After techs at SixApart censored Harry Potter fanfic sites as part of a mass deleting of journals and communities from LiveJournal earlier this week, SixApart CEO Barak Berkowitz offered an apology. Also, according to LJ rep Jane Anderson (who contacted me after I posted about the deletions here), LJ never deleted the accounts, just suspended them. Anderson writes:
Just wanted to clarify a couple of things:
* The
Journals were suspended not deleted.
* Regarding "It's possible that a great deal of original work was lost" -- as the journals were suspended, no material was lost.
In addition, Berkowitz issued a public apology to fanfickers that said in part:
For reasons we are still trying to
figure out what was supposed to be a well planned attempt to clean up a
few journals that were violating LiveJournal's policies that protect
minors turned into a total mess. I can only say I’m sorry, explain
what we did wrong and what we are doing to correct these problems and
explain what we were trying to do but messed up so completely . . .
As most of you know, LJ has a zero
tolerance policy toward content that supports child abuse, pedophilia, or
sexual violence . . . We never intended this policy to cause
the removal of journals that were have perfectly valid discussions about
literature, law or culture. We never intended the policies to take
down journals or communities clearly opposed to illegal activities but
clearly we did. We love our members of fandom and respect their role
in our community. We made a mistake and now we are going to try
to fix it.
Good job, SixApart. Now I hope there will be a good grievance procedure put in place so that next time there's a screw-up, users have somebody they can turn to who can respond immediately.
