LiveJournal apologizes for mass deletion

LiveJournal apologized Thursday for a mass deletion of sex-themed discussions that purged literary criticism and accounts belonging to role-playing game characters and led to an unprecedented user revolt.

In a public announcement, Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of LiveJournal owner Six Apart, said, "Well, we really screwed this one up" and promised to reinstate a wide swath of communities that were deleted as part of the company's attempt to eradicate pedophilia-related discussions.

"Over the next few hours we will review the journals that were taken down and wherever appropriate we will restore these journals or communities," Berkowitz said. A day before, in an interview with CNET News.com, he had defended the deletion as not required by law but part of an effort to set standards based on "what we think is appropriate." (About 500 communities were removed.)

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'pornish_pixies' celebrates its return
One Harry Potter-themed group called pornish_pixies celebrated its return by posting an erotic story of a teenage Harry having intimate relations with arch-nemesis Draco Malfoy. One restored group deals with fictional tales of incest. Another, called lol_porn, includes links to bloopers and other unintentionally amusing pornographic Web sites.

What outraged the LiveJournal protesters earlier this week is that the censored discussions and accounts went far beyond what they believe was necessary to target pedophilia. One post noted that two journals were deleted on grounds that "that they in some way encouraged illegal behavior" even though the accounts belonged to clearly labeled fictional characters in a role-playing game (one listed as interests "beating people up"). Another deleted community was home to Spanish-language discussions of Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita.

A "fandom_counts" group set up as a kind of petition to draw attention to the protest had 29,423 members as of late Thursday.