Uh, Whut?

[talkingsoup]

Has anyone else heard about this whole mess with LJ journals getting suspended?

Man, it's gotten heated. Fandom rose up and ripped SixApart a new one, apparently, so now LJ is kind of re-thinking things.

For anyone who hasn't heard the story, you can search it by Googling "Warriors for Innocence," "LJ Strikethrough 2007" or going to the community innocence_jihad, but I'll give you a summary here.

Pretty much this Far Right group called "Warriors for Innocence" started a sort of Internet movement against sites supporting child porn and sexual assault and whatnot. Which is all good and fine, and more power to 'em. The problem is, the people at WFI--intentionally or unintentionally, we're not sure--also went after fandom and stuff (the woman there claims to "not have known about fandom.") The woman in charge, Sue, wrote a letter to SixApart, which owns LJ, to complain and threatened legal action which set a fire under SixApart's pants, so to speak. They ended up suspending a whole shitload of LJ accounts. Some of them were indeed pedophile hangouts and other such awful places, but a fair amount of the deleted journals were also RL journals of survivors, and fandom journals.

See what happened is LJ went after people who had specific interests listed, like "lolita," "shota," "incest" and "rape," things like that. So in other words, survivor journals, hotline journals, fan journals of Nabokov's novel Lolita, and of course a whole shitload of fandom journals got axed. A couple of slash journals vanished as well.

Now of course, I don't subscribe to the darker side of fandom (I don't really subscribe to anything in fandom, but still), but it's still kind of shitty. It's the principle of the thing. You see, it's not just fanficcers who write stuff with loli-shota, incest, rape and whatnot. Think of all the novels out there that have mention of rape or have a rape scene in them. Or all the novels about recovering victims of incest or child molestation? Just because you write something doesn't make you a pedo or a rape-addict. Admittedly, I've always been a bit queasy over the incest/rape/molestation side of fandom, but that doesn't make it right to just axe them all.

And just think of all the survivor/hotline journals that got dumped--how must those people feel?

In any case, in response to this fandom pretty much rose up in protest against SixApart and WFI. There's a whole shitstorm going on across the Internet, on the fan sites, on the WFI site, and all over LJ. Just look at LJ's main page. Gah, it's gotten insane, so many people are up in arms about it.

Pretty much, I just wish LJ had taken a closer look at the places they dumped before they killed them. They kind of brought this shit on themselves.

Comments

[marang.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I pretty much agree with you about it. And I grant, people have the right to be upset, but I laughed a little to myself upon seeing icons like "2007 Strikethrough SURVIVOR" and the like... I mean, really. But maybe this is just me not being affected by it at all.

[talkingsoup]

Yeah, I'm kind of taking an observer's position as well since none of this affected me. I have seen a few clever icons, though, lol. I just think the whole mess has been way overblown. Everyone just needs to get their shit together.