From the horse’s mouth to your ears … or from Metafilter actually, where there is a nice discussion going on … behind the cut is commentary from Anil Dash of Six Apart fame. It’s rich, and falls into the formula I determined was standard operating procedure for SA. I thought I should pass it along, seeing as there has been no official word at LJ about any of this yet. I’m sure they are frantically typing right now.

Also, I went ahead and signed up at Greatest Journal, mostly to make sure if I need it to keep up with people, I had my username. You can find Orbie right here.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to get my WP to LJ cross-posting plugin to work over there, but it’s not a priority at the moment.

Hey, look, it’s somebody that actually knows what happened! As oppsed to, say, CNET. Mind if I speak?

We screwed up in this way: We changed a policy without telling people in advance. Then we had some inaccurate communications about it. And we compounded it by catching some innocent bystanders. I’m sorry we did, and I’m sorry we’ve made that first mistake before and, unbelievably, did it again. But here we are.

Now then, a lot of the pressure and (often inaccurate) press on this has come from people outside LJ, trying to use as much leverage as possible to force us into either “Six Apart hates free speech!” or “Six Apart hates children!” Believe me, when you’re on an externally-imposed deadline trying to coordinate a large group of volunteers to enforce a policy that’s rapidly evolving, mistakes can and will happen.

The goal here was to get journals with profiles that listed “child rape” or “pedophilia” as their interests to know they’re not welcome on LJ. Naturally, the list of sites submitted by groups like WFI likely included some friendly fire, including legitimate communities for abuse survivors, or, yes fandom. And we accidentally suspended some of those communities, but their data is not gone and will be restored once we get our shit together.

The total number of communities and journals affected is about 500 out of 13 million registered accounts. I’m not saying that to diminish the seriousness of the issue, but to give you some perspective. That may have been lost in translation at CNET between the person who actually talked to someone at our company and the other person who wrote the really slanted story.

Listen, we know and love that one of our core communities is the plethora of fen that flourish on LJ. Hell, half of our volunteers and team members actively participate in fandom. We’re not going to every deliberately do anything to endanger that. But we do make human mistakes from time to time, especially when we’re under the gun to Do Something To Protect The Children.

As a side note, have any of you ever seen Dateline’s To Catch a Predator? (Yes, you’d have to have a TV to know about it.) It’s one of the most popular “news” segments, constantly saying how Teh Internets Is Full Of Predators. And the audience for that show doesn’t distinguish between MeFi and a fan journal and a truly depraved individual’s personal blog. We can, and do (except when we screw up), but the environment we’re working in is waiting to throw MeFi onto the fire, too, and say “look, this is a blog — the things that pedophiles use!”

It *is* similar to Digg — their intent was to, you know, follow the law, even when that sucks. Dirty little secret: we have to follow DMCA takedown notices, even though that law sucks, too. We’re fighting for net neutrality, we support the EFF (with actual dollars — I am a member every year personally, too) to try and do the right thing, but you don’t have an option as a corporation to just ignore the law when you want. We’re trying to honor our safe harbor requirements, and we’re also trying to honor our ethical obligation to not be a home for pedophiles. And yes, like Digg, we did so in a way that wasn’t transparent to the community and earned some enmity, even if the intention was positive.

Fuck you, Vox. Fuck you, LJ. Fuck you, Movable Type. Fuck you, Six Apart. You don’t get it and you never did and I’m so, so incredibly glad I can disengage myself from any of your offal-ings so easily.

I empathize with those who cannot.

I’m not sure how you did it, but you managed to impart the rancid, acrid stink of stupidity and fascism even upon HTTP documents, which have a mighty powerful smell all of their own. Good show. Thanks for the clear warnings.

Jason, you seem really well-balanced and sane in the way you react to stories you read online about software companies. My phone number is 646-541-5843 — call me any time (collect!) as I’d love to hear more about how you evaluate such things. Really, the same goes for anybody in this thread, but your response is truly remarkable and deserves a personal invitation.

To those who brought up my personal comment in a metatalk thread about a color preference for a CSS file while discussing the execution of a policy decision at my employer? You’re ridiculous. Don’t turn this site into that kind of place, or you’ll end up regretting when people link your personal Ask MetaFilter questions to the things your company does.
posted by anildash at 12:59 AM on May 31

Oh, forgot to mention — we’ll be updating LJ news shortly with info on what we’re doing to fix this stuff, as well as an apology for the mistakes we’ve made. IM me at anildash if you are an LJ member and want more info or are upset.
posted by anildash at 1:00 AM on May 31