TOS and Abuse Policy document suggestions

iawtp.

I just love it when people break the rules and then blame the rules.

It would help if the rules were explained clearly, I think that is the point of the post.

It would help if some of the rules were clearer but I think the real problem is that people on LJ Abuse make up rules as they go along, then think out the justification for it after the decision. They should fix things like the notice of no contact being clear about covering your home page link as well as posts since they usually say they don't take any outside links into account, but the real problem is they are very unwilling to admit to their mistakes and won't give real answers. So with the inference thing, almost anything could have some relation to all kinds of people, and someone on LJ Abuse can just decide they think it might have been an inference against someone, and in the case you mentioned it wasn't even a public post so the person couldn't have reported it saying she thought it was inference about her!

Some of their suspensions for "incitement to harass" have been ridiculous too, it isn't harassing someone to laugh about them. Laughing bad, pedophilia good!

They say all their decisions are checked by two team members but when they suspend people in different countries thinknig they are the same person they are obviously not checking very hard.

Okay, so you call for suggestions on improving Abuse policy by making things more clear, but your argument is that a Notice of No Contact isn't clear enough.

"You may not write about her in your journal, or in any community journal, in any way, shape, or form."

What isn't clear about this statement? I'm sure there are policies that could be clarified, but you've picked an example that I really don't think needs further explanation.

As it's my blog that ljablogger quoted from above, I have some thoughts on this. In correspondance with LJ Abuse, they said "This includes inference to an individual and links about them that could point to content outside of LiveJournal," and "To make this absolutely clear, you should not link, discuss, vent or post anything that could have any relation whatsoever to the individual(s) covered by the Notice of No Contact."

It would seem a simple matter to state that explicitly in the original notice that is sent to people. Outside links are not usually taken into account by LJ Abuse. As they said to me, "under normal circumstances of investigating violations of our Terms of Service, we do not take into account content that is outside of LiveJournal's servers". As I asked, how is one supposed to know what is "normal circumstances" and what is not?

It makes perfect sense to me that if I were to post an entry saying "Here is an interesting page for you to read" with a link to a page about them, the post would be about them and hence a breach. Having your webpage URL in your info set to part of your web site which deals with them, with the link text reading "my homepage", doesn't mention them in any way, shape or form - the only mention, inference or otherwise, is on the page which is the outside link. If the original Notice of No Contact said "You may not write about her in your journal, or in any community journal, in any way, shape, or form, or link anywhere on your journal to any page which writes about her," I would never have set the webpage URL to go directly to the page (which was part of my previous journal, which LJ Abuse mistakenly suspended believing that I was someone else).

Presumably LJ Abuse thought I was thinking "Ooh, how can I sneakily get around this rule?" when in fact I was thinking "Would doing this break the notice? This is what the notice says, well, I'm not writing about her in any way and they always say they don't take the content of outside links into consideration, so I guess it's okay." Had the rule been stated in the terms with which it was described to me after the event, I wouldn't have made the mistake.

However, there are significant problems even with what they told me after the fact - as the Anon above points out, "anything that could have any relation whatsoever to the individual(s) covered by the Notice of No Contact" is an extremely wide demand when "inference" is interpreted so widely.

As I cannot talk about the specific situation without inference to the person I have a NONC with, I'll create a hypothetical. Say I have a NONC with someone who is a big football fan, loves mushroom pepperoni pizza, and writes about how much she loves IE and how Firefox sucks.

If I write an entry which talks about any of those subjects, it could have a relation to her. It could be a sneaky way of making snide posts about her. Or it could be me having something to say about football or Microsoft or mushrooms on pizza. So I'd better not ever say anything about any topic she ever mentions, in case LJ Abuse decides it's about her. In fact, I'd better not write any entry with a general vent about the stupidity of humankind, because that might be about her too. You may say I'm being far-fetched and LJ Abuse would never take action on such general statements, but there are two recent examples of LJ Abuse doing exactly that, and then of course refusing to explain why they felt the posts were about the person. Of course I can't give links to all the information and backgrounds, as that would be breaking my NONC.

