LiveJournal StrikeThrough '07

How the Company that Owns LiveJournal is Dealing with the Aftermath

It has been referred to by several names... the LiveJournal Purge, StrikeThrough '07, and many other things which aren't polite to repeat. Regardless of what you call it, though, the simple facts go like this: Six Apart, the parent company of LiveJournal, had received complaints from the Christian fundamentalist group "Warriors for Innocence" that user journals were supporting activities such as rape and pedophilia. As the company began to investigate the matter, they issued permanent suspensions due to terms of service violations for around 500 user accounts and communities based upon the interest keywords listed in the profile. The problem with this was that many of the suspended journals weren't advocating those activities at all... the majority of them were fiction and fanfiction groups, and some were even support groups or public journals written by survivors of rape or molestation. The content of the journals and communities in question wasn't taken into account, the only basis for the mass suspensions were the keywords that were used in the interest section of the profile.

To make matters worse, Six Apart CEO Barak Berkowitz did a telephone interview with cNet soon after the suspensions began. In the interview, he made statements that made it sound as though most if not all of the suspensions had been done due to content supporting pedophilia and rape; he stated that any who's suspension was found to be a mistake would be reinstated but that the number of these would likely only be a "few dozen at most." Worse yet, the cNet phone call took place days before any official statement was made on the site... leaving LiveJournal users in the dark as to what was going on and getting their news about the suspensions from internet and television news sources.