It seems the more things happen re the "Warriors for Innocence" censorship fiasco, the more Livejournal seems to bungle things.

Namely, it seems now that people can flag any entries to LJ Abuse for "adult content":

(from LJ Herald)

A 'Flag content' icon/link will be added to the icons/links found in every entry (Leave a Comment, Add to Memories, Tell a Friend, Track Comments, etc.).

ETA (on Oct. 20 @ 11:45pm GMT): Users won't be able to "flag anything if their account isn't at least one month old". Logged-out users won't be able to flag content. Editor's Note: thanks to worldserpent for the heads-up.

ETA (on Oct. 20 @ 7:55pm GMT): developer janinedog tells us that users won't be able to flag their own entries via the Flag icon. However, they will be able to flag their entries when posting or editing them and, of course, flag their journals via Manage Settings or Manage Communities (we already knew that). The Flag icon will therefore be used by other users to report content to the Abuse team who will then review the content and decide to flag it as containing adult content or not. Janine also tells us that these changes will go live next Thursday. Thanks again, Janine.

More info here:

Users can't flag their own stuff via the flag icon. They can flag their own stuff via the Manage Settings page option (which flags the whole journal) or while posting/editing an entry (which will flag just that entry).

The flag icon is used to submit the journal or entry to the Abuse Team for review. The settings are used for the account owner or journal poster to self-police themselves.

So to summarise: You can mark your own stuff as "adult" and this is okay, but the flag button used by other people auto-generates an LJ Abuse request.

Seeing as Livejournal has in fact admitted they have no formal training in regards to abuse issues and in particular abuse issues that may have legal aspects--as exhibited in defense of communities promoting religiously motivated child abuse, among other things whilst removing adult Harry Potter fanfiction (technically, Dumbledore x Grindenwald fanfic can result in an abuse complaint even though the creator of the series herself has admitted that this is not only canonical but she is interested in seeing what slash fanfic will result)--I am, shall we say, a bit nervous about this.

Among other things, one of my real worries about this is that dominionist groups like Warriors for Innocence will start "astro-turfing" targets for mass complaints with LJ Abuse. DMCA SLAPPs and similar stunts are well known as a method of silencing critics that dominionists have used; another method they occasionally have used is by filing massive numbers of complaints claiming a target is in violation of the rules (for example, the Parent's Television Council and the AFA's "complaint-spamming" of the FCC claiming shows are violating indecency rules; PTC's complaints total up to over 99 percent total of indecency complaints sent to the FCC, for things as minor as a woman being in a bikini before the "Threshold Hour" of 11pm), and I can very easily see dominionist groups targeting entire communities (including this one).

I do wish to assure our readers that--in the event we do get "Abuse-bombed" by a critic who takes umbrage to the writing here--we have precautions to not only back up the archives but to keep the community going elsewhere, if necessary. Still, though, we will want to keep a careful eye on this (including a careful eye at the "usual suspects").