ao3 & censorship

while I’m dipping my toes in the wank water, it’s interesting to me to see people defend AO3′s current content policy as something that is simple or, say, guaranteed sustainable long-term. Fandom history types have elided the influence of libertarian ideology on internet advocacy and fandom’s own historic attitudes towards content rules and censorship for…basically forever, as far as I know (feel free to contradict me), but that influence is very real. See, for example, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, or Phil Zimmerman’s own account of why he wrote PGP, citing “civil libertarians” defending the rights of citizens to encrypt their communication and keep it totally private. These are the sorts of ethical conundrums and ideological activities that gave us Tor, a private browser that is literally used both for vital civil liberation…and to find, distribute, and perpetuate child porn. AO3 isn’t Tor, or PGP, or the Silk Road, or anything like that, but a lot of the ideology around fandom in general and fanfic in particular uses, mirrors, and grew from early cyperpunk libertarian writing and policymaking.

Personally, I don’t think AO3 should delete, say, fic centering around a m/f couple where one member is gay in canon. Is it homophobic? Yep it sure is. But my kneejerk response is “I’ve been there”, because I have! I have had some trash ass offensive/weird pairings. I have absolutely been like “I know he/she’s gay, buuut”, despite being gay myself!!! And maybe that’s the heteropatriarchy brainwashing me or whatever, but sometimes a girl just wants to read her problematic garbage in peace.

AO3 also hosts “extreme underage”, which is a personal HELLLL NO for me, since I am a victim of molestation. Should it be deleted? Honestly, I have no idea. On one hand, it is gross to me, and I do not want to see it, and I think it is mostly morally reprehensible. On the other hand, just for starters, some people really do write that stuff because they were themselves molested. Some people write it but would never rape a kid IRL or even look at actual child porn. Some people are porn-damaged and don’t want to inspect why it gets them off. It goes on. Plus, there are logical enforcement problems: how young is too young? Tumblr likes to say 18, but then, the legal age of consent is lower than 18 in many places, including the US. Should the cutoff age be whatever the absolute lowest age of consent in the world is? What if they’re 15 but the author is clearly writing them as younger in body/maturity? What about diaper play type stuff that screws with the POV so they SEEM super young but are actually of the age of consent? What about high school AUs? The list goes on.

But, then, what about grossly racist fic? The corner of fandom that originated AO3 is pretty white; I have no idea if AO3′s demographics skew majority white these days, but it wouldn’t surprise me. If we leave aside stuff like extreme underage and non-con, under the assumption that a significant portion of the userbase experiences the threat of sexual assault at a bare minimum, doesn’t racist fic then fall under a different kind of category? If you’re white and writing, say, a plantation AU, or openly, gleefully white supremacist fic, then I personally feel that’s reprehensible and should be taken down. But who decides? What’s the line? I don’t mean that flippantly, I mean it seriously: is it enough for multiple people to complain, regardless of content? Or would it only be works that openly advocate for systems of white supremacy in some way? Would all the buddy cop fic with really shitty attitudes towards police brutality make the cut, or not?

And then, if that’s our rubric, what happens if a fandom’s mostly men, and the fic is wall to wall rapefic? I don’t want to be around men who write gross dudeporn about raping women, and again, I think there is definitely something reprehensible about that porn’s popularity. But AO3 is a fannish archive for everyone, and so, that fic would be left up.

So, it’s complicated to think about enforcing any kind of moral community standards when it comes to what kind of fic is posted. The above thoughts - of exceptions, logical and logistical complications, moral grey areas, variations, all of those are things that many websites have dealt with by saying anything goes, always. But I do not think that anyone making policy, whether large and world-affecting or relatively trivial, should be dismissing moderation or rules-making based on perceived complexity. Here is why.

Twitter is probably the most famous example right now of a site that allows almost anything in the name of free speech…and it’s biting them in the ass, big time. It’s become known among many white supremacist communities as the place they can go and say whatever and it will almost certainly not be taken down. And that dynamic - where a space is flooded with people who hold certain repugnant views, and thus ruins the space for everyone else - is one that should not be regarded as impossible for AO3 to facilitate.

