y'know...

[kuangning]

Not for nothing, but if you harass someone anonymously and someone responds by creating an account to respond to -your- harassing comments in his friend's journal, and that friend doesn't mind, then you are the problem. Having the LJ abuse team remove the account you don't like doesn't change the fact that you're a whiny bitch with nothing better to do, and it doesn't hide the cheating, the lying, or the idiocy.

That said, I believe that this:

Dear LiveJournal user johnbot,

It has come to our attention that you are the owner or user of a LiveJournal account used solely for the purposes of harassing other LiveJournal users (vaganus). This is considered a violation of the LiveJournal Terms of Service. As such, all of the offending journals have been terminated with no chance of reinstatement. No action will be taken against your personal accounts at this time.

You are, however, informed that this is your first and only warning in this matter. While we do allow users to express themselves freely, that freedom of expression does not extend to the creation of journals whose sole purpose is to harass or mock other users. Should any further activity of this nature be reported to us, we will have no choice but to pursue further action against your personal accounts up to and including their termination, if necessary.

Regards,
LiveJournal Abuse Team

was uncalled-for. If she's deleted her journal, is she even still a user? The users in this case had no problem with what was said, and if the replies were harsh (and they were,) well, then that's just what she gets for harrassing a user in his personal journal. I really wish the LJ Abuse team, wonderful as they are in most cases, would have investigated this a bit further and applied some common sense.

Comments

[charles.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who spent a while enforcing similar kinds of rules on IRC, this seems fair enough to me. The message is "Say what you like, just don't abuse the account creation process to do it."

When you're writing up rules for a social online system, you run the risk of having to commit yourself to a life of being dragged into the personal disputes of complete strangers. The personal disputes of complete strangers are generally boring, and for the most part they're about things that seem completely petty to a disinterested observer. So instead of diving into the he-said she-said melodrama, you try to make it as easy as possible for people to protect themselves, and fill the gaps with simple rules that have as little room for ambiguities as possible.

Such as, "Don't create accounts with the sole purpose of abusing someone."

The alternative is madness, especially when the community you are trying to police is 300,000 people.

Re:

[kuangning]

I think my problem with it is, what counts as harassing someone? If she's going into his journal, and he never said anything in her journal, which has been -deleted,- and she's posting anonymously, how is that harassment? And why does a deleted ex-user get to complain that she's being harassed in a journal that's not hers? The account wasn't even created solely to annoy her, it was an in-joke between Tony and John. Annoying her was a fringe benefit. Furthermore, neither Tony nor John, to my knowledge, were asked any questions regarding the account. The decision was made unilaterally, and what's with the "no recourse" thing? That smacks of "if you complain, we'll take away your personal account."

[kuangning]

Was. Neither was. Dear gods, do I need a refresher course in grammar.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

Blah. I agree.

I wonder if there's any way to get a second opinion :/