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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

LiveJournal As Clueless About Who Sexually Abuses Kids As… Almost Everyone Else?

filed under: Web Sex Index by Melissa Gira

LiveJournal has deleted hundreds of journals and communities (a list in progress) in response to pressure by Warriors for Innocence, an Internet-based vigilante group with the predictably Dungeons and Dragons’-ish motto, “Hunting monsters on the Web.”

What was Warriors for Innocence and Six Apart’s criteria, then, for determining if a journal “promote[s] pedophilia, child sex, child abuse, and other illegal activities”? Warriors for Innocence claims that “sites were deleted by LJ because LJ (not WFI) chose to delete all sites with certain “interests” listed.” What interests were cited?

Child Rape, Child Molestation, Child Sex, Child Porn….

These are just a few of the “interests” that LiveJournal.com users name in their journals and profiles. Some are much worse and I won’t even print them here.

LiveJournal responded initially that they “regard the description of an illegal activity, an interest in an illegal activity, fantasizing about illegal activity, or even admitting to an illegal activity as something other than the commission of that activity. That is to say: writing a LiveJournal entry about having sexual attraction to minors is different than using LiveJournal to solicit a minor for sexual contact.” Now, three weeks and hundreds of “permanently suspended” accounts later? Says Warren Ellis of the fallout in LiveJournal communities:

The outcome, therefore, has been pure comedy, with comments that read very much like “I love spending all day reading about forced underage incestuous sex with squirrel fisting on top, but of course I’m not interested in that in real life — that’d make me a pervert!”

A protest community, the equally typographically & theologically tragically named innocence_jihad, has started in response.

CNET reports that LiveJournal had no legal liability to delete these accounts, which, at the time of their creation and until today, did not violate LJ Terms of Service. LJ user heidi8 writes:

As the Supreme Court said in Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition back in 2002, in cases involving actual child pornography where real children are depicted in obscene contexts, “the creation of the speech is itself the crime of child abuse; the prohibition deters the crime by removing the profit motive…. Even where there is an underlying crime, however, the Court has not allowed the suppression of speech in all cases… We need not consider where to strike the balance in this case, because here, there is no underlying crime at all.

No. Underlying Crime. If no underlying crime exists, then how can LJ be concerned that they’ll be at “considerable legal risk” if pornish_pixies is allowed to list actions that are illegal in its interest list?

Which means that, with no legal imperative, and given that the pressure to make this move came from an organization that brags “we are not a non profit [sic] organization… [we] do not have a TOS,” and in an action orchestrated by all appearances by a “right-wing nut job” (thx, digg), could someone at LiveJournal/Six Apart have really believed that this mass deletion constituted a reasonable action to take in protecting children from sexual abuse? Why cave to the pressure of three Internet vigilantes? Sure, they say they’re talking to your advertisers, but…

Giving some extreme benefit of the mid-moral panic doubt to 6A, then, let’s just say that they believe that having a place for adults to publish stories about sexual activities that are harmful and illegal either stimulates said activities, or creates an opportunity for them to be committed, or they may believe that writing about and fantasizing about these activities puts children at risk enough that to even discuss these activities in written words is dangerous. But given that in 2004 in the United States, close to 95% of the perpetrators of sexual abuse on children were known to the children abused, the profile of the child sex abuser looks much more like a parent, relative, or caretaker — possible LiveJournal users, sure. Fanfic writers, maybe.

Where can we find these monsters?

Down the block, basically.

Child abusers, if only they were all scary Internet perverts we could smoke out just by looking at them at their LJ interests. Maybe in rodent-humping slash fiction the bad guy is always that easy to spot.

(Also, just to work my nerve, could the faux-daguerreotypes that Warriors for Innocence use to illustrate their blog entries scream pedophile any louder?)

Update, 2007.05.31: Six Apart’s Chairman and CEO, Barak Berkowitz, in Well we really screwed up this one, says, “We never intended this policy to cause the removal of journals that were have perfectly valid discussions about literature, law or culture. We never intended the policies to take down journals or communities clearly opposed to illegal activities but clearly we did… WFI or anyone else may complain but we are responsible for applying our policies to those complaints. Even idiots can be right about some things. We try not to judge the complaint by the source but rather judge them by our policies. I believe the problem here was not the complaints or the policies but our very poor execution.”

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