Because, of course, AO3 isn’t a read-only space. It is an archive, but not in the sense of the Internet Archive, where it’s scraping websites. It’s a social space. They’ve already seen the need for more stringent abuse policies due to trolling, and the site is getting more popular by the day. What happens if some fandom springs up that’s fertile ground for white supremacists, and a bunch of them start posting to AO3? Or the dudeporn scenario? It is very true that in the event of AO3 being flooded with horrifically misogynistic, racist, or homophobic fic, that I could just go on posting my fic and blacklist stuff I find offensive - but it is possible that AO3, by dint of hosting this material unexamined and welcomed, will drive other people away. It is possible that AO3 will become the kind of place known for being permissive towards white supremacists or other hateful groups. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, and it’s important to consider because AO3 is only as good as its userbase. It’s only as comprehensive, in terms of hosting and preserving fanworks, as the people who choose to post there. And while it’s certainly not their responsibility to remove a high school AU because some 20-year-old complained about it being child porn (or whatever), it is their responsibility to look after the interests of their userbase. I very much disagree with the thinking that rejecting the idea of any content moderation wholesale, under the name of “free speech”, is the only or best way to do that.

tl;dr a lot of people pitching hissy fits about AO3′s content policy are being immature and short-sighted, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that AO3′s content policy is perfect, nor that having ANY kind of content policy is simple/free of flaws.

a few follow up comments, since this post got…more traffic than I had planned for.

I am honestly not sure where the idea that I was calling for AO3 to be curated came from, since I don’t think my post communicates that desire, but since the concept is out there: no, I do not think AO3 should be curated. I do think, however, that given AO3’s social nature, and given the existence of Abuse policies already, that a clearer, more transparent, and potentially more restrictive, abuse policy should be considered.

Now, when I say “potentially more restrictive”, I don’t mean “pull down everything that anyone finds offensive”. That assumption has been made several times in reblogs, so I want to be very clear: I do not think AO3 having an abuse-related content deletion policy necessitates removal of any and all fics that anyone on the internet considers offensive. Any kind of abuse policy that allows for content removal will be written with both specific limits and some room for qualitative judgments. AO3’s own policy, in fact, already does this with plagiarism:

So, if AO3 changed its rules to allow for content removal in the case of egregiously bigoted works, or harassment in comments, I would assume it might work somewhat similarly: on a case-by-case basis, incorporating qualitative judgments by Abuse, with clear guidelines in both the TOS and the reporting form regarding what would constitute a violation of the TOS. I would personally prefer to draw the lines pretty parsimoniously: meaning, however you wound up defining “egregiously bigoted”, it would not include things like “wrote Sheith”.

On that note: I am aware of Tumblr’s antis and the harassment that they encourage. My post didn’t talk about them much for the simple reason that as far as I know, no one involved or formerly involved with AO3’s policymaking has said, “hey, maybe a 19-year-old having sex actually is pedophilia, if you think about it.” I have, however, seen several people involved with AO3/AO3’s founding behaving dismissively towards the entire concept of ever removing works for violating any kind of bigotry-related ethical standards. This dismissiveness disturbs me because it helps contribute to a hostility towards marginalized fans that I think is misplaced.

I know that AO3’s purpose is to house as many fanworks as possible, and to prevent older works from being lost to downed websites and deletions. However, I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the OTW to define “as many fanworks as possible” to mean “as many fanworks as people post on an unmoderated, value-neutral site”. It would be great if we could rely on AO3 staying home to the fandom that matters to the OTW’s founders - meaning, genuinely fannish people, whose primary concern is creating fanworks that are generally in line with a leftist Western point of view. But AO3 is semi-public and is, again, a social website. It’s not statically scraping fic from various corners of the internet. The only works that end up on the AO3 are works that creators deliberately put there (and works brought in via Open Doors). What this means is that AO3 is already an imperfect portrait of fandom; it is already a limited set of all the fanworks on the internet. Having a no-removal policy with regards to bigotry has the potential to make that set even more limited.

