topaz

So one of the new LJ features is the "explicit content" flag: users can flag their own journals and posts as containing "explicit content." Content that's flagged as "explicit" can't be viewed by users under 18. Users can also flag other people's posts and journals as "explicit", but that doesn't automatically lock the content; if several different people flag the same post or journal, LJ's "Abuse Prevention Team" (or whatever) gets notified so that a human can review the flag and see if it makes sense.

And now the whole LJ userbase is up in arms. I have seen people recommend flagging LJ's news posts as "offensive content" and flag their own posts about shopping and parenting as "adult concepts".

I don't really get what all the bitching is about.

There seem to be two complaints about this, more or less. One, it censors potentially valuable explicit material from youngsters; two, it opens the possibility of abuse by having people repeatedly flag unremarkable material as "explicit" or "offensive".

The censorship argument is nonsense. Sorry.

lottelita is right when she points out that this will not actually block minors from viewing forbidden content, but encourage them to read it while logged out or to lie about their age in their profiles. In other words, it is an ineffectual attempt at censorship.

People! Isn't ineffectual censorship the best kind of censorship there is? I don't want my reading to be censored effectively! I want it to fail completely! I am really entirely okay with their implementing an easy-to-circumvent mechanism for content filtering. If age filtering is gonna happen at all -- and you better believe that it will -- this really seems as mild a result as we could want.

Being able to flag someone else's content as "offensive" or "explicit" is a different matter and it's a question worth taking seriously. Nevertheless I think their solution is a reasonable one, on its face. Here's why:

Journals flagged by third parties as being explicit or offensive are not automatically filtered from the LJ community. The flags have to be reviewed by LJ staff. The combination of "multiple independent reports" and "human oversight" essentially amount to using the entire LJ community as a first-pass, coarse-grained filter for sexually explicit material. Having human staff or 6A volunteers (and, for the sake of argument, let us assume that these are reasonably intelligent adults) review user-flagged journals for content applies a degree of sanity to the process and prevents a small group of determined vandals from being able to hold LJ hostage.

This is not a feature I would have requested. But assuming that it had to be done? Believe me, this solution beats a lot of the alternatives all to hell. Frankly, I think Six Apart deserves some credit for
applying some thought to the problem and coming up with a good compromise between investor pressure, freedom of expression and limited resources.