... my reading of that is that if an abuse survivor lists e.g. 'rape', 'incest', or 'child abuse' in their interests, and anybody complains about this, that journal will be suspended. I have no reason to think the group who started this mess would have any desire to target journals in that category, but it doesn't have to be them who makes the complaint.
Details in post here and links from there: an anti-child-abuse vigilante group looks to have succeeded in pressuring LiveJournal to suspend various personal and community journals based on the mention of illegal acts in user interests.
My understanding is that LJ are only taking down journals when they receive specific complaints about those journals (i.e. they're not auto-suspending every journal that lists something like 'child abuse' as an interest). The vigilante group in question have claimed they are only filing complaints about journals that genuinely encourage abuse, and no doubt that's their main priority.
However, there looks to be some collateral damage happening - with 13 million LJ accounts, I doubt these guys have the time to read very carefully before complaining to LJ, and LJ for their part seem to have taken a "we're not responsible for checking context" stance. Journals that mention child abuse in a fictional context appear to be at risk - for instance,
lolita07, a Spanish-language community for discussing Nabokov's novel, has gone. (If you want to confirm that that really was the community's purpose, there's a cached copy of the community info page here.)Excerpting from a LJ support response quoted here:
Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk. When journals that contain such material are reported to us, we must suspend them. Because LiveJournal's interests list serves as a search function, and because listing an interest enables other people also interested in a similar topic to gather and/or congregate, we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity.
In particular, the interests that you had listed on your two journals' profiles that qualify as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity were: child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up...
We recognize that many people list these types of interests for shock value, as a method of expressing opposition for these illegal activities, or to indicate fictional activity. Unfortunately, the Abuse team does not have any discretion in these cases; if a journal profile contains interests that support illegal activity, we must suspend the journal. Journals, on the other hand, may express or imply interest in illegal activity or express or imply a desire to meet and/or interact with others with similar interests, but only if the journal clearly (1) is in opposition to or condemnation of the illegal activity, (2) does not encourage the illegal activity and (3) is not used in furtherance of any illegal activity.
Quite aside from the nontrivial matter of fiction... my reading of that is that if an abuse survivor lists e.g. 'rape', 'incest', or 'child abuse' in their interests, and anybody complains about this, that journal will be suspended. I have no reason to think the group who started this mess would have any desire to target journals in that category, but it doesn't have to be them who makes the complaint.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 06:09 am (UTC)Or if there's an illegal activity involving both flan and hermeneutics, I don't want to know.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 07:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 11:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 02:51 am (UTC)In the meantime, you get a cookie: muppets, Helm's Deep, pictures. Possibly NSFW for simulated violence. Enjoy!