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The People's Republic of LiveJournal: Internet Jihadists have declared war on LiveJournal, ostensibly for the sake of the chiiiiiiiiildren
. The bampots at Warriors for Innocence (read the comments before clicking this link) claim to be dedicated to hunting pedophiles where they fester
but in reality, they hate fandom and fan fiction. At least the effect of their actions has been to shut down a number of fannish communities devoted to writing about romantic trysts between fictional characters. Most badly affected has been Harry Potter fandom, even though Harry Potter has been over the age of consent in the country in which the stories are based since book 5. A list of banned fannish communities shows a number of Harry Potter related ones.
They also hate literature. One of the banned communities was a Spanish language one discussing the work of Vladimir Nabokov. Nor do they like discussion of sex and censorship, as the banning of porn_debate demonstrates.
And, as you might expect, our crusaders demonstrate a remarkable lack of intelligence. One of the banned communities was called lol_porn, but obviously they didn't look at it before complaining as it was for lolcat style postings using porno as a basis.
Other subcultures are worried. Fans of yaoi are concerned that they will be targetted, not just because of the existence of shōta (where the characters are underage), but because the somewhat effeminate characters can appear younger than they are in the story. The moderators of yaoi_daily and yaoi_daily_cafe have felt the need to set up a status page and make back-up plans.
So far, the Jihad has not noticed Gothic Lolita, which they are bound to misinterpret as soon as they do. The number of actual child abusers affected by the purge appears to be zero. Their victims, on the other hand, have grounds to be worried:
This is not a fandom-only issue. LJ's heavy-handed response threatens support groups and researchers. By telling users (after that fact and in contradiction to their own FAQ) that you can receive a permanent suspension, proactively, for having an "illegal" interest, pretty much everyone's at risk.
A Jihad Against Innocence
LJ community devoted to protesting and fighting back against the extremists.
(written with a lot of help from Red Wolf)
Update (from Red Wolf): Naruto fandom is scared and the Jihad denies attacking innocent sites. They're all guilty. We're never wrong
. And this list of naughty words suggests that Gothic Lolita has, indeed been noticed, and the comments suggest support communities are worried. The last comment references a 12th century Georgian poet—Shota Rustavelli.
Posted in
Censorship
and Fundies
and Popular Culture: Harry Potter
at 12:58. Last modified on May 30 2007 at 18:45.
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Comments
1: Posted by: Red Wolf | May 30, 2007 2:20 PM
Late night/lunch time, opposing hemisphere, IM research rules
2: Posted by: Feòrag | May 30, 2007 6:47 PM
Reports are coming in that the Jihadist site is riddled with ad- and spyware.
3: Posted by: Red Wolf | May 30, 2007 9:58 PM
I saw that in passing this morning. I didn't notice directly because I use Firefox and that kind of malware typically targets IE, plus half the time I was on the Mac anyway.
I can't confirm this without some serious google-foo, that I don't have time for at the moment, but it appears that some individual accounts that have been permanently suspended were survivor journals. I'll get you to prod me later to go into research mode.
4: Posted by: Red Wolf | May 30, 2007 11:50 PM
Remember last night when I questioned the legality of their dodgy tutorial of how to set up a fake profile to entrap people? It has been raised on one of the legal discussion sites as dodgy in the extreme.
It's illegal, it doesn't help the victims, it interferes with real law enforcement work, it's amatuerish enough to easily be picked up by paedophiles who will ignore them or move on, it's inadmissible as evidence and, if nothing else, is a surefire sign of bampotery.
Oh, and they're whining about the flack they're getting from LJ. Again, it's the cry of along with the circular logic of
5: Posted by: Red Wolf | May 31, 2007 12:05 AM
Something Awful has come out in support of LiveJournal.
Warren Ellis has offered his two cents worth with LiveJournal Deletes Hundreds Of "Paedophile" Sites and LJ Paedo-Storm Continues.
Fandom Lawyers has an interesting round-up.
Firefox News note that the Purity Police have discovered fanfic on Livejournal.
It has been dugg as: Livejournal suspends hundreds of accounts.
cussedness has dug up some dirt on the wankers and their proudly proclaimed hate-mongering antics:
The Anime News Network: Shota Community, Other LiveJournal Accounts Suspended.
BoingBoing: LJ purges incest, slash fic under pressure from self-appointed "warriors".
Declan McCullagh from C|net: Mass deletion sparks LiveJournal revolt.
6: Posted by: Red Wolf | May 31, 2007 6:40 AM
Dark Christianity: : Possible group?
LiveJournal are claiming their decision (via Declan's article on C|net, linked above), but have had paedophilia reported to them in the past and refused to remove it claiming . Note that they're talking to the press but not their paying customers.
