Monday, May 22, 2006

LiveJournal doesn't care how you feel about breastfeeding or anything else - The Social Software Weblog

A row has erupted over LiveJournal's threat to shut down a user's account if the icon image of a baby and mother's breast mid-meal isn't removed. (pic on left) The user is part of a breast feeding advocacy group, so this is some fight to pick. Though it's acceptable to breast feed almost anywhere in real life, LJ is of the belief that the sight of breastfeeding in search results on the LJ site would be unacceptable. What if said user had a signed letter signifying that the breast was at least 18 years old? Indecency policies are rife with absurdity and I'm sure that LJ wants to avoid the kinds of labels that MySpace gets in media and popular culture - so this could go on indefinitely.


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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Alas, LJ doesn't care what kind of label it gets -- the abuse team has been acting absurdly for a few years, and getting more and more out line. Having an abuse team run by a group of volunteers is bound to lead to problems on a site of that size, and unfortunately the paid employees on the team are more inclined to refuse to listen to issues users raise than to behave as professionals.

Sorry for the rant, it's been bugging me for a long time and I've written a lot about it lately.