About moderating and banning content on AO3!
Okay so! I havenāt had the spoons to do this for a while but I cracked and ranted about it on twitter which isā¦ notā¦ conducive to long rants, so!
This is a h u g e discussion part of the l o n g history that led to the creation of AO3, which older, more informed, and more articulate people have talked about at length and can be found around if you look (I reblog some of it in my AO3 and fandom history tags for the curious). So I wonāt go into that here, nor into the practical reasons why itās not even possible to put that system in place anyway.
Arbitrarily, or the purpose of this post, because itās the biggest topic Iāve seen brought up lately, Iāll be talking about fic depicting underage characters in se*ual situations, but honestly I could hold the exact same conversation on literally any controversial content.
This is about why you, specifically, if you are a content creator and especially if you are marginalised and especially if you are queer and especially especially if you are sensitive to fiction depicting certain thingsā¦ do not, actually, want a banning system on AO3.
What? Of course we do. Thereās a lot of p*do shit on AO3 and p*do shit is gross. No one should condone that, wtf? It would be easy to do ā just periodically delete the entire Underage tag!
What will happen if that is done is that people will re-upload and continue to write it, theyāll just stop tagging and you will run into it with zero warning nor ability to filter it out. Again, this is not a theoretical ā we know this is what happens. When I was a teen, adult content (all adult content) was not allowed on FF.NET; it was everywhere regardless, and without tags. The exact same thing happened on tumblr when adult content was banned as well. Itās not a matter of āstaff not handling it wellā ā it just doesnāt work.
To keep safe the people who need to be able to exclude that tag, that tag needs to exist and be used.
Well, shucks. A reporting system then?
A reporting system would operate in one of two ways:
-an algorithm, which would delete a lot of stuff we wouldnāt want it to delete.
-humans, which isā¦ the bigger problem.
An algorithm sounds great. We do want it to delete everything.
Okay. What about the daddy kink fics between consenting adult characters? What about the fics featuring characters that are children in the canon but are adults in the fic? What about the fics about teenagers exploring their se*uality together, written by adults about the experiences they remember having or wish they could have had? What about the thousands of SasuNaru and Drarry and other shounen and YA fics that will get written, by teens or by people who remember being teens? What about the se*ually explicit fic written by teens who are se*ually active in real life? What about the fics about CSA as trauma, about healing from it? What about the fics written by survivors of CSA to cope about their trauma? What about the fics that clearly show that itās evil and traumatic? What about the super dark, harrowing, but beautiful and artistic that Iām glad I read even though it fucked me up for days? What about the ones that were really shitty but also horribly hot?
Well, some of these are still not okay, but maybe some might be. It depends on how itās written. Weāll have humans moderating content and deciding, then.
Okay.
The thing is, I donāt know which of the things I just listed were okay for you to be depicted in fiction and which were too much. Odds are I donāt agree with you. Odds are if I asked 10 people randomly picked off the street, not everyone would agree.
Odds are, even if AO3 arbitrarily decided on which of those are allowed and which are not, you would not agree with their choice, and you would still be unhappy with the decision. (Or you would be happy, but your friends wouldnāt.)
Odds are, different AO3 content moderators might not agree on whether a given fic qualifies or not ā is it artistic enough? Does it show enough that these actions are evil and wrong? Can the author prove theyāre a teenager? Can the author prove they are a CSA victim? Can the author prove that this is to help them cope with their trauma? The author seem to be functioning alright, they mustnāt really be traumatised!
You know what I mean! Thereās absolute, objectively gross shit out there that is not artistic and should not be published.
I agree that thereās vile stuff out there that makes me sick and that I think is very clearly just ped*philic trash. But there is no way to, 1) stop those from getting published anyway, 2) take those down and preserve the safety of everything else.
If we start forbidding some things, thereās two ways to go about it.
One single, clear, arbitrary rule ā for instance, absolutely no adult content featuring characters under 18 (leaving aside the fact that this would not even work for the reason cited above). So we lose all the stuff from teenagers, all the coming of age stories about adolescence, all the stuff from CSA survivors; people who need to write it canāt publish it anymore, and people who need to read it canāt anymore either (and as a cool bonus, theyāre told itās wrong and made to feel bad about it). Depending on whether the rules applies to characters that are under 18 in the canon, we lose entire fandoms.
Or, subjective moderation by humans, according to what they estimate to be gross.
Letās assume all moderators can agree on whatās gross or not.
If there is a system in place to ban some underage works because āgross shitā, then that means other gross stuff can be taken down on account of being gross and harmful.
Yeah! Gross stuff should be taken down! Come on, surely everyone agrees on whatās gross and harmful.
Ah.
But the problem is.
