What’s interesting to me as an Old, who went through Strikethrough on LJ, is seeing how it’s being remembered now in the Discourse here on Tumblr. I’m seeing a bunch of “it was a lot of people who wanted to post child porn” and ok yes that is certainly a take one could have. I’m also seeing “fandom should police itself!” and again, yes, that is certainly a take.
Pull up a chair, friends, let’s discuss.
What people forget about Strikethrough is that while fandom was Loud As Fuck and also, yes, ridiculous (I thought so at the time for that matter I mean COME THE FUCK ON there was a theme song) and possibly the most widely affected group of people, fandom was not the most *profoundly* affected group of people. See, LJ was working off a list of journals handed to them by the group “Warriors For Innocence” who as far as anyone could tell just kinda…searched for some words? And let me tell you, friends, WfI did not distinguish between Harry Potter fanfic that involved Dumbledore and Harry in compromising positions and communities of child sexual abuse survivors. Those second communities? They got shut down, too. So did communities of sexual assault survivors, because one of the words that got targeted was “rape”.
It’s just that the communities of survivors did not have a theme song and icon sets and of course it’s not nearly as ~funny~ and ~woke~ for y’all to have your hot takes about how AO3 and DreamWidth were founded by a bunch of people angry their child porn got taken away when you factor in that survivors were getting hit, too. Kinda like Tumblr is protecting the children now but it’s harming eg sex workers who are following the rules.
None of the communities I was in got lost because of fandom. No, the community I was in that got deleted was sexual assault survivors. Where we were all trying to come to terms with what had happened to us and suddenly, boom, we were told that having “sexual assault” and “rape” in the community interests so that survivors could even find the place was *soliciting illegal activity*. Yeah. That was fun.
As for fandom policing itself, what exactly do people intend by that? Fandom has always had lengthy discussions about what’s acceptable, they were going on in 2007 around Strikethrough. At great and interminable and occasionally kind of nauseating length. One thing we’ve learned in the past 11 years though is that if you provide a reporting mechanism on a platform, it will immediately be weaponized to silence marginalized voices; cf the fash pulling their brigading on Twitter. People have always spoken up and said “that is really not ok” and others have always responded “we disagree” and the arguments have gone on and on and on and the only thing we’ve learned is that asking for platforms to give us a mechanism to report things ends up being weaponized to hurt people who don’t have a damn thing to do with the problem we’re trying to control.
All I really have for everyone for whom Tumblr’s TOS change is their first experience with this kind of thing is hey, listen, the *actual* history is important. Not what you think you know, not the hot takes and the super woke one sentence versions going around – know what actually went down when LJ pulled this shit, and who got hurt the worst by it. Because it wasn’t the Supernatural and Harry Potter fandoms, even though they were the ones being extremely loud and quoting “Hoist the Colors” and making banners and icons (it was a different time, ok). “Protect the children” as a motto will always be used in such a way that it will hurt people who are already marginalized and vulnerable and hurting, we’ve seen it before and we’re seeing it again and already we’re seeing the hot takes about how it’s perfectly acceptable because what’s wrong with you, do you want child porn?
And that’s why all of us who were around for Strikethrough and, for that matter, the actual birth of Tumblr, are tired. We’ve been here before. We’ve heard it all before, word for word. We know who’s going to get hurt, again. We wish people would freakin learn.
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