Please join fandom_counts

[mlyn.livejournal.com]

If you live under a rock and don't already know about LiveJournal's treatment of fannish (and even non-fannish) journals and community over the last few days, you need to read this.

The short story is that a anti-child-porn vigilante emailed LJ Abuse with a list of journals she had found by searching interests. She searched a wide variety of interests, from "incest" to "rape" to "yaoi," an anime fandom term referring to slash. She claimed that LJ was promoting illegal activity. LJ promptly and with no warning (violating their own Terms of Service) shut down those journals (claiming ToS violations, with great irony and hypocrisy). The sad thing is that most journals, if not all, were completely innocent: role-playing game users, fic archives, even a Lolita-reading discussion group and communities for rape victim recovery.

Here is one place to read the longer story.

Fandom as a whole wants to fight back.

The most recent post on news received the maximum amount of comments, 5000 (over 100 pages), each of which was a request for LJ to make some sort of statement or plan of action. We just want an explanation of what their policies are and how they plan to treat their paying customers, because so far this has been the nightmare of all public relations reactions. They have not made any statement, with the exception of LJ-owning Six Apart's CEO making an unjust and horrifyingly bigoted comment to CNET in a phone interview.

There is a community for fans who are lawyers to discuss methods for working against this issue. There are lots of other sites and communities looking at the original source for this issue, "Warriors for Innocence," which does not in fact seem to be any legitimate watchdog group or even affiliated with one.

And there is fandom_counts. It's an empty journal: no posts to read, no obligations. Its only purpose is to gather fans of any fandom, and amass enough users to let LJ know that fans will not take this lying down. Please, take a second and join the community. Then watch the numbers grow. You can literally wait a few minutes, reload the page, and see a higher number of members. (I joined while it was somewhere around 18,400 a couple hours ago, and now it's over 20,000.)

It may do some good, and it costs you nothing. Thanks.

ETA: Six Apart CEO Barak Berkowitz has already apologized in a news post. Score one for fandom and standing up for one's beliefs.

Comments

[kayliemalinza.livejournal.com]

The CEO of Six Apart actually has an apology up at news now. The panicked purging has stopped, but it remains to be seen if LJ will restore the wrongly-deleted journals as promised. I think it's safe to say that if you haven't been suspended yet, you're out of the woods. Judging from the comments on the past three news posts, there's a lot of people who are going to be watching LJ very closely to make sure they follow through on all their promises.

Hurrah for fandom. ^_^

[mlyn.livejournal.com]

Thanks for letting me know. This is great news to read early in the morning. :D