The learnings from LiveJournal kerfuffles
One of the interesting things about the blogosphere is how quickly rumours and stories circulate. The latest kerfuffle on LiveJournal illustrates this particularly well and also shows how much the control of the web is changing.
Early in the week, LJ deleted around 500 journals that had suspect phrases in their interests and profiles. It was an attempt to crack down on people using the system to co-ordinate child abuse, but backfired rather spectacularly on them. In that list of 500 journals were a number of community and personal journals that had nothing to do with child abuse. They were fan communities, many of them fanfiction, that happened to have some unfortunate phrases in their profiles. Leaving aside the issue of why they had those phrases in the profiles, the ensuing uproar spread incredibly fast.
Within a day, pretty much every fan (whether involved with fanfiction or not, whether members of those communities or not) had heard about it and were angry. The news spread into the mainstream, non-fan world almost as fast. This was probably helped by one of the affected communities being a Spanish-language community discussing Nabokov’s Lolita.
The story hit CNet by Wednesday and other IT-related sites picked it up.
On Thursday, Six Apart (owner of LJ) CEO Barak Berkowitz gave in and apologised, promising to restore the journals that shouldn’t have been deleted and take steps to improve the way they handle this kind of thing in the future. A lot of fans (and Spanish book fans) are still annoyed, not least about being tarred with the same brush as child molesters. In fact, LJ has now released three apologies on their news page and various apologies on IT news sites, including CNet. Rather than trying to blame it all on mis-information or one person taking an initiative too far, they’ve been honest enough to admit that they just plain mucked up.
Still, a lot of fans are talking about boycotting LiveJournal and finding a new blogging platform for fan activities.
One of the interesting facets is the rumours that went around associated with the mass-deletion. The big rumour, that everyone including fans have been trying to dispell, is that LJ shut down support communities for rape and abuse survivors. Although that one is a myth, it’s been a hard one to counter and is part of the reason why so many non-fans became involved.
As an observer, the interesting thing is just how quickly the information got out there and how fast the back-lash got organised. In pre-Internet days, it would have taken days or even weeks to get that kind of response going. Now, a story gets into the blogosphere and spreads faster than fire. It’s almost impossible to keep a story - particularly a juicy one - quiet in these days of modern, near instantaneous communications and bloggers are large part of this.
It’s also a lesson for other service providers. What LiveJournal did, on the surface, should have been a good thing. Their handling of it all was at fault. The massive response shows that corporations need to think carefully before taking actions that will anger their core customers. A journal that was set up for fans to register their presence (not aimed at those fans immediately affected by the journal deletion but rather at anyone who considers themselves a fan) has had over 32,000 LJ users “friend” it in just four days. When you consider that this is probably only a portion of the fans, that’s a surprisingly high number and emphasises just how widely the news spread. Social networking sites have to keep their eye on the ball, know what the make-up of their users is, and use that information whenever they are planning any kind of big (or even relatively small) change.
I’m going to be intrigued to see how things at LJ go over the next few months. Usually things calm down after a couple of weeks of kerfuffle, but I suspect that this one might have a more long-lasting effect. Many users, even non-fans, are now setting up alternative locations as a just in case back-up. Lots of users are planning to stop paying LJ for the advanced services. I suspect that other sites, such as MySpace and Blogger, will be looking at what happened and rapidly revising some of their strategies to make sure they don’t repeat LJ’s mistake. At the end of the day, the story won’t be about how LJ heroically broke up paedophile rings, it will be about how LJ annoyed thousands of users with a poorly planned purge of journals and had to apologise and reinstate most of them.
LiveJournal’s attempt to be the good citizen has back-fired on them spectacularly because they didn’t think things through properly.
An interesting take on the whole thing can be found at stewardess_’s journal: How Six Apart’s Greed Allied Them with Neo-Nazis (warning: some bias evident!)
