A few notes on the latest LJ Drama: 'Flag Day'...

*Sigh*

Why do I even need to explain this? Content-flagging protects the hosting company: if children see 'adult' material, someone will sue and try to shut down the service.

In practice, it isn't any random 'someone' that sues: if and when well-funded right-wing religious groups decide they don't like the godless hordes of sodom on a particular web service, they will work very hard indeed to close the whole thing down. If they're serious players, the lawsuit will run alongside a smear campaign in the media - cute images of a shocked family in the Midwest, stumbling on you or someone else's fanfic posts and conflating it with stomach-churning images of real child abuse - which will lead to a total financial and infrastructural boycott of the target company and police raids on the server room. Even the threat of a lawsuit will probably succeed - it's a common blackmail tactic against web-based companies approaching IPO - unless the target can produce a substantial body of evidence showing that they are taking care to protect children from pornography, howsoever defined.

The web hosts live in the real world, not the rhetorical utopia of the First Amendment, and they can be bankrupted, or prosecuted, or financially weakened by repeated lawsuits and a negative PR campaign directed at their advertisers and investors, to the point that they are forced to sell up to Murdoch. Think that one over, then consider this: other 'free' journal hosts who are taking 'refugees' from previous attempts to appease attacks on LiveJournal are actually far less free, because the smaller providers are living on a financial knife-edge and they have no leverage whatsoever with their physical hosts - let alone the content-blocking companies and ISP's. If they don't just fade away through being too small to work as social networks, they have no legal resources and no political backing; and one fine day some television ayatollah and his cross-eyed congregation of illiterate bigots will praise the Lord and pay the lawyers to squash the little player like a bug.

So, however prissy or downright craven SixApart appear to be, the only protection for what little free speech we actually have comes from applying all these little legal fig-leaves to the things we publish, and hoping it's enough to make malicious litigation unattractive. That, and the knowledge that Six-Apart are fairly wealthy, they have a PR team of their own, and they won't go under in the face of repeated lawsuits.

Yes, SixApart could be a lot less clumsy about it. But what's the alternative? As in, what are you going to do that doesn't involve putting other people - their blogs, their jobs, and their share capital - into the line of fire?

Demanding 'free speech' by publishing 'adult' content on a public blog - even pictures of breastfeeding mothers - isn't 'free' at all: it carries measurable financial costs for our hosts and jeopardises the freedom to say anything and everything - from 'Hello World' and pictures of your dog to 'serious' blogging about your lifestyle and your beliefs, real-world politics and why corporation X make products no-one ought to buy.

So if in doubt, flag it. Actually, I think you would be happy to flag anything you wrote if you felt that it was unsuitable for children; the problem is that our definitions differ - you're making an honest judgement about what might be offensive, or genuinely unsuitable; but the dishonest truth is that anything we post faces the 'judgement' of deeply unpleasant individuals who are eager to take offence in order to suppress anything contrary to their scripture. In short, any material with the slightest hint that we're not all happily married heterosexual Protestants consuming our way to Heaven.

The censors have largely succeeded in their aims, more than anyone would've believed when all those fine words about free speech and the rights of man were formulated in the Age of Enlightenment; and they continue to make progress with their threats and their lawsuits today. If anyone wants to campaign for free speech online, fix that and the pressure on SixApart will go away. Meanwhile, think harder about the gestures you're planning to make, and ask yourself who's going to end up paying for them.

Long term, I think the answer is to move off a server-based system and adapt the LJ protocols to a peer-to-peer model. That way, there's no big target to sue... But there will be lots of little people: powerless little people and we have already seen what copyright owners can do. Wait 'til you see botnets on a Mission from God and working heuristics for godless, gay or liberal content.


Yes, it's dystopian: wake up and smell the coffee. SixApart have reasons to be frightened and defensive and I do not believe that their high-risk practice of providing anyone a space to say anything they please will be legally or financially tenable by the end of the decade. Providing a toolkit for self-censorship is their only way of buying time against legal assault and in the end it isn't going to be enough.


Credit where it's due: this grew out of a comment on valkyriekaren's journal.