LiveJournal StrikeThrough '07

It has been referred to by several names... the LiveJournal Purge, StrikeThrough '07, and many other things which aren't polite to repeat. Regardless of what you call it, though, the simple facts go like this: Six Apart, the parent company of LiveJournal, had received complaints from the Christian fundamentalist group "Warriors for Innocence" that user journals were supporting activities such as rape and pedophilia. As the company began to investigate the matter, they issued permanent suspensions due to terms of service violations for around 500 user accounts and communities based upon the interest keywords listed in the profile. The problem with this was that many of the suspended journals weren't advocating those activities at all... the majority of them were fiction and fanfiction groups, and some were even support groups or public journals written by survivors of rape or molestation. The content of the journals and communities in question wasn't taken into account, the only basis for the mass suspensions were the keywords that were used in the interest section of the profile.

To make matters worse, Six Apart CEO Barak Berkowitz did a telephone interview with cNet soon after the suspensions began. In the interview, he made statements that made it sound as though most if not all of the suspensions had been done due to content supporting pedophilia and rape; he stated that any who's suspension was found to be a mistake would be reinstated but that the number of these would likely only be a "few dozen at most." Worse yet, the cNet phone call took place days before any official statement was made on the site... leaving LiveJournal users in the dark as to what was going on and getting their news about the suspensions from internet and television news sources.

In the early hours of May 31, 2007, Mr. Berkowitz broke the silence on LiveJournal with a lengthy apology which detailed what had happened, the mistakes that were made, and tried to show how even though the actions taken didn't turn out well they were done with good intentions. His appology failed to answer many of the LiveJournal users' questions, however, and within hours there were well over 70 pages worth of comments. Users wanted to know why the company had jumped the gun in issuing the suspensions without actually investigating the users and communities in question, why Mr. Berkowitz had talked to cNet before anything had been mentioned on the site which was actually affected by these actions, and why the interests of sponsors suddenly seemed to be taking precedence over both paid subscribers and the online community that LiveJournal has created over the years. Many users have cancelled their subscriptions or stated that they have no plans on renewing them, and even more have simply left the site behind. All mere weeks after the site was proud to report that they had acheived 13 million account creations since the blog community started in 1999.

Plans have already been put in place to restore those user journals and communities which were wrongfully suspended, but receiving the forgiveness of the community and regaining their trust may still take quite some time. A great many people are still very upset, and are watching closely to see whether the promises that Six Apart and LiveJournal have made on how this will be fixed actually come to pass.