CNET reports on mass deletion of people's stories at Live Journal
Thousands of LiveJournal customers are rebelling against the company's recent decision to censor hundreds of sex-themed discussion groups, a broad swath that has led to the removal of literary critiques and fan-written fiction about Harry Potter.
LiveJournal, which is owned by San Francisco-based Six Apart, confirmed Wednesday that it deleted around 500 journals this week in hopes of better "protecting children." It said the deletion was prompted by activist groups, including one called Warriors for Innocence that claims to track sites promoting pedophilia, the sexual abuse of minors, and other illegal activities.
What's new:
Thousands of users of blog-publishing service LiveJournal are up in arms over Six Apart's deletion of journals it says contain material that could be harmful to children.
Bottom line:
Legal experts say LiveJournal is clearly not liable for fictional stories and related discussions posted by its users. But despite customer outcry, Six Apart is standing firm in its position that the deleted journals violate company policy.
"We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up," Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart, said in a telephone interview. The site boasts about 13 million journals.
Some deleted LiveJournal communities went by names like childlove and little_children (a community permits multiple LiveJournal users to post entries, while an individual account is limited to one user). Others, however, broadly fall into the category of science fiction, fantasy or user-written "fandom" stories--and it is those that have sparked the outcry.
What has outraged the LiveJournal protesters is that the purging of discussions and accounts went far beyond what they say was necessary to target pedophilia. One post noted that two journals were deleted on the grounds that "they in some way encouraged illegal behavior" even though the accounts belonged to clearly labeled fictional characters in a role-playing game. Another deleted community was reportedly home to Spanish-language discussions of Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita.
So, the protestors are saying that LiveJournal mowed down legitimate journals.
There's going to some movement of people from LiveJournal to Blogspot or some such.
Some LJ members who are interested in gay lesbian etc issues are among those affected.