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Web protestors only hurt their cause

On Memorial Day, the collective forces of the LiveJournal online community taught parent company Six Apart Ltd. a lesson: you can delete anything you want, as long as you don’t take away our porn.

At the very least, that’s the message I got from various users of LiveJournal over the last week, after Six Apart banned more than 500 journals over allegations of hosting child pornography or being operated by child predators. Since the bans were based off listed user interests, they also deleted several journals and communities related to fan fiction, stories written by fans set within pre-existing narratives, such as the Star Trek universe or the The Lord of the Rings novels.

The bans came about when a group of vigilantes calling themselves "Warriors For Innocence" submitted a list of accounts on LiveJournal.com that "supported incest and pedophilia." Contrary to normal LiveJournal practice – which has been to ignore any abuse complaints and seemingly randomly ban accounts for no reason – the few abuse team members that weren’t on vacation actually followed through and banned most of the journals on the list in the name of "protecting the children" without any investigation.

One thing that should be noted at this juncture is that, as with all Web sites hosted in the United States, LiveJournal is forbidden to grant accounts to persons under the age of 13, meaning that while there are minors on LiveJournal, there are technically no children. Furthermore, LiveJournal has a history of actively enforcing this policy. This means that LiveJournal is mostly useless for online child predators.

It turns out, however, that most of the communities that were banned were actually legitimate communities. Several rape and child abuse support communities were banned, as were communities for discussing Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. However, the community that got the most attention for being wrongfully banned was Pornish Pixies, a community promoting erotic fan fiction with characters from the Harry Potter series.

While LiveJournal’s censorship of longstanding users and communities is cause for concern – to the point that several users have already set up accounts on other LiveJournal-like services – the actions of some fan fiction enthusiasts are just as repulsive. While the official apology from Six Apart was lacking, enthusiasts seemed more concerned about the availability of their porn than the legitimate censorship issues that the bans raised. Threats to fly to San Francisco, dress as pirates and sing "Hoist the Colors" from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End were raised. This is hardly a legitimate means of protest – it’s just silly and reeks of immaturity.

Censorship is a horrible thing. Acts of censorship, however, should be punished in a proper manner. Instead of merely threatening to leave LiveJournal, actually do so. Flood Six Apart’s chief executive officer’s inbox with irate messages telling him in no uncertain terms how you feel about his company’s action – but spare the profanity and Snape on Harry action.

McCormick, a computer science post baccalaureate student, can be reached via [email protected]

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