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| [Tuesday, October 2, 2007 at 12:03 am] |
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| [Monday, August 13, 2007 at 5:17 pm] |
| Subject: LJ Abuse: best not to expect too much. |
| Mood |
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 blah |
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A message to LJ Abuse: On Tuesday, August 7th, 2007, "The LJ Staff" claimed that: "Our goal is to encourage and promote a free and open community. We will only intervene to the extent needed to remove illegal and harmful content that is reported to us."
The default icon for which I was suspended originally was neither illegal nor harmful: it showed a newborn baby breastfeeding.
I wanted to port all my old posts from livejournal over to insanejournal, and make sure I had all my comments backed up via LJ Archive and LJBook. To do this I had to have my journal unsuspended, and knowing that "The LJ Staff" had previously defined a picture of a baby at breast as "illegal or harmful content" and suspended journals on that basis, I changed my icon to get access to them again.
I have now changed my default icon back to what it was: a baby at breast. If "The LJ Staff" consider that this picture is covered by 1a,b,c below, you should go ahead and re-suspend my journal.
If not, feel free to leave it active: I won't complain, and my friends-list will be appreciative.
"I. Content which violates LiveJournal’s policy against illegal and harmful content is:
a. Content that intrinsically violates existing United States or California law; in other words, where merely possessing, displaying or transmitting the content is a crime. This includes child pornography and threats against the President and successors to the Presidency.
b. Content that encourages or advocates hate crimes, the abuse of children in any form, or rape, even if the content itself is not illegal and may be protected by the First Amendment. This portion of the policy reflects the especially reprehensible nature of these activities; users who encourage or advocate these acts, regardless of their motivation, are simply not welcome on LiveJournal.
c. Content that solicits the commission of, seeks customers for, or provides instructions for illegal activities that would cause immediate and lasting physical or economic harm to others." |
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| [Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 5:18 pm] |
| Subject: You may already know about this |
| Mood |
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schadenfreude |
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...but the whole thing is happening all over again, only with a different excuse.
![[info]](http://img.greatestjournal.com/community.gif) fandomtossed.
Same shtick about "this isn't a change, this has always been our policy": same non-apology apologies: and, apparently, same silence for days from Six Apart as LJ members who had been suspended or had their communities suspended tried to get answers from LJ Abuse. |
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| [Saturday, July 29, 2006 at 7:11 pm] |
| Subject: Six Apart: following the American trend against breastfeeding? |
Apparently some Americans complained about a pic of a child breastfeeding on the front cover of a mother and baby magazine.
Query for the group: most US states actually have legislation protecting breastfeeding mothers, and in none of them is public breastfeeding actually illegal. Is SixApart's anti-breastfeeding decision representative of an American trend against public breastfeeding, as Pandagon suggests? |
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| [Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 8:22 am] |
| Subject: If this is a plan to turn LJ into MySpace...? |
Reference to the breastfeeding issue on lj_design....
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| [Sunday, June 18, 2006 at 3:06 pm] |
| Subject: LJ Abuse e-mailed me |
| Mood |
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 annoyed |
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Dear LiveJournal user wordswordswords,
It has come to our attention that your default userpic (located at
http://www.livejournal.com/userpic/47772165/842173) is presently in violation of the LiveJournal Terms of Service. Our policies on the content restrictions on default userpics are described at http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=111.
While we should make clear that the actual content is not in violation, its use as a default image is.
Please change your default userpic to something that does not contain adult content, or select no default userpic at all; you can make these changes at http://www.livejournal.com/editpics.bml. We must request that you do this as soon as possible, but by no later than 0:01 AM EDT, Jun 21, 2006 to prevent further action being taken against your account.
Regards,
Douglas
LiveJournal Abuse Team
( I responded )
Account now suspended: my final reply to LJ Abuse:
( Read more... ) |
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| [Saturday, June 17, 2006 at 2:31 pm] |
| Subject: Small e-world... |
| Mood |
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 pleased |
| Music |
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Ed, Edd, & Eddy themesong |
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I was just online looking up the company that makes the herbal galactagogue blend I just started taking (It's "More Milk Plus" by Motherlove, if anyone's interested). And while I'm browsing around their website, what do I find but links to ProMoM.org in several places!
I just thought that was kinda cool. =) Happy Saturday, everyone. |
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| [Thursday, June 15, 2006 at 2:26 pm] |
Snagged from this LJ post...
