LiveJournal, which hosts about 13 million web journals, has deleted about 500 journals that suggest an interest in sexual predation or pedophilia, among other illegal activities. Prompted by anti-pedophilia groups, notably Warriors for Innocence, the deletion has resulted in accusations of censorship from LiveJournal users, who observe that some of the deleted journals were fandom communities, fan fiction repositories, or role playing games that discuss sexual abuse and pedophilia in a fictional context without supporting it in real life.
LiveJournal, which hosts about 13 million web journals, has deleted about 500 journals that suggest an interest in sexual predation or pedophilia, among other illegal activities. Prompted by anti-pedophilia groups, notably Warriors for Innocence, the deletion has resulted in accusations of censorship from LiveJournal users, who observe that some of the deleted journals were fandom communities, fan fiction repositories, or role playing games that discuss sexual abuse and pedophilia in a fictional context without supporting it in real life.The maintainer of one such community, an archive of Harry Potter fan fiction, femmequixotic, reports that LiveJournal abuse staff claimed a legal obligation to close communities that had been reported to them and that listed illegal activities as interests. Responding to the outcry from LiveJournal users, Warriors for Innocence asserts that LiveJournal also closed down some communities not reported by their organization. For more information, see Declan McCullagh’s report for CNET News.com.
Perfert fanfic
Yeah whaterver, fewer freaks spouting their disgusting perversions is good. If they want to pay for bandwidth let them do it but you can trace those freaks back… and beat them senseless.
I mean register your opposition.
Pedophilic fanfic, please go kill yourself.
LJ
A post by the Chairman/CEO of LJ/Six Apart here: http://news.livejournal.com/99159.html
The disturbing part about this whole mess is that while they did manage to weed out a handful of pedophile/incest journals/comms, many, many more were fanfic based OR support communities. They did not base their suspensions/deletions on the content of the journals but merely the interests listed for those journals.
They say that listing those interests means you participate/support them. Yeah, right. I’m sure survivors of abuse support abuse. The strange thing is that in the past, when people reported what they considered LJs that were actually promoting illegal activities –they were basically told, by the LJ abuse staff, that nothing could be done because discussing such things wasn’t a crime. With this situation, they’ve clearly violated their own policies–and I think it’s understandable that people were in an uproar over it. We were also upset because of the lack of ANY explanation by TPTB at LJ/SA–they spoke with the media before posting anything on the news LJ–not good customer relations.
After all, what’re their next targets? Homosexuality, politics, religion? Yeah, LJ has got some major, major PR work to do with their users.
But it was neat to see fandom come together over this issue.
s/
Fan Fic?
“fandom communities, fan fiction repositories, or role playing games that discuss sexual abuse and pedophilia in a fictional context without supporting it in real life.”
Fan fiction for child rape? And you say you don’t support the crime in real life? Closing a support group for victims of sexual abuse is stupid, but I do not give a rat’s ass about people who support it being banned.
Re:Fan Fic?
Fan fiction for child rape? And you say you don’t support the crime in real life?
I write Criminal Minds fanfic which includes writing about serial murderers, serial rapists, kidnappers, etc. Does this mean I support those crimes? No, it does not. Writing about child rape–which is an unfortunate fact of life in our world–does not mean the writer supports it. Do I read such fanfic? No, I do not. But I also don’t read your average, everyday fanfic that contains heterosexual relationships between consenting adults, either. (If my user name doesn’t make it obvious, I read and write (mostly) slash fanfic.) Are there actual pedophiles out their writing that sort of thing? I’m sure there are, but I honestly doubt many of them would bother to disguise their work in the fandom of a particular show.
Also, it is my understanding that a lot of the Harry Potter fic (those archives were the hardest hit in the great strikeout of 07) that was classed as pedophilia was written by young (ie underage) teenage girls–writing their fantasies of being with an older character from HP. Would that still qualify it as a child rape/pedophile story, if the “victim” is writing it? (I don’t read in the HP fandom, so I do not know just how much truth there is to this, or how big a portion of the fandom it would be, but it wouldn’t surprise me.) I’ve known a few fanfic writers who were sexual abused as children–they’ve written stories in their fandoms featuring this issue–are they supporting child rape as well?
By your flawed logic, every writer who ever wrote anything (and I’m not just talking fanfic) that was fictional would support the topic they wrote about. Somehow, I don’t think the writers of shows like CM or CSI actually support murder, rape, etc. I’m sure those who write fictional murder mystery stories don’t support murder either. I’m sure people who write fiction about child abuse, child sexual abuse, etc., don’t support those either.
Just because someone writes about a certain topic in fanfic or profic, doesn’t mean they support it in real life.
s/
Seems like a bit of a non-issue, actually
If you go to the livejournal main page, you’ll see that none of the journals or groups were actually deleted – they were just suspended. Livejournal is being very apologetic about the whole mess, and is restoring accounts that were erroneously suspended.
All this fuss just because a handful of fanfic writers and people who did a poor job of wording their interests lost access to their accounts for a day or two…