livejournal brouhaha

For those few of you who aren't familiar, the absurdly popular blogging site LiveJournal (owned by Six Apart) recently made the questionable decision to rather spontaneously conform to the demands of a web-censorship group, Warriors for Innocence. Their first action was to suspend hundreds of journals that contained any references - including in the profile - to incest and paedophilia. Among them were no doubt some of the anonymous journals dedicated to exactly those things, but also a variety of fandom slashfic communities and journals belonging to survivors or support groups.

Two days later, Six Apart finally explained what happened, essentially admitting they handled the situation very poorly, and apologizing. What I find interesting, however, is that the two day delay is blamed on the majority of the administration staff being 'on the road' or on vacation. There's no explanation of who made this sudden decision to censor all these journals, however - was the decision made by an executive between flights, and implemented by underlings back home? Or perhaps the decision was made while the executives were out of the office? In the case of the first I'd like to know how and why that happened, and what's going to be done in the future to prevent this sort of thing from being done in the future. In the case of the latter, I'd really like to know if they're going to sack the person or persons responsible.

A big question - which I am not alone in asking - is how come they had time to talk to C-Net about it during this two days of scrambling backpedaling and travel, but they couldn't spare a moment to say something to LiveJournal in person? With thirteen million accounts, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect your news blog to be the first media outlet updated, rather than the last, does it? It saddens me that this question is likely to never be addressed.

Finally, I have this to say: I have some pretty extreme viewpoints, including among other things a firmly held belief that crimes such as rape and child molestation belong in the category of things punishable by death. However, I also have a pretty strong opinion of free speech. To wit, speech is either free, or it isn't. If we don't have it, let's not pretend we do - if we do, that means we have to grit our teeth and bear it when people say things that we feel no right-thinking human could possibly agree with. I can't abide censorship, and I'm pretty disgusted by this whole mess. I cannot communicate how glad I am that I never bought a permanent LiveJournal account when I wanted to, and I urge anyone with a paid account on LiveJournal to consider letting it expire.