#but i have ethical issues with trying to censor things instead of just labelling them as what they are and moving on

[screechingpulsar]

Why I Value Tagging Over Censorship

(TW for descriptions of antisemitism, nazism, cocsa (child-on-child sexual assault), necrophilia, and torture-porn. I will mark in bold the sections where this is discussed in more detail.)

@olderthannetfic you asked to be tagged in this post, so here you go! It’s uhhh... Not a fun story! But I thought it was important to share since people tend to claim that those on the more “freedom of expression” side of things have no experience with running into explicit/problematic work as a minor, or have been groomed into believing that it’s okay to do this and that’s... not accurate.

TLDR: When an archive’s policy is that problematic or triggering content must be tagged rather than deleted, it is actually much easier to root out bigoted garbage and/or otherwise objectionable content than on a site where such content is not allowed, but also not warned for. As an example, as a child I was exposed to a truly terrible piece of work deliberately made to trigger and hurt others. Had that work been forced to use proper tags, I would have never seen it, or seen the tags and known to stay away.

The anti/pro-ship debate is exhausting to watch, tbh. I hold opinions on the issue that I’m sure people from both sides would take issue with. But one thing that I’ve seen crop up lately that rubs me the wrong way is the debate over AO3.

The argument I’ve seen from antis boils down to: AO3 hosts problematic content-- namely underage explicit fics, rape/noncon fics, incest and rpf, and has it enshrined in its policy that it’s pretty much impossible to get something deleted off the site for being morally repugnant or gross-- therefore it should not exist or instead moderate its content to remove these things. Doing this would make it safer for minors to use the site.

Funny story. As a kid, about 12 years old, maybe a bit younger, I went on a fanfic website that had a policy against hateful or offensive works, and it’s there that I was exposed to the nastiest piece of work I’ve ever seen in my life (and I’ve read HP Lovecraft /half joking).

This site was not AO3. It was FFN (fanfiction.net for those unaware). The fandom was Phineas and Ferb, a widely beloved kid’s cartoon.

I avoided AO3 because even as a 12 year old I recognized that site had Adult Content(tm) on it, and if I didn’t want to see that I shouldn’t go on there. So I didn’t.

FFN didn’t allow NC17/E-rated stuff on its site, and because of the relatively stricter moderation policy, people tended to skew their ratings up to avoid being reported. This meant my creepypasta loving ass often looked through T and M stories to find that good good horror content. Also, FFN didn’t have a smut filter of any kind, the best I could do was remove any works tagged “romance”. Which I did, because again, horror-loving child.

(TW comes into effect most prominently here)

The fic was called, “The Final Solution for Isabella”. Should I have known better from the title alone? As a Jewish descendant of a Holocaust survivor, yeah probably. Except I didn’t, because I was twelve and naive, and didn’t think that someone would be fucking sick enough to write what they did.

(I thought the title was a reference to the dynamic between Isabella and Phineas where she constantly flirts with him and he ignores her advances/is unaware of them. And that this fic would be her trying some wacky scheme to finally get him to notice. I was, of course, very wrong.)

Short version of the fic: Phineas tortures and rapes Isabella for being Jewish, then is graphically described to set her on fire and then have sex with her charred corpse.

The fic’s taken down now (I checked about 5 years ago, I don’t know how long it was up after or before I saw it), don’t go looking for it. Not that I imagine you’d want to.

It wasn’t the only or first story I’d seen that covered topics like WW2 and the Holocaust either. Again, creepypasta kid, I saw tons of nazi-experiment ghost stories. On the creepypasta wiki. Where I expected them. Where it was often made abundantly clear in advance what kind of horror I’d be dealing with.

(a rare advantage to formulaic, bad writing)

It was the first (and only) fic that genuinely traumatized me though.

I want to be clear here: this wasn’t merely dark fiction, or someone’s weird snuff. This was malicious, created to deliberately upset as many people as possible, especially Jewish fans of PnF. This was beyond even the grooming material antis talk about. There aren’t enough insults in the world to describe what this was.

(Graphic description is over.)

FFN’s moderation policy didn’t catch the most blatantly terrible and hateful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. How many other kids saw that fic, I wonder? How many little Jewish kids were exposed to that kind of vitriol while just trying to have some fun with a show they liked?

Trust me. You want people to have a place where they can put their fucked up fics and have them be well-tagged. I can go on AO3 and filter out adult content of any flavour with a couple clicks. I could have even gone on it without the age filters and just filtered out smut, but still gotten the gratuitous violence my tiny edgelord soul craved!

(Sidebar: there was another fic on FFN in the PnF fandom that my child self absolutely loved: it was about a haunted house where most of the cast ended up dying brutally and graphically. It was messed up, kinda trashy and gorey for gore’s sake, but that’s what I was looking for, and that’s what I found.

(I’m not sure if that one’s better or worse than the circus AU one I saw where Phineas literally ate people’s souls... I liked that one because it’s how I learned about Creature Feature. Probably should have just picked up Cirque du Freak, eh?)

No matter how morally reprehensible I find some of the content on AO3 to be, I will never fault them for having the tagging system they do. I would much rather see a sign that says, “WARNING: Horrible, awful, no good, very bad stuff ahead” and go somewhere else than see a sign that says, “We don’t allow the horrible, awful, no good etc. content here!” only to be smacked in the face by something I’d rather have not seen.

(Disclaimer: I’m aware that someone could just as easily not tag their shit on AO3 and have the same effect, but fun thing about AO3′s policy: if you don’t put any ratings/warnings on your work, they will automatically put the tags “Not Rated” and/or “Creator chose not to use archive warnings”. So even then, the work could be avoided if a user is, in AO3′s terms, “risk-averse”.)

#fandom discourse #shipping discourse #ao3 #archive of our own #in which i out myself as a huge edgelord for internet discourse #fun fact about my lovecraft jab: i found out what he named his cat through the necronomicon i got for my birthday at 14 #and surprise surprise! reading lovecraft didn't make me think racism and xenophobia was okay! #in fact: it's a big part in how I started noticing problematic themes in horror! and then in other genres too! #anyway that's not quite relevant to the main point of this post #which boils down to: if people wanted to expose kids to abuse/incest/underage fics against their will #thoroughly tagging them so content filters can pick up on them on a website known for its robust tagging system #is a pretty bad way to accomplish this #in other words: i have moral issues with some shit people write #but i have ethical issues with trying to censor things instead of just labelling them as what they are and moving on