stopthatimp:

It’s that time of the year again: discussions of racism on AO3 are in the air, and the response from some of my contemporaries is – as it frequently has been – to bring up Strikethrough and to remind fandom that our elders built AO3 and we must respect that, and not ever discuss censorship of AO3, lest we disrespect our own history.

This discussion has happened often enough that it’s a trope now, and I’ve posted about it before, but I always wind up circling back to the way people talk about Strikethrough, and how much it leaves out in terms of fannish and internet history.

I remember Strikethrough as an incident of then-common advertiser overreach. Ad networks ten years ago weren’t what they are now; advertisers often had a much more direct sense of where they were advertising, and so targeting advertisers when attempting to strongarm a site into removing content you didn’t like was a common tactic. (IIRC, both advertisers and not wanting to deal with the attendant legal issues of minor access online is why FF.net banned adult content.) My summary of Strikethrough, as a non-lawyer who was there for it, is: it happened because of conservative Christians targeting “adult” themed LJs, and it highlighted a need in fandom to get out from under the control of websites who 1. did not see fandom as a valuable part of the platform, 2. were entirely at the mercy of their advertisers in terms of policymaking. Additionally, people affected by Strikethrough were not the entirety of internet fandom at the time, and internet fandom at the time is a subset – arguably a tiny one – of internet fandom now. It’s hard to assign ownership of history in such a large and diffuse community.

Even as we talk about the history of Strikethrough, we tend to ignore other very salient pieces of fandom’s history: the cultural context in which AO3 was founded, the evolution of the broader internet since then, and contemporaneous AO3 content debates and how they shaped the platform.

AO3 was founded just after Reddit (2005), Twitter (2006), and Tumblr (2007). It shares a cultural context with those websites, as well as some design features and TOS limitations. AO3 wasn’t intended to be a social media platform, but then neither was Tumblr; Tumblr billed itself as a “microblogging” website, and its earliest denizens were photographers and other creatives. AO3 in its current incarnation has comments, tagging, bookmarks and subscriptions – ways, in other words, of allowing readers to connect with each other and with creators. It is quintessentially Web 2.0 in design and assumed operations – and, like Reddit and Twitter, its Terms of Service were crafted with “freedom of speech” in mind.

What have you read about Reddit and Twitter lately? They’re both trending towards moderation. [Reddit source]/[Twitter source]

I mention this because I think it’s important to place AO3’s founding, and the history of fandom, in context within the broader internet as a whole. Fandom is not a vacuum; the conversations about avoiding content deletion, the slippery slope of censorship, and what we gain or lose by moderation, were already happening when AO3 was founded. They have continued to happen today, in the context of US politics, revenge porn cases, underage exploitation, anti-sex-work policies, and many, many other topics. How to have a healthy community where content is not horrifying but not hyper-controlled is not a solved problem; we continue to struggle with it pretty much everywhere on the internet, and the consequences are often extremely real.

Strikethrough is often raised as the primary evidence for why content moderation on AO3 would be a disaster. But Strikethrough happened because of appeals to advertisers. AO3 is not beholden to advertisers, and it is owned and operated by people aiming to protect fandom and fanworks. This is a very different situation from LJ no matter what content-related rules AO3 has; LJ was banning broad swathes of users based on, essentially, keyword searches. They did this because they had no interest in protecting fandom – or survivors’ communities, which also wound up caught in that net. AO3 is different and hopefully will always be different because their primary interest is in protecting fandom. So I find the assertions that discussing content moderation on AO3 could lead to a second Strikethrough to be specious at best. They are completely different situations, and the impetus for Strikethrough literally doesn’t exist for AO3.

And, too, when Strikethrough is brought up, it’s often in the context of a post that ignores AO3’s own Terms of Service. Content moderation already exists on AO3. In other parts of the fannish internet, it’s considered normal to put up a tip jar or promote your other work; AO3 bans this. AO3 allows original work and meta, but disallows prompt memes and brainstorming posts. AO3 requires you to choose not to warn OR warn for its “major” warnings. In other words, the AO3 Terms of Service already makes value judgments about what sort of content is allowed or disallowed, and depending on where you come from, those judgments may or may not align with your own norms and values.

