Blogging Wars: LiveJournal versus Mail.ru over Child Porn

Bloggers are famous for our ability to have our own opinions on just about everything in the world and more often than not we are very willing to share such positions on our blogs constantly bragging about certain things we are happy about and yet other things we are unhappy or concerned about. But sometimes bloggers are willing to not only talk and the latest example in Russia shows that bloggers may even be willing to start something looking very much like a real war.

As some of you may know, LiveJournal is the most popular blogging platform in Russia with huge numbers of users contributing their time and efforts to generating content for LiveJournal – even though in the US and pretty much everywhere else in the world you will have to spend quite some time looking for internet users who still use that pretty ancient (and far from usable) blogging platform.

Bloggers here in Russia mostly care about being able to speak and being heard than about pragmatic things like comfort or monetizing their blogs – so LiveJournal is a perfect solution for those purposes due to its strong social networking features. So it is no wonder that people are grouped in pretty solid communities here and information can be spread virally better than it can even be disseminated on traditional social networks like Facebook created with viral growth in mind.

Russian bloggers know how to use this tool very well so when they care about something, they will do their best to make sure everyone learns about the problem they are concerned about. The most recent example is the war LiveJournal bloggers virtually declared to Mail.ru – a competitor of LiveJournal and another popular place for many Russian blogs. Technically Mail.ru is not a blogging platform: instead it is one of the largest Russian portals that offers its users just about everything – from free email service (the thing it initially started with as the name suggests) to news, social networking and free blog hosting as well.

This social networking and blogging functionalities are the reason for the recent war: the thing is that LiveJournal mommy-bloggers have discovered that Mail.ru blogging application and social network are widely used to post child porn content and many pedophiles eagerly abuse lack of moderators and attention from fellow bloggers to post whatever they want and to consume such objectionable content in a manner they are willing to. What’s more, the porn-related content is freely available for anyone on Mail.ru – no matter if you are 14 or 40.

For example, the social network includes 40 communities for pedophiles and dozens of users with interests and tags hinting at their offending habits. The blogger who discovered the disturbing trend has also supposedly carried out a small experiment: she registered a fake profile of a 10-year old girl and in less than an hour the profile was visited by more than 50 adult men with offensive sexual suggestions to the invented girl.

The discovery of the blogger was quickly noticed by other LiveJournal bloggers and they all started to gather information and additional evidence. So what started as a simple blog post resulted in a large-scale campaign with tons of emails to Mail.ru management, press people and even letters to Russian authorities, including the President and public prosecutor.

The thing that they want to achieve is pretty simple: the LiveJournal bloggers demand that registration on Mail.ru should not be allowed to children under 14. But the irony is that this will be virtually impossible to do: the portal is advertised in many magazines for teens and teens are actually their target audience so they bring pop celebrities that can attract attention from children to blog here as well. And for the place where children want to be it will hardly be realistic to expect them to stop registering only because they are under 14 – and without decent parental control and attention any measures will hardly work.

But anyway the management of the Russian giant portal looks to be pretty willing to cooperate and they promptly removed abusing accounts and communities and are now looking for additional ways to make Mail.ru a safer place to be for children though the scandal around the entire situation does not make any party involved look good at all.

Anyway, I believe that for any large social network or blogging platform chances that everything can be properly moderated are quite low so it is no wonder that Mail.ru can hardly manage it. I believe the only thing that any such service needs is support from users (and this is exactly why I invariably report abusive content whenever I bump into something inappropriate on Flickr as I would not want to see Flickr loaded with tons of porn) helping by reporting their findings promptly. And while the internet is obviously the place where you can hardly avoid porn (including child porn) and social networks relying on user-generated content are mostly vulnerable, it is still good to see people who care enough to point to such situations and hopefully help avoid some disgusting situations in the future – even if these people are from a competing blogging platform.

Via (in Russian)