Chilling Effects

[octothorpe]

Chilling Effect:

A chilling effect is a situation where speech or conduct is suppressed or limited by fear of penalization at the hands of an individual or group. For example, the threat of a costly and lengthy lawsuit might prompt self-censorship and have a chilling effect on free speech.

Livejournal has instituted a new method for not only blog owners, but any registered user to flag a blog as "inappropriate" for various age groups. In order to view a flagged blog, a registered user must include their date-of-birth (DOB) in their profile, and explicitly click a button that states they're aware that the content has been deemed "inappropriate" for an age group. The blog owner has no recourse, and can't un-flag their own content that others have flagged. It's effectively a scarlet letter.

This is profoundly distressing. If you don't understand this, reply, and I'll explain it to you in excruciating detail. I assume my readership is actually smart enough to understand the far-reaching consequences of this.

A Modest Proposal
We're all registered users. Create a new (free) account. Now find all posts from all 6Apart (owns Livejournal) and LJ administrators, all blogs that have never contained anything more than puppies and flowers, all posts from 14 year old girls and boys, and flag them as "inappropriate content for under 18s". Do this for every post they have. This is a protest for free speech.

For the record, I'd have no problem with a mechanism for allowing (not forcing) people to flag *their own* content, but to allow any random user with a grudge to flag your posts is poorly thought out at best, and otherwise downright insidious.

Edit Added thornyc's idea of creating another LJ alt before flagging everything under the sun.

Comments

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

This is one reason I never put the "this is the journal of an adult cocksucker who has been known to lick pussy too" disclaimer in my bio. I used to post more explicit sexual stuff in my blog than I do now, and I got a bit tired to doing so, but that's just me. I don't seek out kids to read my journal ... but if they stumbled on it, I have to think that my sheer method of how I think about things is at least as dangerous as my dong.

I started an alternate blog off-LJ the last time they pulled shit like this. I will have somewhere to migrate if this becomes intolerable. Problem is, it isn't as good of a social-networking venue.

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

It will be if you take enough of us with you.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

Well, I'll probably start linking to it more, um, nakedly, from my bio page. What I mean, though, is that it doesn't have the same kinds of tools for easily "friending" people and collecting their pages. It doesn't foster the same kind of interchange, in my (admittedly minor) testing of it. Which is a shame.

And thank you for the compliment! ;-)

[theoctothorpe.livejournal.com]

I used to post more explicit sexual stuff in my blog than I do now, ::goes and sifts through your old posts::

As for the off-LJ thing, that's exactly the problem I mentioned as a reply to greatbearmd's post above.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

This is a really great venue for *both* personal expression *and* connecting with others. In my non-exhaustive sample of web spaces that do either or both, it's been the one that does both best. As we were saying last weekend.

Other means can certainly be developed. And for those who have the stomach for designing and conducting a web business, now might be a good time.