mouseymightymarvellous:

problematic-butnothateful:

i have seen some people criticizing the new things ao3 wants to implement and all of them seem to misunderstand the new proposed functions so much

for those who aren’t aware, the otw recently issued a statement on upcoming changes they want to make on ao3 in response to certain racist issues in fandom. i’ve seen people said they are “giving in to fandom police” or in some way want to put limit on the content that is allowed on the site, and that is not true at all. it’s not even close to what they are doing

all the measures they want to implement are due to instances of fans being victims of racial harassment and racist fans worsening people’s fan experience. all the measures proposed by ao3 will either help people protect themselves from harassment (freezing comments threads, turning off comments on your fics, muting/blocking users, updating the tos to allow the abuse team to deal with forms of harassment that were not previously covered) or improve their fandom experience by better filtering out content (changes to the search function in collections, possibly implementing new archive warnings, and again muting/blocking users). that’s it. at no point are they saying they will restrict the content you’re allowed to post. all of these are perfectly reasonable measures that can help improve the experience of literally everyone involved

overall, the concerns about fans of color being harassed/attacked are very real, and the otw is trying to give users better ways to protect themselves. it’s ridiculous to say ao3 is trying to censor people. when we say fans should curate their own fandom experience that also includes fans having ways to do it, and that includes giving them tools to block harassers, trolls, and other people who deliberately try to start shit

part of the critique of ao3/otw was how their structures and processes for denying censorship were failing to allow users (especially bipoc) to protect themselves from harassment (especially of the racist kind). to conflate critique and analysis of racism (personal and institutional) with anti-ism is such a bad faith argument.

archive of our own. if you want a space where authors can write whatever they like without censorship, then we must tear down the structures and barriers that prevent bipoc from safely and comfortably participating in fandom.