Strikethrough '07: A Lesson In the Careful Handling of Free Speech Issues

Background


LiveJournal is one of the top 5 blogging sites, with nearly 3 million active blogs and at least 2,000 communities (people sharing a blog on a particular interest or focus, from rape survivor networks to fanfiction communities to small groups of localized friends)  updated in the last month alone. Finding a complete list of communities is impossible.

Due to the set up of the communities, which is as far as I know, unique amongst online blogging sites,  the 100x100 user pictures(avatars, icons whatever you want to call it), 15 offered to free users and the maximum of 199 user pictures for paid users,  and many other features, LiveJournal (aka LJ) is the most popular site for fandom communities as well as publishing fanfiction and other fandom-related activities (fanfiction.net is disparagingly referred to as The Pit within LJ) 


Strikethrough is what happens to a LiveJournal user's name when their account has been deleted. Their comments remain, but all posts in communities are removed, and their jounral no longer exists. A user can delete their own journal, or the LiveJournal employee may delete it for various resons.  Boldthrough is when an account is suspeded

Ex: myDeletedUser indicates that journal no longer exists.
      mySuspendedUser indicates that the journal is suspended
      myRegularUser is the way the username should show up


Events

A group (Warriors of Innocence) pressured LiveJounrnal to remove journals that were, according to them pedophillic or otherwise morally and legally reprehensible, by informing SixApart (the company that owns LiveJournal) that they must either delete those communities and journals, or else the would inform the paid avertisers that their advertisments were being displayed next to sexually explicit material.

While the concept of attempting to prevent the spread of rapists, child molesters and other human scum from propagating via the internet is a rather righteous cause, the matter of handling such actions is difficult.

LiveJournal reacted by deleting 500 journals which had anything that came up within their rather wide search terms related to such topics.

As the article published in the online news archive CNet states

"As a queer, feminist writer who explores the darker aspects of human nature, many of my stories deal with incest, rape and child molestation," a LiveJournal member named "bitterfig" wrote. "As such, I belonged to and contributed to several of the communities which have been suspended and frankly I'm pretty offended. I don't like being lumped in with rapists and pedophiles and other 'monsters on the Web.'"

Practically any attempt to sort works of fiction into tidy piles of acceptable and unacceptable material, of course, is likely to invite controversy. Works by noted authors such as James Joyce, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs have been lauded as masterpieces--and at other times prosecuted as obscene.

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.

As a large (and maybe disproportionate) amount of the journals were fandom-related, the fandom community saw this as a direct strike against their free speech and their community.

Protests, including support-posts, support-memes, and a community fandom_counts were started. fandom_counts entire purpose was to get a tally of the unique users in the fandom. To this day, there are nearly 4,000 users who have joined the community (although this is no where near the total users involved in fandom, this community alone is larger than the number of users who are from the Netherlands) On LiveJournal at least, the users who identify with fandom are equivalent to a small, but very very active country. 

The main issues within the community were that fandom-focused topics were persecuted, while topics of  racial discrimination and many of the more real-life oriented explicit content slipped through the LJ staff members collective strikethrough-net. In addition, no warning was given, and LJ's public handling of the case equated fan-works with endorsement of said situation in reality.

 As RandomSome1 posted in her analytical essay on the events and the reactions:

Most recently, on September 3rd, users’ multiple complaints to the BBB were addressed. Chris Vail (representing himself as General Counsel for Six Apart) defended the company’s actions by saying absolutely everything that was deleted without warning was “related to child pornography, pedophilia,” and so on. This blatantly libels the RP journals, the incest and rape survivors, and the Lolita community, clearly shows Lj’s lack of differentiation between fanworks and child pornography, and makes it exceptionally plain that Lj’s staff did not take any users seriously when they complained about being repeatedly called pedophiles and child molesters. Vail also did not address complaints of news not being directed to the userbase at news, did not address Lj’s warnings of vikingcarrot or of cluegirl, and did not address complaints about burr86’s statements in efw.

It seems this wreck is far from over.

Most of us understand that Six Apart is (at least theoretically) trying to take responsibility for its content and keep itself safe from lawsuits. Should someone take them to court, no matter how frivolous the reason, they automatically lose—not the case, but thousands of dollars in legal expenses. No matter the number of users that’ve joined fandom_counts, the court costs from one lawsuit to a major company (the average was $30,000, as quoted to me by a Cedar Point rep. a few years ago) could still outweigh the gains from keeping this vocal, somewhat feral segment of its customer base.

One wonders if this wave of bad press has factored into their calculations. One wonders if Six Apart expected people to find links to and pick apart their promises, contradictions, and commentary; if they expected a full dissection of the Miller test; if they expected people to find how the charities they were promoting were really closely tied to the company itself. One wonders if they clearly grasped the nature of what they were dealing with.


Overall, there has been much discontent with the shifting policies, outright lies and hypocrisy, lack of communication, and accusations of child pornography and pedophilia. A number of users have left for other journaling sites, such as Insanejournal, Greatestjournal, or Journalfen. A number of other users have declared themselves sick of the entire mess and have repeatedly told the dissenters to STFU. In these cases, it appears that the point has been missed: Had Livejournal been clear and upfront about what it would and would not allow to begin with rather than hedging about with loophole-ridden legalese (“No underage sexuality in artistic works, period. If you have a question about a particular thing's status then ask,” versus “It’s probably okay, but only if it’s not obscene, and this says what’s obscene by undefined community standards as not set in this site which also says that art does not apply”) all of this mess would have been averted. Had they not tried to stifle all naysayers with the label of “child pornographers,” then things wouldn’t have gotten nearly as ugly within fandom. And had they responded to frantic fen within a reasonable period of time, then things wouldn’t have escalated to the point that entire communities and movements were formed to oppose them.

The Strikethrough '07 was not an isolated incident, and resulted in many mirror-journals being created at GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, and other sites. Some people left LJ permanently, while others left it temporarily. Nearly all possibly-controversial material requires either joining limited groups, or being friended by indidual users, which does not really limit the viewing of such sites, but irritatingly enough, opens up your own journal to viewing by those users. 

Further Information & Documentation may be found at:

RandomSome1's Personal Blog: (hoping for) a fistful of change
FanHistory.com: LiveJournal Article, Strikethrough Section
And, as always
Wikipedia. org: LiveJournal (Relevent section: Controversies)

(some discretion may be advised when clicking on FanHistory, as it is a bit more explicit as to the nature of the content deleted, including quotes from emails sent between LJ users and LJ administrators)

Conclusions
1) Actions taken against even a miniscule faction of a group on the internet will be reacted to as if the entire group was threatend
2)Fandom regards its rights very seriously and is not passive
3) Everything will be documented; Nothing is forgetten. Multiple communities are dedicated to remembering histories only relevant to small sections of the population.
4) the Internet, and fandom is a very, very difficult medium to police and to monitor.

The differences between art, porn and things which require legal action may be very indefinte. Because someone reads fiction on a topic, do they suport it? Because someone discusses a topic, do they support it? Someone writes fiction on a topic, do they support it?  How should one regulate a media.

Homosexuality may be legal in one area. Someone in that area writes a relevant story and posts it on the web. Another area may have banned homosexuality, and someone from that area reads said story. Is that person acting illegally? Is the site displaying that story acting illegally?  What if the topic was incest between  cousins? Underage sex? Or any other number of topics which are morally & legally grey- or even flat out illegal?


What is the responsibility and liabilities of each party in these situations? What, if any, limits should exist on the web in regards to such content?


-Lia