Hockey fandom had a troll who posted a deliberately racist fic and engaged in the comments by saying things like (apologies for spelling out slurs) “this fandom will never ship a mulatto and a wetback”. The most egregious comments were deleted, but the fic is still up. Such behavior is obviously a perversion of AO3’s intent, but it’s also pretty classic trolling. AO3’s current policies simply do not account for malicious actors to the degree that hockey fandom saw. To me, this lack of preparation presents the very real danger that AO3 will lose parts of its userbase when people decide the trolling and bigotry isn’t something they want to deal with. I am aware that some people plan to continue posting regardless of what kind of people they share the fandom’s AO3 tag with. I am also aware that, personally, if I ever found myself in a fandom that liked to write violently homophobic fic, I’d probably leave. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t mean it as a threat; it’s just a description of one action that people might take.

I’m not saying that any kind of values-related content policy is easy to write. I am aware that AO3’s current policy was written by people who take the OTW’s stated mission very seriously. But ultimately, the OTW exists in its current form - as a nonprofit, which solicits funding and has a wide-reaching organizational structure - because it is supposed to serve fandom. A content policy that is entirely neutral on marginalization is not serving fandom neutrally. It has the potential to permit perpetuation of marginalization.

AO3 vs Twitter

I compared AO3 to Twitter not because they are comparable, currently, in scale or userbase (demographics, interests, whatever), but because they share a key component of being socially oriented sites whose primary form of interaction is users posting and responding to content. That description is generous enough to account for many other sites as well: Facebook, /b/, HackForums, and Tumblr, for starters. Twitter is a standout because they underestimated the power of online abuse and the threat it presented to their site for years. AO3 has experienced exponential growth (users and engagement), and has only recently begun providing users with tools to control their interactions with other users (Abuse and Support improvements, refusing gifts. I think it would be wise for AO3 to look to the future because it’s a website with the stated purpose of being a permanent archive. In addition to the userbase issue I discussed above, permanency requires funding; funding requires ongoing user engagement. Twitter has struggled with userbase attrition, which they themselves have attributed to their harassment problems. Again, AO3 isn’t the same as Twitter, but I am a believer in learning from others’ examples. In this specific case, the lessons I’d glean from Twitter are:

1) It is best for abuse-related user experience controls and policies to grow with the site’s complexity 2) It is best to consider what those controls and policies might be before the abuse actually becomes a huge problem.

page_leaf sent me some links about what that planning might look like: Designing Good Policy, Comment Moderation, We’re The Reason We Can’t Have Nice Things Online

Ultimately, there are a lot of ways to think about forming a content policy. AO3 could implement blocking to allow users to more easily tailor their experiences. They could revise their content policies to allow for work removal when a work is judged to be especially homophobic, racist, or misogynist. They could revise their content policies to allow for work removal only when the work’s content can be demonstrated to have an intent to harass*. But ultimately, my problem is and remains that hostility to any kind of reconsideration of AO3’s current policy is not values neutral. AO3 is not currently a comprehensive archive, and it never can be: it is only as comprehensive as its userbase. The current message I’m seeing from some corners of fandom is that the status quo is fine, and marginalized fans who can’t tolerate sharing an archive with people virulently hostile to them are a disposable part of AO3’s userbase. I really, really hope that’s not true.

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*AO3’s TOS can be read to do this already, but again, that hockey fic wasn’t removed. There is some obvious ambiguity here; I’m not proposing this as a fully formed policy.

AO3 and Abuse: A Story About the AO3 Abuse Team

First, I’m just going to say that I didn’t particularly WANT to write this post, but given that some people deliberately seem to be missing the point when it comes to this discussion of the AO3’s current policies regarding abuse and how they don’t protect marginalized members of fandom, I’ve elected to do something. Also: this post contains discussion of racism, including the replication/quoting of racist slurs and abuse.

A disclaimer: I’ve been in fandom for over a decade at this point. I’ve been a user of the AO3 since 2009, and I was writing fic for years before that. I was around for Racefail, for the J2 Help Haiti Big Bang Debacle, and I was around for the giant debate in fandom whether warnings for common triggers such as rape, sexual assault, and explicit depictions of violence should even be used. Because of that long history in fandom, I’m not surprised to see that many people are regurgitating the same exact arguments as before, but I am disappointed, deeply so, that we seem to have taken so little from those arguments and developments in fandom over the years.

