[Important Notice] Regarding the "LJ is Banning Users for Slash Fiction" Posts...
Today, Twitter has been in an uproar because someone found the following post entitled " Signal boost: Spreading the word: Livejournal has IP blocked me for posting slash fic." and it has been since spread like wildfire.
I'd like to address two issues here. First, people seem to be under the misconception that the banning of their IP address directly affects their journal and are in a mad rush to back-up everything. This is not true. Banning someone's IP address merely prevents them to access LiveJournal via that specific location/device. This means that you could switch computers, or even take your laptop out for a spin on some public wifi, and still be able to access LiveJournal. It does not affect your account in the least.
Secondly, LiveJournal has it plainly stated in their Terms of Service:
Offensive content: LiveJournal is a social media platform that falls under the DMCA Safe Harbor Agreement and, as such, cannot be held responsible for any user-generated Content that appears on its Service. Without imposing legal accountability where none exists, LiveJournal reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to suspend any Account, remove any Content, and/or restrict access to any part of the Service that contains full nudity, violence, obscenity, gang-related Content, hate-based Content based on racial, ethnic, gender, transgender, disability, or sexual orientation, harassment of other users, endangerment to minors, incitation to violence or criminal activity, violation of another person’s intellectual property rights, or Content that is otherwise offensive or inappropriate under the TOS, in order to maintain a safe environment for all of its users.
It's unlikely that LJ Admin would just happen to stumble upon this person's journal, rather than others that I've seen dominate the now public Top Journals list. It's unlikely that they'd say, "This person writes gay content? Banned!"
What is likely is that this person's account has been reported multiple times by several different users for inappropriate content. What kind of inappropriate content, I can't say since I'm not a Whovian nor have I read this person's fics, but one thing I've learned from fandom is there are virtually no limits. (And sometimes, I really, really fucking wish that there was. :-/)
*coughs*
Anyway. :) Inamorato is actually complete for those that are waiting on the next updates. I'm just waiting on my beta, then I'll post them a few days apart. ♥
EDITING TO ADD: here is where you can find where an actual LiveJournal staff member commented about the issue and cleared it up.
According to copperbadge, who wrote the entry the LJ staff member commented upon, there seems to be a general understanding that angstytimelord (the person from which all of this originated) "is an anti-Russian, anti-LJ troll who may have been banned for other things. [...]" Though I would like to strongly point out that this has not been one hundred percent proven, but the point remains: take this whole situation (and any others that may be similar) with a grain of salt. Always do your research and look into things before jumping to conclusions that are massively incorrect.
Most importantly, here is what the LJ Staff member markf had to say about the issue:
LJ staff here, and responsible for site policy. This rumor spreading about being blocked for posting slash/gay content is unfounded. Their IP address was temporarily blocked from accessing LiveJournal, and this sort of thing does happen due to anti-spam & anti-DDOS measures which are in place, and these unfortunately do produce some false positives and block people who shouldn't be blocked sometimes. This is completely unrelated to their journal's content, though. If there was a problem with angstytimelord's content, it wouldn't still be accessible; you'd see a message indicating that it was suspended. That didn't happen because there is no problem with their content; they haven't violated site policy. We're very anti-censorship, and while Strikethrough did happen, there's not a single person working for LiveJournal who didn't argue against that decision; the people who made it haven't worked for LiveJournal in 5+ years.
Since some concerns about Russians overtaking the site's policy have been raised, I think it's worth clarifying a few things. All content policy issues are handled by people in the U.S. Any admin tools that can be used to restrict access to content on the site are not accessible to anyone in Russia. LiveJournal's datacenter is in the U.S., not Russia. Russian law does not dictate our site policies. The extent to which the Russian government has affected site content is that we do disable access to certain entries to people who are in Russia; when this happens, we display a message that this content is inaccessible within their region. This is to accommodate a law which forces all internet service providers in Russia to block access to any website which does not comply with this. This means if we choose to not block such content in Russia, everyone in Russia gets blocked from accessing all of LiveJournal. There's an article about this law [here].