I thought this was hilarious. =D
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| [Wednesday, June 7, 2006 at 11:04 am] |
| Subject: Doug Bryan says he can't be "autocratic" with LJ Abuse |
| Mood |
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 cranky |
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On Monday three women went to SixApart's office in San Francisco for a "nurse-in" and were invited in to talk with Doug Bryan and Ginger Someone. Doug seems to be claiming that the problem is that he can't be "autocratic" with LJ Abuse volunteers:
I basically reiterated everything Carrie has already told Doug. I said that I think he should just tell the Live Journal Abuse team that breastfeeding icons are ok, period, end of story, as long as the baby is latched on. That is pretty clear cut. It's hard to know exactly what he is saying when he talks, but basically he said that he doesn't want to be "autocratic" with the abuse team members. He went on about how they are a volunteer staff and how they would have to hire 4-6 full time employees to replace them. He said the only person he can be "autocratic" ... with is Denise. link
If true, this doesn't speak well for Doug's ability as a manager.
Using volunteer labour is cheaper. Volunteers don't have to be paid. If that's the only reason an organisation is using volunteer labour, the organisation needs to take a long hard look at what it's using volunteer labour for.
Livejournal needs a police force. Any big community does. And in my opinion, even a bad police force can be better than none at all. I think LJ Abuse is a bad police force, but it's better than nothing.
What kind of police force it needs depends on the nature of the community. A science-fiction convention generally does just fine with volunteer security and clearly explained rules: and in many ways, livejournal used to be run very like a science-fiction convention. But it's not: it's a corporately-owned online community running on corporate servers... policed by volunteers who are, according to Doug Bryan, not under SixApart's control. That's a bad police force, and Doug's toleration of that because he doesn't feel he can lay down firm rules for volunteers that they must follow, makes him a bad manager.
Of course, Doug may not have been altogether honest about this: it may be that he is blaming LJ Abuse because LJ Abuse is a convenient target for user rage, and he would rather have us blame LJ Abuse than blame Six Apart. If so, that doesn't just make him a bad manager: it makes him a bad human being.
I started out to write this comment just as a link to what-else-is-being-said, but the importance of Doug's claim has struck me in the writing of it: I'll be cross-posting this. |
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| [Wednesday, June 7, 2006 at 8:48 am] |
| Subject: Okay. What's next? |
| Mood |
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 quixotic |
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A bunch of us who wanted to do something to show SixApart how we felt, discussed, off livejournal, what we could do - what we could ask others to do - and what we wanted to ask SixApart to do. (A necessary part of any strike action is to figure out first what you're asking for...)
But my reasons when - after discussion - I finally wrote the "this is what we want" post for focussing on the breastfeeding issue were threefold:
1. Changing the patriarchal assumption that women's bodies are sexual and men's bodies are neutral is an awfully, awfully big fight, and one that I didn't think we'd win in this one battle, whereas I was quite hopeful that we could win the specific fight about breastfeeding icons.
2. There are all sorts of good reasons why everyone (even the happily childfree, which includes me) ought to support women feeling comfortable about breastfeeding in public, and why even tiny steps backwards - such as SixApart's decision that you can't have breastfeeding pics as default icons - should be opposed. (See Bohemiancoast's post quoted on Making Light.) This applies whether you normally oppose public nudity or you are an ardent campaigner for shame-free nudity for everyone - breastmilk is usually the best milk for babies, and discouragement of public breastfeeding is generally discouragement of breastfeeding, end of story.
3. Breastfeeding icons were plainly and obviously OK as default icons under the pre-May 20th version of FAQ 111 amplifying the TOS, and FAQ 111 was evidently rewritten specifically so that LJ Abuse could get away with banning breastfeeding icons. It's a nice, clear-cut case, and when campaigning, nice clear-cut cases are good.
I'm a feminist. Ultimately, I want to destroy the patriarchy. But, to avoid being a choked-up feminist, I accept that I can only try to destroy the patriarchy in small, manageable bites.
Grr'rr.
Stats for 6/6/6:
Total accounts: 10385229
... active in some way: 1854616
... that have ever updated: 6980683
... updating in last 30 days: 1196909
... updating in last 7 days: 723059
... updating in past 24 hours: 262802
Stats for 31st May (previous Tuesday):
Total accounts: 10336342
... active in some way: 1853118
... that have ever updated: 6953213
... updating in last 30 days: 1197567
... updating in last 7 days: 710839
... updating in past 24 hours: 257041
Which means that the one-day strike didn't work as far as putting a dent in the statistics went. As far as getting people to talk about the issue (unfortunately, as far as I can tell, mostly on Livejournal!) it seems to have worked pretty well.