As before, I really encourage everyone to read stopthatimp’s posts on this topic, both the original and the follow-up posts she’s made, which can be found here: http://stopthatimp.tumblr.com/post/152352331803/ao3-censorship

What I wanted to do was discuss in depth an incident she’d touched on, about the racist troll in Hockey RPF fandom that, in 2014, posted a deliberately racist fic to the tags involving Sidney Crosby and PK Subban. PK Subban, if you’re not aware, is a black Canadian player, and Sidney Crosby is a white Canadian player. The fic was tagged with “interracial kink”, posted anonymously, and sets out to deliberately fetishize PK Subban as a black man. When other AO3 members protested in the comments, the author responded with outright racist trolling, using racial slurs in response to critical comments. I want to say this again, because I don’t want this to be overlooked–this isn’t just a case of an author posting something in good faith that other people found offensive. This is a troll deliberately choosing to post something offensive, then responding to critical feedback with comments such as “this fandom will never ship a mulatto and a wetback”.

At this point, many people went to the AO3 Abuse Team to report the author, believing (and reasonably so) that such behavior was harassment, and should not be allowed on the AO3.

I’m reposting some of the Abuse Team’s responses, with permission of duckgirlie, who was one of the AO3 users that contacted them originally. During that exchange, the member of the Abuse Team stated that:

“unless it violates some other policy, we will not remove Content for offensiveness, no matter how awful, repugnant, or badly spelled we may personally find that content to be.” This is an accordance with our policy of maximum inclusiveness, which is one of the main goals of the Archive.” [emphasis theirs]

They later went on to state that the author’s behavior was NOT harassment by the definition of the Terms of Service, and that they felt “that both parties (the commenters and the author) are equally responsible for the conduct reported to us.” [emphasis mine]

As far as I’m aware, the author was the only person using racial slurs in the comments. To me, the notion that you could go into the comments to discuss a fic with the author, be met with racial slurs, and then be somehow be held “equally responsible” for what happened in those comments is beyond baffling, it’s inexcusable.

When duckgirlie politely pressed the Abuse Team for clarification as to how racial slurs would not be deemed harassment under the AO3’s TOS, she was told that unless slurs were directed at any “specific users”, the AO3 would not delete comments because they were simply “offensive”.

The email ended with this: “We understand that not everyone agrees with these policies. The OTW has decided that our goal is maximum inclusiveness of content. By necessity, that content will includes things that many different people find offensive.” [emphasis mine]

Inclusiveness of content. Not people. Not, say, the people of color who were talking and arguing with the author in the comments, who already had to deal with a fic that fetishized and dehumanized a popular character in a fandom they all were in, but now had to face the casual use of racial slurs in those comment threads, slurs that deliberately thrown in their faces–and then had to discover that by the AO3’s standards, none of this counted as harassment. On the contrary, they were “equally” at fault for what had occurred.

The most insulting of the comments on that fic have since been deleted, either by the Abuse Team or by the author themselves, I’m not sure. The fic, however, is still up.

It’s been two years since this happened. For all that I know, the AO3 Abuse Team might handle this differently now than they did then (although personally I doubt it). The reason I bring this story up is because to me, this was the moment when it became brutally clear that I, and other fans of color, are afterthoughts as far as the AO3 is concerned. We are told, over and over again, in ways both small and large, that we are not valued, that our jobs as fans are to shut up and assimilate and not cause waves, because that’s just not NICE, you guys.

This is peak White Feminism at work here. The idea that one abuse policy will fit all, the idea that it’s more important to preserve the “free speech” of racist trolls rather than making a good faith effort to support the fans of color who are being attacked by said trolls is, frankly, privileged bullshit, and is a MAJOR reason I do not support the OTW/AO3 financially. Because I do not trust the AO3 to support me if needed, not when their stance on plagiarism is stronger and more nuanced than their stance on racist/bigoted abuse.

The idea that the AO3 doesn’t need to create a policy that will address bigotry and racist abuse because “it’s not really an issue yet” is not only disingenous, it’s blatantly false. Racist and bigoted abuse on the AO3 has already happened, is happening now, and will happen again in the future. And until the AO3 acknowledges this and takes real steps to prevent it, fans of color, as well as other marginalized groups, will continue to be pushed to the fringes of fandom.