LJ just keeps making me sadder...
I just posted this as a comment to the latest announcements post, but I thought I should repost here. Because I just realized something that is REALLY bothering me about this whole mess. Like many of you, I feel extremely deceived.

One of the reasons that these suspensions are particular upsetting to me is that I had a very civil discourse with burr86, trying to figure out what would happen if material WERE deemed "inappropriate" and I repeatedly used pornish_pixies as an example. To be fair, he made it quite clear that he wasn't speaking officially for Livejournal. But this is the response that he gave me, and it sounded to me like he was summarizing LJ's policies at the time:

It depends on the circumstances, honestly.

If it's an entire community devoted to "mmm yum hot sweet seven year old flesh" or whatever, then the community is suspended. If it's one post in a community where, say, the poster posts child pornography -- then the individual poster is suspended, but not the community. (Unless it's been a rampant problem in the community and we told the maintainer "hey, watch out", but in that case there's warning.) But that assumes that it's clear, 100%, nobody thinks it's ambiguous sort of violations of the policy.

If it's "hmmm, this is probably in violation, but maybe not 100%" -- and honestly, those cases are *really* rare -- then what happens is a "temporary" suspend. Temporary because it's not a clear violation of the policy, suspension just because we want to err on the side of caution and remove it from public view. And what happens in those cases is that you'll get an email saying "hey, this is still a violation, but not unambiguously so. please delete it and we'll unsuspend you ASAP."

So there's provisions in place even to account for the edge cases, because we don't really want to permanently suspend someone just because they tripped across the line of acceptability, where they probably don't know any better, etc. But if someone is unambiguously violating the policy -- in the manner where there's not even any question that they might not be -- those *do* result in permanent suspensions.

That's a high-level overview though. Everything depends on the individual circumstances, because each case is subtly different from the next. So I kind of hesitate posting this comment because I don't want people to think this is the Definitive Guide -- but take this comment in the spirit it was intended. Contents may settle during shipment, etc. *g*

I think that the fact that this was FAN ART and not depictions of real children would make it clear that the artists in question "tripped across the line of acceptability, where they probably don't know any better." Which means that the bolded bit above, assuming that that's actually LJ's policy, was completely IGNORED in this situation.

How much do we have to scream and yell and demand before Livejournal just TELLS US what we can and cannot post? None of us WANT our accounts suspended. We don't WANT to do anything illegal. WE JUST WANT TO KNOW.

Now, I'm not saying that burr86 was lying to me. It's just as possible that LJ simply ignored its own policies in this case. But either way, that's just NOT ON.

Also, tarie and I have made the decision to lock down erotic_elves. Well, unless in the next couple of days Livejournal makes some grand statement that makes it clear we have nothing to fear. But I would feel TERRIBLE if one of our members' accounts were suspended because of something they posted to EE.