Young Writers Society

This won't be on CNN tonight, it won't be in your daily paper and BBC won't run a program on it, but I thought that it was worth discussing. LiveJournal has buckled under pressure from a vigilante third party, calling themselves Warriors for Innocence, and supposedly deleted 500 journals with "illegal" interests. However, the definition of "illegal" seems ambiguous. A Gravitation fanfic community was taken down, along with another devoted to a scholarly reading and discussion of the book Lolita. I won't bore you with the whole list, but of all of the supposedly 500 accounts (communities and individuals both), only one so far has come up as actually supporting pedophilia. Of particular interest is a rape survivor whose account was banned for discussing her ordeal.

So, discuss. If you're on LJ, have you heard about it? Even if you aren't, what do you think about the fact a random (unofficial!)** group can pressure a company into deleting so many accounts without warning? I mean, hell, even AS IF! is looking into it. (See?)

This is scary. The implications are scarier.

("official" source)

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**this is not a government endorsed group, they aren't law enforcement officials, and they don't appear to be affiliated with AMBER Alert or any other recognized child protection non-profit


(ps. sorry this isn't "real news")

...well, they DID agree to their terms of service. There are plenty of places that they can show their work without this mess happening.

I think the issue at hand is that LiveJournal has been contradicting it's own Terms of Use and precedents in similar cases, if you will. That, and if you read up on Warriors of Innocence, they're pretty ... interesting.

That Gravitation manga creeps me out. I had an ex that liked it.

Although LJ seem to have over-reacted, Warriors for Innocence seem fair enough.

LJ did over react. (They made an official post on their news community and apologized.)

Warriors for Innocence seems benign, but when you look deeper into it, they start sounding really sketchy. ("We are the only thing between innocence and evil." What?)

That 'Warriors for Innocence' website scared me, it must be said. They seemed so... what's the word? Unwilling to accept that they might have done something wrong.

I think that 'We are the only thing between innocence and evil' scared me the most.

*shudders*

I don't know too much about the whole jazz, I'm not on LJ, but surely instead of deleting them, it would have made more sense to hand them over to the police so they could track down the ones who created it or whatnot, instead of just chasing them elsewhere.

They "permanently suspended" them, not deleted them. According to the news post, they're trying to go through and figure out who was banned rightly and who was an accidental/unneeded ban, and supposedly they're going to restore the wrongly banned accounts, I think.