If you see people still talking about this, please address them to this post (or copperbadge's itself) to clear this up. It's getting ridiculous. e_e;;;
I'd like to address two issues here. First, people seem to be under the misconception that the banning of their IP address directly affects their journal and are in a mad rush to back-up everything. This is not true. Banning someone's IP address merely prevents them to access LiveJournal via that specific location/device. This means that you could switch computers, or even take your laptop out for a spin on some public wifi, and still be able to access LiveJournal. It does not affect your account in the least.
Secondly, LiveJournal has it plainly stated in their Terms of Service:
Offensive content: LiveJournal is a social media platform that falls under the DMCA Safe Harbor Agreement and, as such, cannot be held responsible for any user-generated Content that appears on its Service. Without imposing legal accountability where none exists, LiveJournal reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to suspend any Account, remove any Content, and/or restrict access to any part of the Service that contains full nudity, violence, obscenity, gang-related Content, hate-based Content based on racial, ethnic, gender, transgender, disability, or sexual orientation, harassment of other users, endangerment to minors, incitation to violence or criminal activity, violation of another person’s intellectual property rights, or Content that is otherwise offensive or inappropriate under the TOS, in order to maintain a safe environment for all of its users.
It's unlikely that LJ Admin would just happen to stumble upon this person's journal, rather than others that I've seen dominate the now public Top Journals list. It's unlikely that they'd say, "This person writes gay content? Banned!"
What is likely is that this person's account has been reported multiple times by several different users for inappropriate content. What kind of inappropriate content, I can't say since I'm not a Whovian nor have I read this person's fics, but one thing I've learned from fandom is there are virtually no limits. (And sometimes, I really, really fucking wish that there was. :-/)
*coughs*
Anyway. :) Inamorato is actually complete for those that are waiting on the next updates. I'm just waiting on my beta, then I'll post them a few days apart. ♥
EDITING TO ADD: here is where you can find where an actual LiveJournal staff member commented about the issue and cleared it up.
According to copperbadge, who wrote the entry the LJ staff member commented upon, there seems to be a general understanding that angstytimelord (the person from which all of this originated) "is an anti-Russian, anti-LJ troll who may have been banned for other things. [...]" Though I would like to strongly point out that this has not been one hundred percent proven, but the point remains: take this whole situation (and any others that may be similar) with a grain of salt. Always do your research and look into things before jumping to conclusions that are massively incorrect.
Most importantly, here is what the LJ Staff member markf had to say about the issue:
LJ staff here, and responsible for site policy. This rumor spreading about being blocked for posting slash/gay content is unfounded. Their IP address was temporarily blocked from accessing LiveJournal, and this sort of thing does happen due to anti-spam & anti-DDOS measures which are in place, and these unfortunately do produce some false positives and block people who shouldn't be blocked sometimes. This is completely unrelated to their journal's content, though. If there was a problem with angstytimelord's content, it wouldn't still be accessible; you'd see a message indicating that it was suspended. That didn't happen because there is no problem with their content; they haven't violated site policy. We're very anti-censorship, and while Strikethrough did happen, there's not a single person working for LiveJournal who didn't argue against that decision; the people who made it haven't worked for LiveJournal in 5+ years.
Since some concerns about Russians overtaking the site's policy have been raised, I think it's worth clarifying a few things. All content policy issues are handled by people in the U.S. Any admin tools that can be used to restrict access to content on the site are not accessible to anyone in Russia. LiveJournal's datacenter is in the U.S., not Russia. Russian law does not dictate our site policies. The extent to which the Russian government has affected site content is that we do disable access to certain entries to people who are in Russia; when this happens, we display a message that this content is inaccessible within their region. This is to accommodate a law which forces all internet service providers in Russia to block access to any website which does not comply with this. This means if we choose to not block such content in Russia, everyone in Russia gets blocked from accessing all of LiveJournal. There's an article about this law [here].
If you see people still talking about this, please address them to this post (or copperbadge's itself) to clear this up. It's getting ridiculous. e_e;;;