Allowing or disallowing original work or meta, requiring warnings, banning commercial promotion – these are decisions that were often made in the context of debate in the community. [Source][Source][Source] We have already had these conversations. They happened! Some of them were quite painful, but they happened. So when I see appeals to authority – fannish history! Respect your elders! – that ignore the historical existence of these debates, I get irritated, because the truth is that we all debated about a wide variety of AO3 policy, and the fact that “should we delete super racist fics” didn’t make it into AO3’s TOS is much more indicative of who was listened to in those debates, not whether or not we had them.

Or, in other words, the structure and norms of AO3 that are now seen as both static and pre-ordained were created by a lot of people, most of whom were white, and the concept of content moderation related to racism simply was not given a ton of weight.

When I see a suggestion that AO3 users be able to tag fics with user-created warnings for racism (or homophobia or any other marginalization), my kneejerk reaction as a developer is to think “well that won’t work”, because the concept of downvoting and other user labeling has been very challenging for a lot of communities (Reddit again comes to mind). But that’s my kneejerk reaction. Let’s go beyond that: what problems is this suggestion trying to solve? What content would this help people avoid?

AO3 has plenty of content that’s blatantly, “anyone but a white nationalist would agree this is bad” racist: in my opinion, that should be deleted*. But the original suggestion was related to labeling any fic, including fic that is more subtly racist, or fic that some people don’t agree is racist at all. The fact that such fic is hard to define and opinions about it might be contradictory does not mean that the user’s problem – a hostile environment that’s difficult to navigate without encountering hurtful racism – disappears. If “just delete it” won’t work, and “allow users to label it” is likely to result in harassment, then what else could AO3 do?

A few suggestions:

– Enhance bookmarks so that they can serve as full-featured recs lists, to empower marginalized fans to create easily navigable, richly commented/tagged/etc recommendation spaces
– Let people block each other; have “you don’t see me, I don’t see you” style blocking
– Integrate search blacklisting into AO3 proper, so that people can natively curate lists of creators, tags, and terms that they don’t want to see
– Ask fans of color what changes they’d like to see, take them seriously, ask for elaboration when specific features are discussed, and prioritize these changes. Take the difficulty and pain fans have articulated seriously, and respect them.

I’m sure there are many suggestions from other people – there always are when website policy and features are discussed publicly. And I think that discussion is good, whether you agree with the line I’ve set for deletion or not. Ultimately, members of our community expressing frustration with the structure of one of our most important resources is not inherently bad. Their perspectives, which may differ from yours, are also not inherently bad. None of us are required to seriously consider ideas put forth in bad faith, but I do think we have an obligation to one another to seriously consider changes to our ecosystem when people say that they are being hurt by existing norms.

Much has been made of the cultural conservativism of antis. I don’t disagree. However, cultural conservativism takes many forms, and I see a certain irony in calling antis conservative while imploring them to respect their elders. The truth of our history, as I recall it, is much more complex than the “what about Strikethrough” crowd wants to admit, and it includes mistakes that we seem determined to repeat now. We have nothing to lose by seriously considering the complaints of people whose fannish experiences differ from our own. We have a lot to lose by acting like questioning AO3 or the OTW founders is a fannish thought crime. We have a lot to lose by posting kneejerk, reactionary screeds when fans of color attempt to discuss the challenges they face in our community. We have a lot to lose by pretending people of color who disagree with AO3′s policies have the same lack of perspective as a self-identified 16-year-old Reylo anti. We have a TON to lose by pretending some of those same people of color weren’t here for Racefail. Refusing to listen to people you’ve labeled as outsiders, whether due to age, identity or personal history, is the epitome of modern US conservativism. Let’s stop pretending it’s anything else.

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* (A sidebar because I know someone will mention this: I’m not talking about the “AO3 loves pedos” stuff because I don’t think it applies. One of AO3’s foundational rules is that underage must be tagged and made avoidable. People who don’t want to see it, myself included, can already avoid it. I would support deletion of underage fic that uses IRL tragedies the same way I mention supporting deletion of romanticized racism that uses IRL tragedies above. Not a perfect metric, but then, I’m not aware of nearly as many Sandusky or Nassar fics as I am of slavery/genocide fics, which itself points to a disparity in power within fandom.)