Posts from — May 2007

I’ve been watching the commentary and reactions on LiveJournal since in their infinite wisdom bowed to an outside group and deleted groups and journals with incest and related terms in the interests.

I’ve always believed that pedophilia, child porn and other sexual acts with children are not good, but this arbitrary action got fandom journals and groups, rather than the actual perpetrators of sex crimes against children. The majority of those fans write/draw/talk about FICTIONAL characters and they are being punished because one group is afraid that children would be harmed by being exposed to that?

Also, so as to not be forgotten. LJ deleted the comms/journals with no warning whatsoever, not allowing the owners the opportunity to backup, or remove offensive material. That was in the ToS as well, that anybody who was to be banned/suspended for violating the ToS would have the chance to retrieve their content before deletion.

Some links others have gathered for info along with a Boing Boing article and a couple of link collection posts.

I’ll update this post as I collect more links. I’ll do a post later, sharing links I have on Fanlib.com as wells, since this may be mere coincidence that two major threats to fandom on LiveJournal occurred so close to each other.

ETA: I’ve been using Technorati and Google’s Blogsearch to gather links and also to add that LJ’s servers are getting hammered.

The LJ News posting I have linked below was at 76 pages of comments and had been up for 19 hours at the time I looked at it, which was about 2 hours ago.

Links of Interest

http://catrinella.livejournal.com/151812.html
http://fandomtossed.greatestjournal.com/1338.html
http://community.livejournal.com/fandom_lawyers/profile
http://community.livejournal.com/reasoned_speech/profile
http://community.livejournal.com/innocence_jihad/profile
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/fandomtossed/profile

SJT Special Letter to Readers. My post to my IY fandom newsletter.

Article at Boing Boing.
Fandom_Wank post.

News.com article.

Slashdot.org posting.

LJ News: Well We Really Screwed This One Up… I’ll comment on this posting once I read through.

Google BlogSearch LJ+Strikethrough, LJ + Pornogate, and LJ + Deletegate.

livejournal
strikeoutgate2007
fandom
strikethrough07
deletegate

Link to Whedonesque : Comments on 13271 : Let’s Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death.

Also: Equality Now.

Read and think.

Okay so y’all have had at least one person affected by the LJ mojo meme, and got their journals defaced by a nasty picture.  The perpetrator was one aka along with others unknown.  [LJ mojo google search]

Most have taken down the meme results but the aftereffects are still being felt.  Awesome job for somebody who wanted to be a jackass.

He friended me last year sometime, and I checked out the profile and was immediately suspicious as there was a ton of gross interests and quite a few ‘friends’ (over a thousand or so) with no communities.  I checked a few at random and none of them had any interests in common with the dirtyfilthy guy whose icon was a face covered in a brown substance I don’t want to think about since I just had dinner.

I flipped out.  I felt violated, since here was this stranger that I have never spoken to in my life offline or online, watching my journal where on occasion I talk about my daughter and give out her name.  He gave off the creepiest vibe I have ever felt and I’ll be honest, it scared me.  I was so tempted to flock my journal.  I dug about LJ and found the admin console and a useful command: ban_set [user].  Useful tool to keep away the people you don’t like and don’t want to have read your journal. 

Strange feeling for a denizen of the net, having blogged online since 2004 (three years?  Dang.), and coming up on my one year anniversary with LJ, along with using chat, IM and email since Dec. 1996, to feel like somebody just violated your privacy when it was just words and a gross picture and just a feeling of wrongness.

But that runs smack dab into one of my firm beliefs that everybody should be free to say what they want, but yet I value having a trusted place to say things that aren’t for general consumption.  Sticky conundrum. 

[crossposted at my LJ.]