#sorry if you saw this before I fixed tumblr's big formatting fuckups lol

[skellagirl]

i love how so many people in the comments are associating getting rid of child porn with getting rid of gay content, really pushing the vintage homophobia. ao3 has a child pornography problem, and it is not evil to want to address that. the fact that REAL CHILDREN have porn written about them is vile and it should not be something that is allowed on ANY website.

who even are you lol

anyway. Like, shit-tons of people have articulated this better than I'm about to, but yeah I'll give it a shot

When people, particularly queer people (like me) talk about censorship of fandom spaces inevitably leading to the purging of queer content, we're not pulling that concern out of our asses. It has happened Over and Over and Over and Over and Over again. It happened with fanfiction.net, with livejournal, with old-ass email lists and dinky web.1 sites and email lists made by tiny groups of people, it happened with tumblr, it even happened with youtube (the demonetization and soft-blocking of queer content, and when creators tried to appeal, they were told that their content was unsuitable for children (HMMMMMM))

There is a huge amount of historical precedent off of which to base the fear of censorship leading to the purging of queer content.

We're gonna put aside the dead horses of 'just because you write about something doesn't mean you endorse it in real life' and 'fiction =/= reality' (because I think those both often lack nuance when brought up in this conversation, and overlook some very real exceptions). Alright? We're not gonna beat those horses at all. Put them out of your mind.

I agree with you that real children having porn written about them is completely vile (honestly I hate rpf in general, but in the case of children it's especially reprehensible). I wouldn’t be sad at all to see underage fics be purged from AO3, honestly, if I thought there was a way to do that without it inevitably leading to queer content and queer creators being obliterated from the site. Which I don't, currently, because it's literally never been done.

The thing about associating queer content with csam (and pushing the 'vintage homophobia') is that QUEER PEOPLE AREN'T DOING IT. I keep seeing this come up like it's some blazing hot big-brain take, but it's just, incredibly fucking insulting. Knock it the fuck off with this asinine assertion that queer people are victimizing ourselves and bringing this association on of our own volition.

Take a look at any conservative twitter account (particularly conservative politicians) and count how many times they call queer folks (particularly trans folks, and especially trans women) 'groomers'. It's literally like, their big hot button issue right now, calling queer people pedophiles and groomers, and attempting to get legislation introduced which categorizes us as such

WE ARE NOT FUCKING DOING THIS. THEY ARE.

Okay so let's go on a little hypothetical journey, yeah?

You censor underage fics. Okay cool! What does that mean? Where's the line? What constitutes a child? Under eighteen? Under sixteen? The brain doesn't really stop developing until around twenty-five, so should that be considered the line? Is it still objectionable if both characters are underage? If both characters are, say, fifteen, and this fic was written by some horny fifteen-year-old who, whilst trying to figure out their own sexuality, just wanted to write about their blorbos fooling around, should that be purged?

When I was a teenager, I wrote about teenage girls being ravished by older men, because I myself was attracted to older men. Should I have been punished for that? Should my content have been deleted? It never felt like some mortal sin I should have to atone for; it was fantasy fulfillment through the safe space of fucking fanfiction.

If other teens do that, and post their fics online (because teenagers do indeed have a right to post their mature fics online if they want to), should they be required to divulge private information about themselves to justify their content existing? Should readers be required to divulge private information to verify their own teenagerhood before reading the fics, to prevent intergenerational cross-contamination? What if they lie? How would that be enforced? Is that even ethical, to force people to divulge actual, real life private information like that for the sake of keeping a fandom space 'morally pure'?

Moving on from that, let's say we somehow figure out how to purge only the truly morally bad and gross fics (which, to be sure, some of them are obvious and easy). Well, okay, but maybe while we're at it, we should go ahead and purge [insert additional objectionable content of your choosing here], because it also has no place in polite society.

And again, how do we draw that line? We could have that above back-and-forth conversation for every single morally objectionable category on AO3, and you will never find a solution that doesn't catch innocent people in the crossfire, nor will you ever find a solution that doesn't lead to further descent down the slippery slope of censorship

When conservatives (and yes, censorship is almost always inherently conservative) get a foot in the door of power, they do not stop. They might start with purging the obviously nasty and gross fics, but they will take it farther (and we know they will because again, this has already happened Over and Over and Over and Over). Queer content will inevitably, invariably, always be on the chopping block when censorship comes into play, because to conservatives, queer people are pedophiles just, inherently -- and thus our content is automatically categorized as csam or grooming material.

Sometimes the slippery slope is real. And there's heaps of historical and cultural precedent for this one in particular.

So like. I'm really solely concerned with queer content being purged, because I've literally watched it happen before, and I care more about queer rights, and queer content, and queer people in general, than I care about the murky morality of writing questionable fanfiction (which are, y'know, as a sidenote, nearly always appropriately tagged and warned for so as to be easily avoidable; the dead dove tag trend is a gift, actually)

AND..... this is all putting aside the fact that AO3 was never meant to be a moderated space in the first place. It's literally just an ARCHIVE, it's right there in the name. It has no morals of its own, nor any responsibility to bear such. It's like throwing your fic into a remarkably well-organized warehouse (perhaps, with bookshelves, and some sort of.... system to find what you want; I feel like we might have a name for these spaces in real life? but idk) and then peacing out.

anyway AO3 good, go suck a conservative's clown shoes since you wanna join their circus so bad