Still thinking, but beginning to feel a bit better...

[rabidsamfan]

http://caras-galadhon.livejournal.com/348782.html has some good points about the whole flag/content marking system. #3 had escaped me, but I like it I do. Should cut down on the basic trolls. And you appear to need to be an LJ user to set flags flying from that too.



Some background -- I'm a children's librarian in a public library, and I know from that experience just how ballistic people can get about kids and internet porn. (We once had a local paper put a screaming headline on the front page "KIDS FIND PORN AT THE LIBRARY" and it would have warmed the cockles of your heart to discover how many children really *do* pay attention to the news and do what their elders tell them to do.) The compromise we reached, after a great deal of fuss, was to filter the children's computers and leave the adults computers unfiltered. This changed, gradually, to giving adults the option to turn off the filter, and is about to change again to limiting the number of unfiltered computers in the adult areas of the branches to a single machine. Our filter supposedly only blocks pornographic images, but it has flaws, and we need an unfiltered machine for the problem pages (where breast cancer information gets blocked because of pictures of breasts, for example.) But the drive to limit the number of machines came from librarians and patrons, who got tired of walking past the masturbators when all they really wanted to do was work on a resume or find a reference source.

The filter, of course, is imperfect. Filters always are. And the kids find porn anyway. And lie about their ages. And do all the things teens always do to make adults roll their eyes and shake their heads. And there are times when a page with a warning comes up anyway, because the filter's somehow missed it.

But not every kid clicks on through.

For the kids who really aren't interested yet, or are quietly principled, warnings of adult content really do provide a way to skip the stuff which is more mature than they want to deal with at the moment. And the younger kids, believe it or not, don't usually lie about their ages.

For parents whose concerns are very real, the warnings and filters help make it possible to allow a computer in the house at all.

What the warnings also do is cover the service provider's ass. Like "the coffee is hot" warnings on McDonald's cups, a little bit of legal blurb can go a long way when it comes to a court case. Since LJ has made the whole "self-labelling" thing entirely optional, and will only intervene when they really get nudged to do so, and then only to put up a content warning... well... that's not that unreasonable.

There are categories they still have to deal with legally, but lets face it, if you've already labelled your content as "adult" oriented, it's not gonna do a troll a bit of good to throw up a flag saying you should label it.

(I'm also amused by the "no adult content" category designation, but then again I work in a building where half the collection is "adult fiction" or "adult nonfiction" and its more fun to be amused by the stupidity of using "adult" to mean "sexy"...)


But reading through all of the things I'm seeing, I think what I'm getting is a sense of relief. Like any compromise, this is imperfect -- no one is entirely happy, but we're all unhappy for different reasons. There are kinks that will probably be addressed. But on the whole, this is a win for the users.

You see, it could be a lot worse. LJ/SixApart could have decided that adult content was just too much hassle to deal with on their servers and banned it entirely.

I'm just as happy that they didn't.

Comments

[claudia603.livejournal.com]

Your story about the library made me think about how I was at that age. Frankly I was a child-prude. :-) Seriously...If I even saw or heard or read a hint of something that involved too much cursing or explicit sexual description, I looked away. I remember stopping reading some books because I felt they were too "adult" for me. I had my own self quite censored. :-)

/no point to this whatsoever, lol :-)

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

No, there is a point. Most of us went through a stage where we just plain didn't want to know yet, and we ducked away from sexuality or cursing because it made us uncomfortable. I have no problem in making that stage easier on the kids while they go through it.

[surgicalsteel.livejournal.com]

Our filter supposedly only blocks pornographic images, but it has flaws, and we need an unfiltered machine for the problem pages (where breast cancer information gets blocked because of pictures of breasts, for example.) *laughs* Yep, same problems with by immediately former employer's filters - and that was a hospital. I do breast surgery (among other things) f'r cryin' out softly, sometimes you'd like to be able to show patients actual pictures of what a reconstructed breast looks like, or a post-mastectomy chest.

I'm agreeing with you on the labeling, and I've labelled both of my journals (regular and fic) globally as 'adult.' I feel safer that way. I know the people on my flist here are all over 18, and this journal's f-locked. But the fic? Whether it's the sex, the medically graphic material, or the fact that Serinde has opinions on homosexuality and prostitution that are very definitely controversial (whether people agree with them or not) - I personally feel safer knowing that anyone wanting to read that has to tell LJ up front that they're over 18.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Filters are by their very nature fallible. A clunky, "we made it easy for the computer" solution... but as long as you're aware of the potential problems, still useful in a limited kind of way.

[surgicalsteel.livejournal.com]

When I was on active duty, our med group's pediatrician liked to buy his contact lenses online from a popular website (well, it was the late 90s, so it was the beginning of the e-commerce explosion). That website was blocked by the Hanscom AFB filters - because, you see, the 'S' in 'Lens' next to the 'EX' in 'Express' spelled 'SEX' and triggered the filters.

Filters amuse me.

[clevertoad.livejournal.com]

okay, went and changed my journal settings to say 'adult content', will just have to label any explicit entries separately if I decide to post 'em here. (I write good smut, it's just that none of it's fannish these days) Put in a date for the birthday, blatantly stole-- er, borrowed -- the idea of using 1900 for a birth year since it's only about a half-century off. Set the filter options so I can see all of the adult content on everybody else's sites. Probably a few more hoops to jump through, but worth it.

No, filters aren't perfect and there will be the occasional slips. But it's worth the effort to keep trying to keep adult speech free for adults, and to keep reminding people that kids aren't little grownups in short pants.

You summed it up fairly well, rabidsamfan -- a reasonable compromise leaves most of the parties dissatisfied but all for different reasons. Will wait with interest to see how this one shakes out.

[siljamus]

Thank you for this. It is one of the more thoughtful posts on the subject that I've come across and you raised a few issues that I hadn't considered.