I can also think of a couple of very easy ways to abuse this aspect of the rule to "set people up", but I'm not keen to describe them as they'd give too many people ideas.

I'm not sure that in these cases it's a matter of clarity, but a matter of consistency. The rule (which doesn't appear unclear) is applied in some cases and not in others. In cdaae's case, the 'rule' was applied in a very presumptuous way, assuming that a rather vague post was about the person mentioned in the NONC. In other cases, users can blatantly break rules and the abuse team chooses to interpret it as something else (for example, the way that you distinguish between anorexia and less socially accepted/promoted forms of self harm (when the medical evidence is actually that anorexia is more risky in the long term)), presumably for idealogical reasons.

Oh, one other thing I should add, which I should have mentioned on my blog too. About a week before I was mistakenly suspended because LJA thought I was yellow-finch/cdaae13, some random people (ie. not on my friends list) had left me comments mentioning the drama that led to my NONC. They were obviously trolling for trouble. I wrote to LJA and asked whether I had any responsibility to remove comments by others, in case anything blew up.

They replied that I didn't, but that I should tell my LJ friends not to mention said person on my journal just in case. They wrote "We strongly suggest that you delete any such comments and let all your friends know that they should not mention the other individual in your journal". Since I have a relatively large number of LJ friends, and not all list their email addresses, this could very sensibly be interpreted as an instruction to expressly mention in my LJ the user I have a NONC with. I didn't do so, but I think it illustrates that LJ Abuse can be less than clear about what you are and aren't allowed to do.

Would you mind if I add that to the blog?

That's only one example I picked, it's the longer example because I thought quoting that part of cdaae's blog illustrated the point well. It should state "including indirect inference, and linking to outside sources about her" so people are 100% clear since LJ abuse usually says they do not consider outside links.

I also think harassment should not be left undefined and open to such wide interpretation where mentioning people in a mocking way gets called incitement to harass them. I reckon LJ should stick with a definition of harassment that people looking up harassment law would recognize, not people looking up dictionary.com. This is why people feel the abuse team should be made up of professionals with more training that what can be supplied to a volunteer group of users, that goes for the inconsistency on whether they can read locked entries as well.

The first item under Member Conduct in the TOS also misleads people, it says members agree they must not "Upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable" when in fact LJ Abuse does not take action on material that is racially, ethnically or otherwise hateful or objectionable, and they take action on "harassing by nature" but not "threatening by nature." Why is posting images of user's babies with bulletholes in their heads a matter of freedom of speech, but "harassing" someone by persistently irritating them, or posting their full name when it is publically available on their web site, is not?

You don't think the head guy of the abuse team is actually going to sit down and carefully consider your points, do you?

You should send it along to Mena Trott.

I think he made it clear enough.

Can you explain why LJ Abuse refuses to answer totally reasonable questions?

I also feel that abuse team member's ability to read locked and private entries should be addressed in either the Abuse policy document or LJ's privacy policy. LJ Abuse has declined to take action on locked entries before, saying they can't read them, but it is obvious they can and do.

Ditto on that. I once had someone leaving comments they knew they'd get in trouble for, then deleting them, so I'd get the notification but had nothing to report. So on the next comment, I f-locked the entry so they couldn't delete it, and reported it to LJ Abuse. LJ Abuse told me they couldn't do anything about it because it was a locked entry, even though it was my locked entry and I was specifically asking them to look at it.

Then on another occassion they quoted something from one of my locked entries to me saying it was a breach of a NONC (which it wasn't, but that's another matter). So which is it?

As has been said in this community numerous times, the ability to view locked/private entries is limited to LiveJournal's actual employees, and is only used in cases of copyright complaints or violations of United States law.

Untrue in my case. There was no copyright complaint, and no alleged violation of US law. In fact on the first occassion, my journal was not reported at all - they thought I was yellow_finch, who had been reported for breach of a NONC, and then went into cdaae to have a look.

here's a thought-why don't you and all your friends leave the whole melouise thing alone and maybe you'd stop getting suspended?

are you that immature/obsessed that you guys can't just stop? i mean, it was funny when all the stories first started being posted (like on lj drama, melee can't see me, etc), but that was what, two years ago? and you're STILL dragging it out?! and then you expect people to care that you get the boot from lj?

sad and pathetic, really.

