What Does Strikethrough (LiveJournal, 2007) Mean?
Fandom CultureThe 2007 incident in which LiveJournal mass-suspended hundreds of journals and communities — many of them fandom spaces — over listed interests, with deleted names displayed in strikethrough text. A formative trauma in fandom platform history.
Strikethrough (LiveJournal, 2007) in Practice
In May 2007, LiveJournal abruptly suspended a wave of accounts in response to outside pressure over objectionable content, sweeping up fanfiction communities, fictional-content discussion spaces, and even survivor support groups alongside actual bad actors; deleted usernames appeared struck through, giving the event its name, and a second purge later that year was dubbed Boldthrough. Fandom's takeaway was structural: a community living on someone else's platform can be deleted overnight by policies it doesn't control. The episode directly fueled the founding of the Organization for Transformative Works and its 'own the servers' philosophy — AO3, launched in the aftermath, exists in significant part because of Strikethrough. The word remains fandom shorthand for platform betrayal, invoked during every subsequent purge.
Example usage
"Every time a platform announces a content crackdown, fandom elders whisper 'Strikethrough' and update their AO3 backups."
Related Terms
LiveJournal (LJ)
The blogging platform that hosted fandom's social center through the 2000s — communities, kink memes, fests, and friendships lived on LJ before the great migrations to Tumblr, Dreamwidth, and AO3.
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AO3 (Archive of Our Own)
The largest fanfiction archive on the internet, run by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works. It is fan-built, donation-funded, ad-free, and famous for its powerful tagging and filtering system.
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OTW (Organization for Transformative Works)
The nonprofit founded by fans in 2007 that runs the Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, and Open Doors, and advocates legally for fanworks. The OTW exists so that fandom's infrastructure is owned by fandom itself.
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