... I've designated my entire LJ as containing "explicit adult content," in accordance with LJ's latest dumbshit clusterfuck bid to force every adult online to act as a 'net nanny, for a few reasons:

• In all honesty, considering that my LJ is full of openly and intentionally pornographic fanfics and fanart, there's really no other way to describe its content;
  
• I simply can't be bothered to go through every single entry and individually rate the "adult" or "explicit adult" level of its content, so it's easier and safer just to assume that anything I post has about even odds of containing blatantly hardcore pornography; and ...
  
• This "screening" system is so ridiculously simple to get around, even if you're not the appropriate age(s) to be seeing this material, that all I'm actually doing is (a) covering my ass and (b) hopefully making my age-inappropriate material easier to find for horny teenage boys, in much the same way that more precise movie and television ratings do - because when you're a 15-year-old who's looking to rub one out to something you shouldn't be seeing, it's important to know whether that NC-17 or TV-MA rating means that you'll at least get to see hot chicks' exposed pubes grinding against something. I FEEL YOUR PAIN, horny teenage boys.

That being said, I'm taking the suggestion I've seen from several other LJ users, and flagging this post for "offensive content" as often as I can. I mean, it offends me, and since that's as arbitrary as your reasons apparently need to be, in order to flag something, why not?

They were probably under pressure from parent's groups to implement something like this. I'd honestly rather have content filtering become voluntary, like the video game industry did with age labeling, than have it forced upon us.

Take the PVB for instance. I'd rather voluntarily put a "parental supervision" label on the site than have every filtering application used by parents and workplaces block it as a possibly inappropriate site.

It's also one of those things I'd rather see free market take care of before the government does. I'd hate to have to worry that the FBI is reading this site and can shut it down on a moment's notice and prosecute me if someone posts something they don't like.

... The problem is, if you actually look at how this is being carried out, it's so open to abuse that it amounts to countless Little Brothers, who now can conceivably report any entry for "hate speech" or "offensive content" if its religious, political, philosophical or any other views disagree with their own, especially since there is no recourse given for "flagged" LJ users who wish to contest such allegations against themselves. Also, the whole "protecting children" angle is bullshit, because LJ itself has officially stated that LJ users under 18 may still post entries including adult-level topics, but they may not see any other LJs which include similarly adult-level topics, so gone is the ability of adolescents to talk with one another about a lot of the growing-up stuff they go through at that age, and in its place is a system that gives potential pedophiles a one-way window into teens' sex lives.

The fact that LJ changed everyone's settings to "filtered" by default, without telling anyone, likewise did little to endear them to their own users. I've had to correspond individually with several of my fellow LJ users, to guide them through the process of switching the settings on their LJs, so that they can see my entries on their friends pages now without having to un-collapse every single one individually.

That's a good point. I'm not entirely sure they did that purposely, it sounds to me like a bad implementation. In fact I'm going to report that to their bug system - adults should not be able to see under-18 users' journals without permission, especially if this system was put in place to protect them from liability. Also, it should be designed so one person's journal can't be "swarmed" by activists.



That was also bad implementation. They should activate filtering only for under-18 users. I guess they couldn't figure out how right away so they took the lazy approach and applied it to everyone.