Here is a list of things I have seen ā with my eyes seen ā called harmful to be depicted in fiction:
Murder
Non-con
Inc*st
Cannibalism
Torture
Self-harm
Mental illness
Drugs
Racism
K*nk
Non-negotiated k*nk, but healthy k*nk is ok
Spanking k*nk
BDSM where the woman is a bottom, but woman top is ok
Healthy depictions of BDSM
Unhealthy depictions of BDSM
Queer people doing bad things
Abusive relationships
Rival/Enemies to lovers
Redemption stories
A happy relationship between a 17 yo and an 18 yo
A happy relationship between a 20 yo and a 60 yo
A happy relationship between a boss and their employee, or a college teacher and a student
A happy relationship between a 14 yo boy and an older teenage boy, because thatās reminiscent of older men preying on younger gay boys IRL
Se*ual content featuring a character whose age is unclear in canon and some people headcanon them as being underage, some as being a young adult
Loving, consensual fluff between characters that are evil villains, because it romanticises them and their actions
Dark content shipping female characters
Fluffy content shipping female characters, because itās misogynistic to act like lesbians are only soft all the time
Consensual s*x featuring a canonically asexual character, because it implies that all aces can and should still have se*
Fics about the same canonically asexual character hating s*x, because that erases the experience of s*x-positive aces
Shipping a character who is perceived by some fans as queer-coded with a character of a different s*x
The tendency to ship a black character with white characters
Fluffy drunk s*x, because thatās not actually consensual
Sleep s*x, because thatās not actually consensual
Trans characters not experiencing dysphoria, because that idealises the trans experience
Consensual s*x between adults that are not married
LGBT+ content, because kids shouldnāt see that.
I guarantee you: you, I, and 10 random people plucked from the street will not agree on what, in that list, is and isnāt okay to publish and consume fiction of.
So why should your taste be the one followed? Why should it be the taste of mods you donāt know? Why should anyone get to dictate? What if the mods think your OTP is gross and your NOTP is fine?
This is the slippery slope argument.
Yes, it is the slippery slope argument. Because we know it happens. Because weāve been there, because Iāve seen it happen myself twice already and Iām not even thirty. Because we know people do complain loudly about all of these things.
And because the second there is a banning system in place, assholes will use the system to abuse it and get stuff they just donāt like taken down using the āit is grossā argument, and one day youāll wake up and the beautiful fic that helped you come to terms with your abuse/trauma/identity/orientation/k*nk for feet will be taken down and wonderful vulnerable creative people will have been harassed out of fandom because they argued with 1 person who didnāt like their foot k*nk fic that happened to also feature, for instance, a CSA trauma backstory.
Again: not exaggerating. Not theoretical. It happens, we know it happens, AO3 was created literally because it happens.
I still fucking hate that stuff.
That is completely fine and normal. No one likes everything. Me too! Most of the dark stuff is niche and the creators know only few people will like it the same way they do.
(For the record, I get grossed out and triggered by fics about an asexual character who does not like s*x having s*x with their partner to make them happy. Deep in my gut everything screams that thatās fucked up, terrifying and harmful, how can people write that. But I recognise that there are people who love and need that, and I leave those people and their content alone.
OTOH, I read a lot of otherwise dark shit and I enjoy it in the same way I enjoyed, say, Hannibal, in the same way some people enjoy true crime documentaries, horror movies or rape fantasy kink. It helps me explore stuff that I like to see in fiction, in a safe, controlled way. Iām also asexual, 90% s*x-repulsed IRL, and, obviously, I would never abuse a child. For that matter, I wouldnāt kill and eat people, either, nor would I do 90% of the tamer k*nky stuff I read.
Of course, Hannibal was fucked up and lots of people probably think Hannibal was gross and should not have been aired ā but as exemplified by the fact that it was created, aired and watched, lots of people thought it was fine, interesting and even fun to watch.)
You can and should curate your experience and protect yourself. The AO3 website now allows you to exclude certain tags, and people have developed tools to help with that such as plugins that save your filters or hide fics that contain certain words.
But no, it isnāt going to, and it shouldnāt, get banned.
This post makes a lot of excellent points, and Iād like to add one more that I donāt usually see discussed:
If you want humans moderating content on AO3, you are asking for other people to look at all of the darkest, most fucked up content you donāt want to see. And because of the way the OTW works, all of those people will be volunteers.
Moderation for sites like Facebook can be a dangerous and difficult job with a high turnover rate. Sure, the people in those jobs are paid to look at real violence and abuse, not fictionalābut as we know, fiction can have profound emotional effects on people, and an AO3 moderator might have to read hundreds or thousands of words in order to evaluate a workās content.
Who are you asking to do that? Youād want someone with a pretty strong stomach, right? But youād also probably want someone with the same disgust response that you have to identify what should be removed; after all, the people who are okay with reading that kind of content for a volunteer position might be the same people who think itās okay to read that kind of content in general. And considering the number of works already published on AO3, it would have to be a huge team, with a lot of time, resources, and support to prevent burn-out and psychological distress.
Who would you expect to take on this unpaid labor?
