Six Apart Idiocy, Yet Again

[queerbychoice]

I do not support censorship, including of things that I dislike and consider harmful, because censorship is both an intellectually dishonest strategy of opposition and also not really nearly as effective as the intellectually honest strategy of simply making your own counterarguments heard. It is certainly easier than the intellectually honest strategy, though, which is why it's so popular.

Anyway, our evil LiveJournal overlords have already made it clear that they support censorship plenty. That would have been quite bad enough, but they also keep revealing more and more by the minute how ridiculously backwards their hierarchies of supposed "harmfulness" are. What sort of behavior could be so harmful that it merits immediately permanently deleting a person's entire LiveJournal without giving them any opportunity to undo the offense? Drawing pictures of two fictional male characters whom Six Apart judges to be under 18 (despite the fact that the drawing was apparently presented as an illustration for a short story in which the fictional characters were clearly specified as being 22 years old) having sex. How will the poor 22-year-old fictional characters ever recover from this abusive experience in which they were forced to take part in "child" pornography although there were no actual children present? All LiveJournal users will have to donate money to pay for the fictional characters' psychotherapy for the next 30 years!

Meanwhile, what sorts of behavior aren't harmful at all, according to Six Apart? Here's one: Urging eating-disordered real teenagers to lose more weight, and offering them tips on how to do so. LiveJournal employee coffeechica, who confirmed that she was speaking here as an official spokesperson for LiveJournal and Six Apart, says:

[W]e allow pro-anorexia communities to remain because they are, in most cases, serving as support groups for the members. Silencing them won't make their problems go away; we'd rather allow them to heal together as a community. (source)

And, about those same pro-anorexia communities:

[I]t's not illegal to aspire to be thin. It's not against the ToS to give people bad advice.(source)

Yes, that's right - "bad advice" to lose more weight when you're already 75 pounds and 5'5" isn't harmful! Nothing at all about that situation violates the terms of service requiring users not to use LiveJournal for harmful purposes! Meanwhile, Canada's National Eating Disorder Information Centre website reminds us:

The death rate for eating disorders is high: it ranges between 18% (in 20-year studies) and 20% (in 30-year follow-up studies). In fact, the annual death rate associated with anorexia is more than 12 times higher than the annual death rate due to all other causes combined for females between 15 and 24 years old. (Information originally from Carolyn Cavanaugh's article "What We Know About Eating Disorders: Facts and Statistics" in the book Eating Disorders: A Reference Sourcebook.)

In conclusion: Urging emotionally disturbed people toward 20% chance of death? Not harmful at all! But drawing pictures of fictional 22-year-olds having sex and looking as if they might be 17-year-olds? VERY HARMFUL!

But lee_rowan has a suggestion for how paid users and former paid users (or permanent users who spent money to obtain their accounts) can fight back: contact the San Francisco Better Business Bureau.

You may also wish to read thevelvetsun's open letter calling for the proanorexia community to be suspended.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

i suspect that our evil overlords care much less about actual harm than they do about the risk of legal trouble or media trouble.

this doesn't do anything to justify or excuse their actions, but it perhaps explains their priorities.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I suspect that too; I was not confused about their priorities. Just nauseated by them. I'm also nauseated by the priorities of the law and the media. Even so, I think the priorities of a considerable portion of the media (at least) are not quite as confused as Six Apart has anticipated. The fact that this article was ever published seems like fairly good evidence of that.

[spreadsothin.livejournal.com]

I think Six Apart's ridiculous zealousness has to do with the ridiculous "in the name of the children, spare us the sex" legislation that I first read about in Eden Gardnener's blog.

from what seems to be a relevant wikipedia article:

In 2004, bound by the new PROTECT Act of 2003, the [Department of Justice] made sweeping changes...to keep up with the proliferation of sexually explicit material found on the Internet...Anyone who touched explicit content in any way could arguably be considered a producer and be forced to maintain identification records of models [verifying adult status] along with a highly complex indexing system that many argue is impossible to implement. Under the current law, anyone who commercially operates a website or releases sexually explicit images of actual humans, regardless of the format (DVD, photos, books, etc.), is subject to penalties that include up to five years in federal prison per each infraction of the regulations. These regulations do not currently apply to explicit drawings (i.e, adult cartoons, hentai) as no actual humans are involved in such production. However the exclusion for such sexually explicit drawings are being confronted with changes to these laws in the recently signed Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act addendum to the adult record-keeping requirements now codified at 18 U.S.C. § 2257A.[4] At this time, though signed into law, the portions of § 2257A which include simulated sex are not enforceable.

Six Apart is covering its own big fat commercial ass.

[q10.livejournal.com]

probably covering their ass more than is necessary, if the latest word from the Supreme Court means what it looks like it means. (and do note that the recent Bush appointments leave the majority in that decision intact.)