I'm sorry but I'm not having anything to do with the "melouise thing," it's mentioned in my blog only through its bearing on LJ abuse.

I think if you look into it you'll find that the two people who had journals suspended over it (other than her, I know she had more than 20 journals suspended) haven't had anything to do with it in a while, except that cdaae put up her post explaining things from earlier in her journal when LJ abuse suspended her by mistake (a rare thing, a mistake they admitted and apologized for!)

I gather Melouise or her mother or whichever is still writing blogs about it though.

If you'll take a look at my blog you'll see the other cases I have written up so far.

LOL, Meele. I bet I can guess what the IP was on that comment.

That's what gets me about it, Meele has kept up harassing cdaae and cdaae has ignored 90% of it except answering a couple of her most insulting lies on another journal service a month or two ago. Then cdaae got suspended because of lj abuse's error thinking she was someone else, and the someone else got suspended becuase lj abuse insist she was talking about Meele when she says she can show the logs to show she was talking about someone else. So because Meele is still spreading lies about cdaae she has her web page link on the her new LJ replacing cdaae pointed to the text of a post that was on cdaae, so after they apologize to cdaae for suspending her thinking she was someone else they suspend her again for that. Plus some other friend locked inference because she talked about PC alternatives to the word cunt.

Actualy it's been 2 years since Meele started drama on Yahoo but 1 year since it was on LJ drama.

They have left it alone. Melouise continues to refresh their journals several times a day, and then she'll pick out some obscure reference that she can indirectly tie to herself and reports them. And sadly the abuse team takes her word on it. They've moved on. She hasn't. She's still talking about Peter fucking no one cares about him Karrie and how he molested her. Boo hoo.

On this one here: http://ljabuse.blogspot.com/2006/03/do-you-trust-lj-abuse.html, I've seen it before on your blog and just kind of dismissed it - but now you bring it up here - so I have to ask. What proof do you have that whoever posted those screenshots is telling the truth?

I can tell you that it's not possible for an abuse team member to allow someone else to log into someone else's account. I couldn't log into anyone's account unless I have their password, and we can't see passwords, so there wouldn't be a way for us to hand over the password to someone. We can't view friends only/private entries. We can't see IP logging unless it's on a journal that we own or maintain. This ability is limited to a small handful employees and not volunteers of the team.

I know you are about as likely to believe me as I am to believe whoever posted those screenshots. But really, from the "proof" posted, it looks more like she broke into the other one's account and is saying LJA "let" her in to cover her own ass.

The pieces of damning evidence would most likely be here: http://www.pbase.com/frozenstars/image/44706646 in the IP address the password was requested from and the email it was sent to. But those are hidden, so it's not possible to prove who requested the IP and who it was sent to.

I've looked at the screenshots and I feel like I'm missing the other 3/4 of the story. And I have no idea how the changing of default colors (and a screenshot to prove it!) fits into anything, or what it proves. So I apologize if I'm missing some vital comment or entry that explains how those screenshots prove that someone from LJA is handing out passwords.

I don't know whether that person is telling the truth or not, but I have researched and experienced instances of the abuse team contradicting what they have previously said, and people have had their locked entries quoted to them as 'evidence' by abuse team members, so some team members must be able to read locked posts. Why do they say they don't to some people, when they can?

Only employees have the ability to read locked posts, this isn't news. There are only 2 employees that are active on the abuse team so they simply do not take every case. In what you are talking about, the quotes are obtained by the manager and the team member puts together the answer/email. Only the part that is quoted is shared with volunteers on the team. Just because there is only one signature on the response doesn't mean only that person worked on the case. It just means that's the person that answered or sent the email. There is a lot of interaction on each case between volunteers and managers, and then each case is documented so non-abuse team employees can provide some oversight if necessary.

I have nothing to give you as proof, but there you have it.

What happened to a couple of entries about the kitten animation ? I'm confused. I went to go thank someone for their comment and noticed that my comments, and others, are gone. Either LJ is acting up today or something else?

Thanks :)