Soapbox

[marcmagus]

I assume everybody's heard about the ruckus going on with LJ deleting a whole bunch of journals and communities which might have been supportive of pedophilia. I've been thinking about this for about a day now, and I think my opinion has matured a bit. This is probably going to be controversial.

I think LiveJournal screwed up, big time. Their mistake was in deciding to monitor content to any extent not required of them by law. Not only should they not have deleted fannish communities and survivors communities, they shouldn't have deleted anything which isn't actively used to solicit sex with children. And those only to protect themselves from legal action.

See, I think pedophiles should get LJs, too. If somebody wants to come on here and post about how they get turned on by children, I don't think LJ should stop them. Maybe they want to angst about how their feelings are in conflict with the expectations of society. Maybe they want to talk about how they're coming to accept themselves as who they are. Hell, maybe they even want to say there's nothing wrong with what they desire and that society is wrong to damn them for it. I think an LJ where people don't have to fear banning for expressing distasteful opinions is a better LJ.

This is about free speech. Not in an "I'm an American and I have a right to Free Speech, dammit!" way. Six-Apart is a business, and they can make as restrictive rules as they please in this community, and our recourse is to vote with our feet and our wallets with respect to those choices. But the thing which makes this community beautiful is that people can and do talk about whatever's on their minds. If we make topics off limits, that starts to disappear. People become afraid to post, because their account might get deleted. This tool for speedy communication with complete strangers all around the world becomes compromised.

Now, granted, the person who posts to their public LJ that they fantasize about having sex with children can fully expect to be at the center of a raging shitstorm of protest. That's to be expected, that's the community reacting within the means of the community. Hell, there'll probably be a flood of requests to get them banned, too. But the powers that be shouldn't cave in to those complaints. A place where distasteful speech isn't silenced, and the community is allowed to hear it and respond, is a better place.

I'm going to spare you all the Free Speech rhetoric. I don't have anything new to say on that front. I'm just saying that if we hold this ideal of Free Speech, then it includes the pedophiles along with the Nazis and the gay-bashers. They get to say their piece too; use it to identify potential criminals, bust them if they go from speech to action, but don't silence them.

ETA: Ok, it's not just about Free Speech. It's also about people wh o aren't thinking. Some people don't seem to realize that there's a difference between writing fiction about sex with children, writing about one's experiences in the past having had sex with children, writing about one's fantasies about having sex with children, writing about having had sex with a child yesterday, writing about one's plans to have sex with children, and actually having sex with children. Speech is, itself, an action, but it's not the action it describes. Sometimes that action is problematic too (as writing to solicit sex with minors).

Comments

[oldsilenus.livejournal.com]

Oy. I had actually not heard about that.

But, if the situation is as you're describing it, yeah, what you said is pretty much right on.

[directordale.livejournal.com]

The organization that is behind the firestorm, witchhunt, whatever you want to call it is named "Warriors for Innoncence" Their website says they are dedicated to tracking pedophiles down on the internet. I guess they are the on-line equivelent of the "To Catch a Predator" series.

I went to their website yesterday. Almost every article and sentence on the page saidsomething like LJ habours pedophiles. The stragedy is wrong and crude but very effective. Their is nothing worse for a business to be associated with pedophilia.

You are right that this is about buisness and Six Apart decided that they would it would be more bad for the bottom line if they are associated with pedophilia in the public conciousness.

[theoldwolf.livejournal.com]

We both know a pseudo-public forum where a user has been banned for abusive free speech by the management. Basically because their use of free speech inhibited and lessened the expereince for the rest of the community. I guess my question to you is "Isn't the community allowed to make a decision that they don't wish to deal with certain types of discussion?" Yes, everyone can vote to leave the community but honestly, that may have happened to individuals anyway.

[marcmagus]

Apples and apples, please. To make that parallel meaningfully:

There are a lot of spaces within LJ. The owner of a journal moderates what content will appear within it and in its comments section. The owner or moderators of a community exercise the same control over that community. They're all completely allowed to exclude certain types of speech from within those spaces. But I'm talking about people being permitted to say whatever they like within their own LJ, and set its interests and profile to be what they wish.

To read somebody else's journal or profile requires you to actively go and attempt to read their content. This is very different than a community, which you might track, or comments on another journal, where you might not reasonably expect to see a particular other person commenting.

Banning someone from LJ for abusive behavior such as going out and posting inflammatory remarks in communities and other people's journals is similar to the event you're talking about, and it's something I support. We're still not talking about banning someone for discussing a subject or taking a particular stance on it, however.

Again, the bottom line is that LJ is free to do waht they like. But I'd rather keep my journal at the LJ which doesn't ban people for making distasteful posts in their own journal than the LJ which does. In fact, I'd rather be at the LJ which permits communities dedicated to ideas I find horrifying, and which bans the people who come in and act disruptively to that community, than the one which bans the community and lauds the people who disrupt it.

[anothervoicemdf.livejournal.com]

In theory I agree with you. I think we have to distinguish between behavior we as a society want to outlaw, and things ABOUT that kind of behavior. If for nothing else then the fact that free expression around subjects like pedophilia allows society to re-affirm why we as a whole find it so problematic. It also allows for a far more nuanced discussion of the topic then if its not allowed to be talked about at all- for instance in this case allowing people to really look at what motivates a pedophile and ask if its really something evil or, as most doctors seem to agree, more of an illness or an addiction, like alcoholism.

Where I disagree with you is on blaming LJ or whoever owns and runs LJ for this decision. I don't know much about this situation, but I'd imagine that of far greater concern then bad publicity to the people who run LJ is the fear of lawsuits or criminal charges. Bogs are still relatively new, legally speaking at least, and while there hasn't been much established law, what there is leans on the side of making the host company criminally or at least civilly liable for what happens on the sites it runs, no matter how many ways it tries to distance itself from the content that others post on their site.

I think that legal situation is seriously flawed, and I hope it will be resolved in the next few years in a way that better protects the parent companies, and doesn't ask them to monitor content. As it currently stands, the legal situation is still quite murky and full of gray areas, and while you could argue about what could or couldn't get LJ in legal trouble, I imagine they just think, rather then taking the chance and possibly being sued into oblivion they would rather just be uber cautious and ban all of it. It's too bad they feel that is necessary, but I can't really blame them when they could get thoroughly screwed if they roll the dice and it doesn't work out.

What we need is not to blame the companies, but to get laws passed that firmly protect people like LJ, Myspace, Facebook, etc from being legally responsible for what others do with their services.

[directordale.livejournal.com]

I don't think they were necessarily fearing lawsuits or criminal charges but loss of new clients, investors, and ad revenue because of associations with pedophilia and other illegal activties. Buisnesses would rather be associated with Al Qaeda than pedophilia probably.

[amyamy.livejournal.com]

I'm almost more cranky with SixApart/LJ on how they went about it. Yep, it's a business, they can make whatever rules they want and, when it comes to legal worries they're likely to make the most reactionary one they can, simply to avoid lawsuits and bad press. As far as anyone can tell, the order came down from on high for the abuse team to simply do a blanket interest search and ban them all, which meant that in addition to journals and communities which were actually supportive of pedophilia, they managed to also pick up (among others) fictional role-playing journals, literature discussion coms and support/recovery journals. It was so badly handled.

[marcmagus]

Yup. They screwed the pooch but good. I've already seen plenty of other people describe that situation sufficiently eloquently that I thought I'd just pull out a soapbox in my own little corner of the room and rant about some tangential thoughts this all inspired in me which might actually be interesting.