Save What You Love

The neo-puritans and radical right are coming for your content

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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Every so often I repost a fandom screed I made on Tumblr advising both readers and authors of fanfic to save what they love.

Fortunately, these days that’s pretty easy since the fanfic repository Archive of Our Own (Ao3) has a handy download button that allows you to save any fanfic you want in multiple formats. I use it often not just for stories I love, but for my own stories (as a way to make sure that I have a final version saved of what I actually posted).

The reason for this is that historically, fanfiction has been susceptible to being deleted and purged in vast quantities. There are some pretty famous examples, such as the fanfiction.net “NC-17 purges” of 2002 and 2012, followed by the LiveJournal “strikethrough” of 2007, and the infamous Tumblr “NSFW Content purge” of 2018. But those are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

In addition to being purged off of popular platforms, fanfiction has often also disappeared when a platform was entirely shut down. Everyone thinks of geocities (shut down in 2009) as an example, but it happened a lot of times before then. Small, volunteer-run archives were particularly susceptible to just disappearing with no warning.

I don’t know how much amazing fanfiction was lost when the jackass who offered to host the Life on Mars (UK) fanfic archive decided to simply delete it in its entirety (something I continue to believe was done on purpose), and that was just one tiny fandom out of hundreds. Ask any fan of any fandom 15+ years or older, and you will hear horror stories of archives that vanished one day, or broke because the original administrator moved on and was never replaced (or in some situations died). In all of those instances, treasures of fanfiction were lost, never to be found again.

Finally, there are times when an author goes and deletes their own work. (It is their right to do so, but every story has someone who loves it, and ripping it from their hands is IMHO a cruel and thoughtless act and no, I will not be changing my mind about that.)

In short, you don’t have to search far to find a fan who lost a fanfic that was precious to them for whatever reason, and who mourns something they have almost no hope of finding again, anywhere.

So what does this got to do with you, dear readers and authors of original fiction? What do the vagaries of fanfiction have to do with you?

Because it can happen to you, your work, and the stories you love.

It has happened before, and will happen again.

It is happening now.

The Wattpad Purge

Wattpad recently introduced A.I. moderation to check stories posted on the platform to make sure they comply with the ToS. On the surface, it sounds like a great use-case for A.I., but when A.I. is useless, it is really, truly, catastrophically useless.

Anyone who knows me knows I am generally a fan of most things A.I., because I really believe that it can contribute to our world in many ways. In fact, in scientific fields, it already has! But it definitely has its limitations, and launching an A.I. moderation system based on a few keywords is destined to create chaos. For instance, if those keywords were all associated with genitalia, the “moderation bot” could easily nuke a bunch of medical textbooks. Not that there are medical textbooks on Wattpad (that I know of?), I’m just using that as an example of how difficult this kind of scattershot approach can be.

Sounds simple/Is NOT simple!

In fact, the legendary LiveJournal “strikethrough” was essentially caused by a bad attempt at automated moderation. In an effort to crack down on child sexual abuse (CSA), LiveJournal moderation bots not only deleted a lot of accounts that contained actual CSA, but also deleted fanfictions that discussed the topic of CSA (e.g. as part of a character’s tragic back story). Even worse, the bot deleted communities of CSA survivors, completely erasing a lifeline for many people who suffered some of the worst crimes humanity has ever invented. Many communities never recovered, even if they were reinstated eventually.

It was, as they say, Not Good.

Seventeen damn years later, Wattpad appears to be doing the same damn thing. Here is a link to a post on r/Wattpad which explains the details (my presence on Wattpad is minimal, so this doesn’t affect me, and I’m not here to give the nuts and bolts rundown of what’s going on there. As a text technologist, my goal is to give you a big picture view).

But, as with fanfic, this is not new for original fiction either. The Wattpad Purge comes on the heels of the Great Gumroads Deplatforming, which happened on March 15th of this year. I’ve already mentioned the Tumblr-apocalypse of 2018. Patreon has been hostile to anything related to erotica (much less actual sex work) for a long time, with account suspensions/content purges in both 2017 and 2023.

But you might not be aware that Amazon has been purging/deleting content for years.

The fact is that moderation is not easy but is also quite important, and not just for hunting down illegal material containing actual CSA (admittedly one of the most important things to hunt down, morally speaking). Ever since self publishing really came into its own starting around 2010, there have been people trying to game Amazon’s publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), with low content books, junk books, and other useless, low-quality items that they trick people into buying. Amazon’s ability to delete those books is an important part of their maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

But that’s only part of the story

Amazon is, actually, quite prudish, and has only gotten more and more strict about what can be on its platform over the past decade.

In the early self-publishing days, also known as KU 1.0, it was possible to make a lot of money writing and selling the filthiest erotica you could imagine. Most of those books would not be allowed on the site today, and the types of erotica that are allowed are often kept out of searches and so are hard to find (the legendary “Kindle Dungeon” you may have heard of).

The end result is that if Amazon decides that a certain type of cliché or trope or kink is verboten, they will simply delete the book, and often, shut down the author’s account completely.

Readers lose access and authors lose income, and sometimes stories just get lost (if the author has changed genres or abandoned a pen name, they may not care or even be aware that anything has happened).

