LiveJournal apologizes as users revolt
By David Cassel
“Well we really screwed this one up…” LiveJournal announced to their users today.
The popular site for online journals posted an apologetic message hoping to quell a “mass revolt” in which hundreds of angry users were deleting their accounts in protest of recent LiveJournal actions. “For reasons we are still trying to figure out,” this message states, an attempt to remove a few journals violating the site’s policies “turned into a total mess.”
The message was only made available to LiveJournal subscribers, and was signed by Barak Berkowitz, the CEO of Six Apart (which owns LiveJournal). “I can only say I’m sorry,” he wrote, “explain what we did wrong and what we are doing to correct these problems and explain what we were trying to do but messed up so completely.”
In the thick of a raging controversy, his explantion seemed to acknowledge a crucial mistake. Users trying to indicate an interest in fighting the exploitation of minors were mistakenly treated as supporters of exploiting minors. This was compounded by a critical miscommunication, and “what was supposed to be a well planned attempt to clean up a few journals that were violating LiveJournal’s policies that protect minors turned into a total mess.”
The CEO clarified that the flagged accounts were not deleted, as was reported, but only suspended. He indicated the problem with some profiles was “the appearance that they are soliciting or encouraging illegal activities” (though they could have been OPPOSING those same activities.) But “in an unfortunate number of cases” the account owners weren’t told that their suspensions would be lifted after small changes to a user’s profile.
“We never intended the policies to take down journals or communities clearly opposed to illegal activities but clearly we did…” Berkowitz wrote.
“We made a mistake and now we are going to try to fix it.”
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May 31st, 2007
If only people were as passionate about war, world hunger, poverty, incurable diseases, and general mistreatment of one human by another, as they are about something trivial that happened on LiveJournal…
May 31st, 2007
Maybe if people could make as much of an impact on those other things as they can on LiveJournal, they would be.
But every victory, no matter how small it looks in perspective, is worth fighting for. Free society is preserved by thousands of small victories like this.
May 31st, 2007
Most of these people ARE passionate about those things. It’s not “all about the porn” as people uninvolved in this issue seem to think. A lot of the journals that were mistakenly suspended (”permanent suspension” was the term used when the owners asked LJ Abuse what was going on. They actually WERE told that they would not get their journals back) were NOT blogs full of seedy child pornography, rather they were about the thoughts and ideas of a large group of people who are generally very savvy on world issues. They were places where people could come together to explore all sorts of things – yes, including some “taboo” topics as incest, rape, etc. However, if we refuse to talk about those things, it gives them power, and talking about them is NOT the same as supporting them. Unfortunately most people who diss fandom don’t have any sort of idea what it’s really about.
June 1st, 2007
Actually, users were told that they were not going to be *allowed* to make those profile changes because concerns about legal liability. Several of the email responses saying that were posted by the folks who got them.
Said letters also contained grossly inaccurate statements regarding the legality of a number of things.