Strikeout pondering...

[lederhosen]

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.

Hmm. I'm pretty sure 'torture' and 'human rights violations' are both illegal activities, yes? And, hell, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was pretty damn illegal. Though maybe not quite as much as the Holocaust.

(I do not suggest LJ/SA would actually be dumb enough to follow that policy literally, but at the least it desperately needs rewording.)

Comments

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

And, you know, whose laws? Whose?

They're not liable under US laws, anyway.

[moxie_man]

And from a brief glance at some of the 37 pages (as of this comment) of responses, they're getting their backsides fried by their paid subscribers over this screw-up.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

They claim that interests should be in the form of "I like X" or "I'm in favor of X." This is stupid, because it prevents people from listing anything like the assassination of Lincoln as an interest, since I assume most people aren't actually in favor of it. Or, a Kennedy assassination conspiracy group -- they could put Kennedy himself as an interest (but only if they actually like him!) but not "Kennedy assassination."

"I'm interested in X" ought to be a valid interpretation of interests.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I suppose one could put "reading about the Kennedy assassination" etc (depending on the character limit for interests, whatever that is) but it's awfully clunky. The edit-userinfo interface does say that interests should fit in the sentence "I like ...", but I interpreted that as a grammatical test rather than actually implying support, and it looks like most of the rest of LJ did too.

I had a longer post but due to technical hiccups I can't post it; short version is "LJ were warned months ago, only acted after ad revenue threatened, should have foreseen back when they first broke the 'no ads ever' promise and we changed from 'customer' to 'product'".