So: what do we do next? |
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| [Sunday, June 4, 2006 at 6:29 am] |
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| [Saturday, June 3, 2006 at 10:46 am] |
Incidentally, someone somewhere suggested a submission to the Suggestions community on LJ about the FAQ change. I did that and got this rejection:
Here are the reasons for the rejection as provided by the moderator:
The FAQ reflects current policy. If you have concerns about an Abuse policy,
please contact the Abuse Team following the instructions in
http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=105
Though, in fact, there isn't an option there to contact LJ Abuse about anything other than abuse by another member, as far as I can see. |
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| [Friday, June 2, 2006 at 8:57 pm] |
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| [Thursday, June 1, 2006 at 6:36 am] |
| Subject: Why delete journals? |
| Mood |
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annoyed |
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The goal of the strike is to put a dent into the Livejournal Statistics that SixApart cannot ignore.
I think there are probably half a million active users on livejournal. On average, as far as I can tell, over any 24 hour period about 250 000 posts or comments get made.
What SixApart is selling isn't account space - it's targetted advertising space. Deleting journals wouldn't have done a thing to send a message under Brad's business model, where free accounts were not a source of revenue, but under SixApart's business model, free account holders are a pool of advert-targets that SixApart can use as a resource - a pool that has already given information about age, gender, locale, and interests. The significant change to the TOS since SixApart bought lj was that you are not legally *allowed* to have software installed to block ads on livejournal.
We could do this just as well by not commenting for a day. There are two reasons for deleting. One is that a deleted account has a line through it wherever the account-holder made comments or posts on other journals or communities, so that it's visible that the account-holder is on strike: the other is - well, I don't know about you, but I'm going to find it HARD to stay off livejournal for a day! (In fact, I'm planning to strike for 48 hours - from the beginning of Tuesday at the International Date Line, to the end of Tuesday at the IDL.) And it will be easier to remember that I'm doing it if my account is deleted.
Livejournal statistics
The stats for the previous 24 hours are:
Total accounts: 10336342
... active in some way: 1853359
... that have ever updated: 6953213
... updating in last 30 days: 1197567
... updating in last 7 days: 710839
... updating in past 24 hours: 257041
The stats for the past 24 hours (they seem to be updated at midnight Pacific Time) are:
Total accounts: 10343538
... active in some way: 1852649
... that have ever updated: 6957300
... updating in last 30 days: 1196089
... updating in last 7 days: 711324
... updating in past 24 hours: 253545
The figure people have been pointing at and saying "we can't possibly change that" is Total accounts: 10.3M. True, we can't: but a lifetime acquaintance with How To Lie With Statistics tells me why. This figure is said to be (on the front page) the total number of accounts created since 1999. What that says to me is that it includes accounts since deleted or suspended - and it certainly includes just over 3.3M accounts that have never once even updated, because their own stats say so.
Breaking this down: 10.3M accounts created is a figure that will only ever go up, not down, no matter how many people leave the site. Only 6.95M of these accounts have ever been updated. Listed as "active in some way": 1.85M. No definition of what that means.
The real information is: updated in the past 30 days - 1.2M (just under). Given that any time one person comments on a community, that's two accounts updated, my guess is that's probably around half a million people.
Updated in the past seven days: 711 324. To put a dent in this figure we would have to go on strike for a week, and I don't see that happening.
Updated in the past 24 hours: 253545. (In the previous 48 hours, 257 041 / 236 681.) That figure I think we can put a dent in, if enough people join us, and that - and the publicity being created by other means (see press release) - is a message to SixApart and their advertisers: don't piss off the people you plan to make money out of. It's rude, and it's counterproductive. |
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| [Wednesday, May 31, 2006 at 9:21 pm] |
| Subject: Press release and Hee! |
There's a press release on the BN community on livejournal. They're asking it to be spread as widely as possible.
If you want to add notes (for example about the one-day strike on 6/6/6), do so AFTER the # mark - that is the standard form that tells media people that a press release has ended.
Also, some public evidence that LJ Abuse forgot to edit: ah well, they're not 1984 experts yet, are they?
Under the cut. It's big. But you can see it for yourself here.
( FAQ 111 as it used to be ) |
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