Oh dear. LiveJournal’s done it again. The original blogging site generates stacks of controversy whenever it makes any changes to the site, and the recent alteration is attracting plenty of new comments and irate blog posts even as I write this.

The change I’m talking about must have seemed like a good idea at the time - but then most things do, before you try to implement them in the real world. What LiveJournal has done is to introduce new filters: “Adult Concepts” and “Explicit Adult Content”. Users can flag their own content as inappropriate for children to either degree, or, if they read a post they believe to be adult in theme or content, can flag it up to LiveJournal’s admin. When posts are marked as containing adult content, they’ll be hidden under a cut tag, and only users whose profiles indicate that they’re over 18 will be able to view them.

All very well in principle, until you consider a couple of things. One, that there’s no way of verifying the age of a LiveJournal user, so underage bloggers may well just claim to be older than they are in order to access the adult content. Two, there are a lot of people who may well want to abuse the system by flagging content they don’t like as inappropriate for underage readers.

The latter is the one that seems to have generated the most problems. That, and the fact that adult users generally don’t want to have to click on a cut-tag to read a post when they’re browsing their LiveJournal friends list (basically, the friends list is an RSS feed of posts from users that have been added as “friends”, i.e. subscribed to).

Users can already lock their own posts so that they are accessible only to their friends, or to select groups of their friends if they’ve set up filters, so the ability to hide some potentially offensive content from the delicate eyes of child isn’t new. But allowing other users to chip in and claim that another LiveJournaller is posting inappropriate content — just by clicking a button, rather than having to fire off an e-mail — is new, and worrying. LiveJournal’s staff has assured its users that content will only be investigated if it’s been flagged by numerous users, but that policy is decidedly questionable. What if a little-known blogger is posting something inappropriate, and only a couple of people have found the content? It wouldn’t get flagged many times, but would be available for children. The flipside is that posts by popular and/or controversial bloggers are liable to be flagged many, many times over. The content will still have to be reviewed by LiveJournal staff, but that sounds like a potential headache, and a massive waste of time, in the making.

And then there’s the problem of defining what, exactly, constitutes adult content.

It’s all a big mess, really. An understandable one, when you consider how often social networking sites (and sites which rely on user generated content) are criticised for not protecting younger members of the Internet community adequately. But exactly how any site is supposed to do that, short of employing thousands of new members of staff solely to scan the site for anything that might be objectionable and remove it, is still a problem that remains unsolved.