Amazon doesn’t play around, either. If you used a pen name to publish that super-taboo erotica, sometimes they won’t just shut down the pen name, they will shut down your entire author account.

Okay, but why all the censorship? Are they just PRUDES?

This is a topic that can take up a whole book, and fortunately other people have written about it in depth and with far more insight than I have about it, because it is a complex web consisting of the rise of neo-puritanism and far-right religious extremism (mostly in the USA, where these large corporations are legal entities). But dig down past the up-swell of the modern version of “satanic panic” (aka “won’t someone think of the children!!!”), what you’ll get to is one simple word: liability.

Apple, Patreon, and Amazon have been openly opposed to sexual content of any kind from their founding, and honestly for good legal reasons. Whether you know this or not, most people well versed in the history of I.T. know this to be true: progress often rides on pornography, and pornography often rides on organized crime.

Who were the first people sending large image files? Large video files? Video streaming? Online payment processing? If your answer was “sex workers and people who enjoy pornography” you would be right. Or, as CNN reported in an article from 2010, “In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way.”

(This is a disputed theory, but having lived through the birth of the modern World Wide Web, I gotta say it is not far off the mark.)

Since porn is universally spurned while also being universally consumed (ya’ hypocrites!!!), it’s been hard for the I.T. industry to disentangle itself from it, but it has tried very, very hard to do so since the very beginning. The optics of it was a major issue for Steve Jobs, who did not want the pristine tech beauty of Apple to be besmirched by bodily fluids. But in the corporate legal offices, the big concern was being held liable for human trafficking and money laundering.

Point blank: They care less that it happens than that they don’t end up with their precious servers getting seized by the Feds.

“Think of the children!!!” always was and remains a palatable cover for limiting liabilities.

Yes, there is more money in porn than in almost any other entertainment media, but the risks are high due to all the laws in all the countries that outlaw pornography (either outright or by criminalizing the production of it).

No CEO wants a piece of that.

It’s easier to get the public on board with restricting apps in the app store if you say it is to prevent CSA. After all, that’s also true.

But in twisting themselves up with the anti-sex brigade, these companies lost control of the ship and ran it straight into the bridge of personal liberties (too soon?).

You will enjoy nothing, and be happy

The “weak link” in online porn has always been payment processing. Because it is by necessity such a shady industry, it is rife with money laundering, and payment processors like Visa and MasterCard have been looking for a way to distance themselves from that for a long time. At the boardroom level, absolutely no one actually gives a damn about human trafficking, which is the focus of most anti-porn initiatives. It’s just a convenient villain to point at and wrap laws around.

Until 2018, most platforms were content to give a lot of voice to cracking down on porn and sex workers, while at the same time turning a blind eye to much of it. Their adherence to their own TOS was lackadaisical because, yes, there is a LOT of money in porn. Pretending to ignore it while reaping in the $$ seemed to work fine on the corporate ledgers. Apple and Amazon were stricter than most, but only by a few degrees.

Then, in 2018, right-wing GOP-led anti-sex worker hysteria led to the passing of the SESTA/FOSTA laws. These laws were universally derided by actual sex workers and people fighting human trafficking, rightly claiming that they would actually result in making things worse by driving those activities further underground. In retrospect, they were right, but no matter: they were roundly ignored because of the well-funded anti-sex propaganda around it, geared once again on “think of the children!”

The reason this was such a shock wave to the I.T. industry was due to one major change for online platforms, which was that the SESTA/FOSTA laws suspended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It stipulates that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

In other words, platforms became liable for content they host, and by extension, the payment processors became liable for handling transactions associated with that content.

The result? Financial organizations, namely MasterCard and Visa, started cracking down on providing payment processing services to companies/platforms hosting sexual content out of a fear of being held liable for things such as money laundering and human trafficking.

The result is that the low-level, simmering censorship of pre-SESTA/FOSTA got ramped up to eleven and here we are.

What to do?

If you are in the USA and eligible to vote, keep an eye out for politicians who support stricter online content regulations. Right now the battle is over KOSA (the misnamed “Kids Online Safety Act”) which has been proposed on the heels of the “success” of SESTA/FOSTA. While not specifically targeting porn, erotica, or minority communities, it poses a significant threat to free speech and freedom in general by giving authorities the power to demand removal of any online content they deem “dangerous to minors,” which could include violence, porn, or poems by Maya Angelou, depending on the authority in question.

But, to swing back to my opening volley: SAVE WHAT YOU LOVE.

The internet is already a volatile and uncertain medium. Things get lost, get deleted, and get censored.

Sometimes you can’t save what you love, or can’t do it easily. For instance, there is no simple way to download stories from Wattpad…although I would bet money that there are fans of stories posted there who have painstakingly screen-captured every chapter of their favorite story to hoard in a folder on their computer. (That is how we used to save fanfic back in the ancient days of LiveJournal!)

But if that story you love is available from the author as a printed book, I beg you to buy a copy. You will support the author and also preserving the story for posterity. At least for a little while!

We joke that “everything is forever on the internet,” but fandom in particular knows that is not true. Trust us on that! Retailers like ‘zon and B&N and, yes, Wattpad, can yank a book out of your library at a moment’s notice for no other reason than that the blurb contains the word “slut” or the story features a kink that “the authorities” find objectionable.

Fight the power, and save what you love.

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