I have HAD IT.
I've done my logical post. Now comes the rant.
People.
LJ's suspension of accounts that they have decided violate their TOS is not the fucking Holocaust. (That offends me so much I can't even tell you.) It is not genocide of fen. It isn't even surprising. The only thing that's surprised me in all of this is that it's taken LJ this long to take action on things that are against their TOS.
Of course their TOS is murky when it comes to copyright infringement and obscenity. Show me a TOS that isn't.
Of course they're going after images more than they're going after text. This is the national trend and has been for quite some time now. Go to your local megamart and see this in action: can you find books depicting explicit sex and violent acts? Yes. Can you find NC-17 rated movies? No. This is not a new phenomenon.
Of course they're going to go after Harry Potter. If there's a fandom where it's more confusing to tell whether the characters involved are of age or not, I haven't heard about it.
LJ has every right to decide what they allow and do not allow. LJ has every right to make these decisions subjectively. They're a private company. That's what private companies do.
LJ is not some special case because they'd prefer not to see chan or drawings of Harry Potter getting sucked off on their servers. Having published gay porn professionally for years, I can assure you that if you write a story about two guys fucking without using a condom, it's going to be a hard sell. If you write a story about two guys fucking and one of them is 17, good luck. This is not oppression. This is not censorship. This is private publications making a call about the risks they are or are not willing to take. Same with LJ.
Lest anyone think I'm somehow outside the fray here, I was kicked off a mailing list several years ago for writing what the mod decided was underage porn. The character appeared in a single episode of a television series, and I thought he looked 18. The mod disagreed. When I explained that it was not my intention to portray the character as underage, she quoted specific lines of my story that she felt made it obvious he was underage. (The only one I remember at this point was that I'd said he had "hairless thighs.") The mod's decision was not to be reversed, and I felt nauseous for days at the thought that I'd been pegged as some kind of child pornographer. It was fucking awful. And you know what? The mod still had the right to do it. It was her list.
Show me a US-based social network with a TOS that says "Sure, you can post your chan and pictures of characters generally regarded as below the age of majority here!" and I'll eat my hat.
Until then, I find this whole debacle becoming more and more hysteria-driven and less and less fact-based. Fanfic has always been on dubious legal/ethical ground. So has chan. I'm astonished LJ hasn't come under fire for hosting it until now, really. And unlike the majority of people in this argument, I don't expect them to decide to stick up for the fans and thereby hemorrhage sponsors.
Actually, if they did that, they'd look a lot like JF, wouldn't they? All for the fen but with a struggling business model. The people who are anti-LJ in this fight don't seem happy with JF, either. Sorry. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you have a grassroots social network where fans can do whatever they want that will always struggle due to lack of corporate sponsorship dollars, or you have a large and stable social network funded by corporate dollars that has to restrict some content in order to get the money to run well.
Neither way is evil. Nor is either way a goddamn holocaust. Cripes.
*steps off soapbox*