lolaraincoat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lolaraincoat) wrote2007-05-31 09:17 am
lolaraincoat) wrote2007-05-31 09:17 am
One more, that's all. I can quit any time.
This is the comment I am trying to post in response to Berkowitz's apology, on behalf of LJ, which is over here. Shockingly, the servers are busted. So.
Having spent much of the past two days trying to track which journals did get suspended, and which journals were deleted for fear of suspension, and what kinds of journals they were, I agree that these are hard issues. There are vast grey areas here.
Very, very few Livejournals clearly announce that their participants intend to prey on children; lots of adults engage in activities together which, if they allowed or encouraged children to join them, would be dangerous, illegal, and morally wrong. Some of those activities, if conducted in virtual spaces that are accessible to a broader public might unintentionally provide support or encouragement to people who prey on children. These include -- just as not-so-random examples -- literary analysis of Nabokov's novel Lolita, communal gameplaying set in the Harry Potter universe which places teenage characters in sexual situations, sharing of reproduced pornographic artwork from Japanese comic books depicting imaginary young people, personal musings on surviving sexual violence and abuse, and discussions of shared interest in having sex while dressed up in teddy-bear costumes. The grayest of gray areas was the fetish sites where adults pretended to be children for pornographic role-play purposes. This week's purge shut down personal journals and/or communities devoted to all of those.
I am an enthusiastic participant in some of those activities, unmoved by others, and repulsed by several. But I can't find a clear line that divides them from each other in moral, esthetic, or legal terms -- much as I might like to, in the case of the those activities that disgust me. They all might, possibly, be used by pedophiles for masturbatory purposes, even though that is not the intention of the journal authors/artists.
So I urge you (and the collective LiveJournal "you" as well) to think more carefully about exactly what journals you are looking to weed out, even if that means going slowly in reinstating any. You can't purge every journal that a pedophile might find arousing -- it's a hopeless task. You can try to ban pedophiles, and I hope you do. But please, err on the side of openness. Remember that nearly everything all of us do on LJ is going to offend somebody and be used as jerk-off material for somebody else; you can't prevent that. Good luck.
p.s. if it helps, here's the posts where I tried to sort out the clearest mistaken deletions, with a little help from a lot of pissed-off LJistas:
http://lolaraincoat.livejournal.com/253978.html
http://lolaraincoat.livejournal.com/254490.html
Having spent much of the past two days trying to track which journals did get suspended, and which journals were deleted for fear of suspension, and what kinds of journals they were, I agree that these are hard issues. There are vast grey areas here.
Very, very few Livejournals clearly announce that their participants intend to prey on children; lots of adults engage in activities together which, if they allowed or encouraged children to join them, would be dangerous, illegal, and morally wrong. Some of those activities, if conducted in virtual spaces that are accessible to a broader public might unintentionally provide support or encouragement to people who prey on children. These include -- just as not-so-random examples -- literary analysis of Nabokov's novel Lolita, communal gameplaying set in the Harry Potter universe which places teenage characters in sexual situations, sharing of reproduced pornographic artwork from Japanese comic books depicting imaginary young people, personal musings on surviving sexual violence and abuse, and discussions of shared interest in having sex while dressed up in teddy-bear costumes. The grayest of gray areas was the fetish sites where adults pretended to be children for pornographic role-play purposes. This week's purge shut down personal journals and/or communities devoted to all of those.
I am an enthusiastic participant in some of those activities, unmoved by others, and repulsed by several. But I can't find a clear line that divides them from each other in moral, esthetic, or legal terms -- much as I might like to, in the case of the those activities that disgust me. They all might, possibly, be used by pedophiles for masturbatory purposes, even though that is not the intention of the journal authors/artists.
So I urge you (and the collective LiveJournal "you" as well) to think more carefully about exactly what journals you are looking to weed out, even if that means going slowly in reinstating any. You can't purge every journal that a pedophile might find arousing -- it's a hopeless task. You can try to ban pedophiles, and I hope you do. But please, err on the side of openness. Remember that nearly everything all of us do on LJ is going to offend somebody and be used as jerk-off material for somebody else; you can't prevent that. Good luck.
p.s. if it helps, here's the posts where I tried to sort out the clearest mistaken deletions, with a little help from a lot of pissed-off LJistas:
http://lolaraincoat.livejournal.com/253978.html
http://lolaraincoat.livejournal.com/254490.html