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my outrage, let me show you it

This is mostly a housekeeping post. I have no new information to contribute regarding the current kerfuffle, so if you're looking to find out wuzzgoinon, I invite you to visit elke_tanzer's very comprehensive giant post o'links on the subject. Somehow I doubt there are a lot of people reading this journal who don't yet know what's going on, though. What follows are my reactions to the current situation as well as some decisions I have made regarding this journal.


0001 - I have made backups of my LiveJournal on various journalling sites. Degrees of success varied, so they're imprecise mirrors at best, but I really can't be arsed to go through every entry and reproduce the LJ exactly -- if worse comes to worst, I make a daily backup of my journal both with Blog Backup (public entries only, including comments) and LJArchive (all entries, including comments). I only mirrored public entries, and I will not post friendslocked anywhere except here on LJ. Thanks to Semagic, every public post I make shall henceforth be mirrored on these other sites. This is where you can find me:

JournalFen
GreatestJournal
LostJournal
InsaneJournal
DeadJournal

I also have journals at a few other services, but I think five is enough to be getting on with.

0010 - As of this writing, I am not leaving LJ. I have a permanent account, which means I give them no money, ever again, for enjoying all the perks of a paid account and using the fuck out of the service. Damned if I'm going to take away whatever infinitesimal server strain my journal causes SixApart. A friend gave me an LJ gift certificate for my birthday, and I used it all up on sending virtual gifts to a few of you, but I will never again buy anything from LiveJournal, no matter what happens with the current situation. It is my LJ friends-list that I'm going to keep up with -- so if you're on my flist here and have permanently moved to a different journalling/blogging site, please let me know so I can create me a feed for your new journal and make LJ's servers work a little harder whilst they retrieve content they could have hosted themselves if they weren't such duplicitous bastards.

0011 - I'm staying on LJ not because zomg I love LJ and hope they get their act together!1. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have zero respect for those who run LJ and I have no illusions regarding their agenda. If fandom leaves LJ for a place of our own, I will follow -- I just don't want to permanently depart for an LJ-clone where the same fandom-related problems will resurface sooner or later. I also have friends here who have no interest in fandom, and I'm not willing to leave them behind on a whim, without knowing where I'm going. I am willing to contribute to a place of our own, in any way that I can, which is why I'm watching fandom_flies and encourage all of you to do the same. There will be a time to go, eventually.

0100 - On the subject of ponderosa121 and elaboration, I am completely fucking outraged, but not because I view LJ's actions as censorship. As many have already said, 6A/LJ are well within their rights to bar any type of content they wish; it's a private web site and therefore they can disallow whatever they wish, be it graphic depictions of sex between fictional characters or pine-nut cookie recipes. The source of my outrage is two-fold.

First, these suspensions say "one example of your work proves to us that you are a criminal." I don't know ponderosa121, but I'm certain that her journal contained more than just chan-ish HP fanart. There were probably posts about her life, work, school, random fandom squee, and so forth. I know elaboration and she's certainly not a criminal; she's a young woman with a life, with friends, who posted beautifully coloured artwork (some of which happened to be sexually graphic). I just talked to her on the phone a few days ago, and she has a lovely voice. LJ gave these women no warning, no chance to remove the "offending" artwork from their servers. Instead, they suspended their journals -- art, life, and all -- and thereby branded them criminals. Both of the artists were told in no uncertain terms that they were no longer welcome on LiveJournal. Because apparently, posting porny Harry Potter fanart makes you a dangerous paedophile. There are no words in the dictionary for how fucking unacceptable that is.

Second, there are no clear rules on what is and isn't allowed, and these suspensions, based on so-called "obscenity laws", are completely arbitrary. The images that got Ponderosa and Foo suspended disturbed the delicate sensibilities of the asshat(s?) who reported them, and in turn were deemed as lacking in artistic merit by a random egghead on the so-called "Abuse Prevention" team. What resulted was the suspension of two longtime LJ users -- customers, natch -- one of whom had a permanent account. Meanwhile, the images in question are a far fucking cry from some of the chan art I've seen in my day -- I would not have said that Harry is under 18 in Ponderosa's image, and whoever decided that Fred and George are under 18 in Foo's image must not have been reading the last book very closely. Fred and George are both over eighteen (and we know it was not the incest that was found objectionable and lacking in artistic merit). So essentially, these permanent suspensions of paying customer accounts happened based on opinion, and these suspensions are made even more arbitrary by the fact that there are no clear guidelines in the LJ ToS that can help users decide whether what they're about to post is okay or not. Two paying customer accounts are suspended arbitrarily, and LJ has been utterly silent on the issue even despite increasing media coverage; e-mails and phone-calls go unanswered as more and more fen are afraid that they're next -- because there is no fucking way to tell if they're safe or not. Not even speaking of LJ employees making some very unfortunate "role-playing" decisions as fannish customers grow increasingly upset. To call this "bad customer service" is an understatement, and it's particularly outrageous because clearly 6A/LJ think they can get away with treating their customers like crap.

0101 - Lastly, fuck you, LJ. Fuck you for affecting Sectus and our fandom's final book release, fuck you for making Prophecy so much less squeeful for so many of us.

[This post also on: GJ | JF | IJ]