Waitin' on the world to change, Part 1

Let me tell you a story about fandom and its mistress, LiveJournal.

LiveJournal is where fandom lives. There are fan communities of every breed there, from supersnotty academic meta-fandom-critiquing geeks to squealing preteen fangirls to adult-locked hardcore porn fanfiction/fanart communities. Many have built their fandoms from scratch - think obscure Anime stuff, or short-lived TV shows - and the fans have built LiveJournal up with them. They form the largest LJ's largest paid-user base. These people spend their lives on LJ, posting half a dozen times a day, creating an enormous wealth of content - essays, fiction, art - that you have to read to believe. The quality of the material is stupendous, if you know where to look. Much of it makes my college sociology class (among others) look like a joke.

LiveJournal, of all people, should know that fandom is worthwhile.


Apparently not.

First, there was Strikethrough '07. In May, SixApart, which owns LJ, suspended more than 500 accounts without notice for percieved Terms of Service violations. A group called Warriors for Innocence complained (quite legitimately) to LJ about the hundreds of pedophile comms, and LJ mindlessly hacked journals off left, right and centre.

Now, even the mildest kind of porn squicks me out. Slash, het, whatever - I find it all immensely distasteful. It is incomprehensible to me that otherwise brilliant writers like Copperbadge find writing graphic sex scenes interesting... Call me a girl, but my response is basically EWWWWWW.

But this isn't about personal preferences. It's about freedom of speech. The vast majority of the suspended accounts proved to be entirely innocent of the charges: most were deleted because they listed "incest" or "non-cons" (for non-consensual) as interests... there was no objectionable content in their journal itself. Many were incest and rape survivor support groups. Two journals were deleted even though the accounts belonged to clearly labeled fictional characters in a role-playing game. Another deleted community was home to Spanish-language discussions of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. The suspended users' names appeared with a strikethrough whenever their accounts were invoked by other journals - Strikethrough '07 became the community's rallying cry.

LiveJournal responded with a reinterpretation of their Terms of Service: "... [E]xpressing interest in, soliciting or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk." (emphasis mine) By which standard, a New York user who lists "Gay Marriage" as an interest risks account deletion without warning - not to mention hundreds of journals belonging to gay rights activists.

But would any of these journals place LJ under "considerable legal risk"? No. A 1996 federal law immunizes web-based discussion forums from lawsuits as long as the content of the discussions is not otherwise illegal. Do you think fiction involving squicky sexual stuff should be illegal? Think again. You'd be banning Romeo and Juliet (Juliet is 13 years old when married), Mary Shelley's Mathilde, Sophocles' Oedipus plays, and It by Stephen King along with the rest.

Anyway. These events in May 2007 caused an uproar in fandom, because for some reason, they were the hardest hit, instead of all the actual pedophiles. Did LJ apologise? Guess. And always remember: these are the people who keep LiveJournal alive. LJ was built on slash writers.

Nor did LJ learn from its mistakes.

Just a couple of weeks ago, on 2nd August, LJ once again deleted two members (all their journals and communities) without warning for supposed TOS violations. This time, there was no Strikethrough, the deleted account names were BOLDED instead. Har de frickin' har.

The deleted members drew Harry Potter fanart in manga style - and if you've ever seen manga art, you know how young the adult characters look, big eyes and little bodies on all of them. The art posted with warnings in an adult community featured Harry and Snape going at it - both of whom are well above the age of consent, as anyone who's familiar with manga would know, as anyone who's read the books would know, and frankly, it's not that hard to find people who've read Harry Potter.

Fandom was incredulous and outraged.

So what does LJ do?
(a) Keep mum officially
(b) Meanwhile, *comment* on outraged users' journals publicly mocking fandom as being a bunch of pedophile pornographers (no, really)
(c) Not apologise for said mockery (or the account deletions, but that goes without saying)
(d) Claim (still in comments) that the art was deleted only because it was "lacking in artistic merit" (I am not making this up)
(e) Post an official response five days later clarifying nothing, apologising for nothing
(f) Stick to the comments section for any actual clarifications, which was basically: Tough luck, our TOS says we can delete whatever we want for no reason.
(g) Refuse to refund money for the deleted accounts, one of which was a lifetime permanent account.

Yes, really. It did all of the above.

Today, 12 days later, LJ finally allowed one of the users back, and her account has been reactivated. No official statement was released regarding this miraculous resurrection. It simply... happened.

My question is? Pedophiles, I ask you. Who's got their eyes on them while LJ chases predatorily after its own livelihood?