It’s a Strikethrough-Eat-Livejournal World Out There

So it’s been just over a month since Six Apart and Livejournal decided to enforce their terms of service and subsequently ban the living daylights out of 500+ journals.

For the ‘unofficial’ list, try catrinella’s LJ.

The basic idea behind this mass murder was to eliminate journals whose Interest fields contained certain objectionable ideas, such as pedophilia, rape, and incest. However, the moderators got a bit too trigger-happy and started suspending journals whose genre make up a large part of the LJ writing community: Slash.

The Harry Potter fandom took a critical blow for a few days, though with community names like “hp_incest,” it’s really no wonder.

The Strikethrough was genuinely successful, though, shutting down several journals that were legitimately populated by pedophiles and existed for the express purpose of indulging this obsession. Many users involved with these journals, which will go un-named and un-linked here, deleted their journals before moderators could get to them, and the groups were effectively dismantled.

However, the problem remains that these people could still jump back into the system at any given time, as long as they get a new Hotmail address and take five seconds to register a new account. In the 8 years that LJ has been around, this is the first mass action by the abuse team to clean up the network. Now, with far too few checks and far too many threats, this Strikethrough seems more like a temporary fix or a symbolic gesture, especially when you take into account the number of suspended journals that were inevitably reactivated.

~ by echostarlite on July 9, 2007.