LJ abuse go ape?

[ciphergoth]

Updated: meta has updated his web page.

meta, who I've known for over a decade but never met, has had his account suspended by the LJ abuse team. Here's his side of the story. Now, in context, the "innocent" act of copying a publically available address from one place to another isn't innocent at all - it reads as an incitement to violence - but nonetheless, it's pretty clear that if things are as he describes them, the Abuse team's response is pretty inappropriate.

I'd like to link to the support request, but we don't have the privs to see it.

Comments

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

That does sound pretty insane on the face of it. Mind you, I think that Meta is wrong where he says ,i.Posting information about person X that person X publishes themselves on their public web pages should never be a TOS violation; that's just stupid. I think there's an enormous difference between, say, a full name or an e-mail address, and a full street address or work address. I know that keeping such information private online is like trying to hold back the tide, but holding back the tide is what all abuse teams are trying to do, and we hope that their sandbags last at least until the general public gets the message about how hard it really is and start to protect themselves appropriately.

And you're right about an incitement to violence. Publicising already public details is often used to deliberately make things harder for someone. If a newspaper print someone's personal details and they then get swamped with threatening or annoying contact, it's safe to say that however public the details were the paper is responsible for the level of the hassle. Most people don't bother to go and look for the details themselves...

[nickys.livejournal.com]

> Posting information about person X that person X publishes themselves on their public web pages should never be a TOS violation

Yes. There are different levels of 'publically available' after all.

Some of my personal details ended up on the Internet because I originally allowed them to be put in an obscure printed magazine (circulation figures in the hundreds), which then produced a web version of itself and republished my stuff without asking my permission.


Having said that, unless meta was in the habit of doing stuff which brought him to the attention of the LJ Abuse team, their response seems a bit heavy handed.
It's a bit much for a first offence.

[(Anonymous)]

Note that (a) the guy has continued to goad people to go visit him, and (b) the information is one click away from his home page. We're not talking about searching whois records or obscure web pages or anything like that.

- meta