One of the affected LJ members has been contacted by the CEO of SixApart with an offer to review the content of her deleted journal. There's a notably frustrated response from friends of the member who are asking
MetaFilter: livejournal suspends hundreds of accounts
w00t. Cat macros
You know it's bad when even Perverted Justice is calling you a moron:
In a comment on Declan's article at C|net, another LJ member is outraged by selective deletion due to her report of a paedophile being ignored by the LJ Abuse Team. While no longer active, the purported paedophile's LJ is still live. However, one of the wingnuts creaming himself over the most recent post has been culled.
Slashdot: Mass Deletion Leads to LiveJournal Revolt
Anil Dash has responded to the MetaFilter post:
As of this comment, a response from LiveJournal has not been issued to the community.
Sues, one of the insane Redneck Mafia scum fronting WFI, posted her whine to SixApart about LiveJournal on Blogger. The post attracted some comments. In fact it attracted a shitload of comments. Initially Sues and her bampot buddies tried to reply by calling any dissenter a (learn to spell you ignorant bitch) or deleting anything that cut a little too close to the bone. There are several complaints about WFI accusing support groups of paedophilia and having them shutdown. The general consensus of the comments seems to be that WFI is a group of paedophiles protecting their own. I suspect it's more likely that they're ignorant morons who caught an episode of CSI one night and are trying to emulate it, with no training and a serious lack of clue.
7: Posted by: Red Wolf | May 31, 2007 9:27 AM
Barak Berkowitz, Chairman and CEO of Six Apart, has finally issued a public response to the LiveJournal community.
8: Posted by: Feòrag | May 31, 2007 9:41 AM
The public response seems okay at first reading: , but it also reveals the poor choice of the word "interests" when it seems they really meant "likes".
9: Posted by: Red Wolf | May 31, 2007 10:24 AM
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of grey area of and it varies from person to person.
My seeds to NewsVine are a prime example, just because I seed something doesn't mean I agree with or like it, just that it caught my eye and I thought it worthy of being dragged into the light. The same applies to interests. If you're a survivor or a psychologist, or are perfectly legitimate interests. They probably are if you're a redneck vigilante, like the WFI bampots, too.
10: Posted by: Feòrag | May 31, 2007 11:39 AM
Looking at my interests, there are definitely a few things in which I am interested, but do not like, or support. Someone pointed out that the LJ community for members of the National Guard in the US has "terrorism" listed as an interest - obviously a perfectly legitimate interest for them.
Another bit of weirdness here. Apparently "yaoi" and "yuri" were removed, though the former still exists if you write it in hiragana. Dunno about the latter.
11: Posted by: Feòrag | May 31, 2007 8:44 PM
Another official announcement from LJ: Journals being restored. About half of the deleted communities and journals have been restored, including . So now we can see that lol_porn is about humorous porn in general, and not just porn version of lolcats, and that porn_debate is, indeed, a forum for discussing issues surrounding pornography. The Spanish-language Nabokov forum is still suspended, though.
12: Posted by: Red Wolf | May 31, 2007 10:18 PM
I'm torn over the deleted interests. On one hand, I'd be pissed if mine were affected; but, on the other, I can see it as LJ doing something quick and immediate to stop cranks targetting accounts for no reason other than a keyword they don't agree with.
Good to see the journals being restored. I imagine it would be quite a labour intensive task to manually go through each LJ checking if it's okay. A foreign language journal would end up being way down the list as the english ones would be quicker for an english-speaking company to check.
13: Posted by: Red Wolf | June 2, 2007 1:47 PM
A couple of comments from the Slashdot post for reference:
They're related? Is it just me wondering if their incest obsession is a little like the gay-bashing arseholes who do it to hide their own homosexuality?
The Web Developer extension for Firefox will easily fix that hidden Blogger flag.
14: Posted by: Red Wolf | June 6, 2007 10:58 PM
There's been much debate that the reason LiveJournal's response to a bampot campaign was moronic was due to their parent company, SixApart, about to launch an IPO. The rumours were nothing more than speculation and the articles involved date back to 2005 and 2006. Obviously, the current crop of rumour-mongers need to do a bit of research first.
I believe the real reason that the ball was dropped was that SixApart were about to launch the beta version of MovableType 4. While they were concentrating on getting that out the door, it looks like they lost the plot over on LiveJournal.
Another brief bout of kerfuffle raised its head when it was noticed that LiveJournal is refusing to post articles and comments containing . Rather than some great tin-foil hat conspiracy, it appears that the block is a temporary measure to halt a DDoS attack. It seems the DDoS attacks have been an ongoing issue both before and after the WFI bampots' 15 minutes of fame, so it seems that the SixApart crew have had a hell of a lot on their plates at the moment.
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