Is it true that fanfiction.net banned reader/self insert fics because, according to their logic, if a child reads such a fic, that makes the fic child porn, and thus said child’s parents could sue the website? That’s what I heard. It sounds beyond ridiculous.
(submission)
…Yes, although it must be specified that the problem is the juicy lemon, so to say. It is perfectly in tune with their 2002 ban on anything even remotely explicit, and then their 2012 purge. The 2005 ban on 2nd POV and self-insert fics was explained in 2012 with this message:
I’m– not going to comment on that unless explicitly asked because anything about that website makes my head shake so hard I get cramps in my neck and the secondhand embarrassment is almost unbearable.
Can you please comment? Now I’m curious. Because this is completely and utterly ridiculous.
Omg where do I even begin. You can’t talk about FFnet censorship on one type of content without dragging the discourse to all the type of content it has banned since its creation. And you can’t talk about the disaster of its management (despite its size and out of control in/fame) without also talking about the staff of the site. Let’s go a bit in order.
- Ffnet has 1 admin
“FanFiction.Net was created by Xing Li while he was a student at University of California, Los Angeles. The original servers for the site were connected to his then-employer. This employer “recouped part of the cost in order to use it as a test for how well their servers worked.” [1] When these costs rose to over $2000 a month, Xing Li’s employer wanted compensation. [need cite] Xing Li tried to cover these costs with paid memberships, something that was a failure. [2] Advertising on the site was initially used, removed, then later implicated.“
- Had moderators not even out of high schools, one of which in particular was 13 at the time
“Flourish (was on staff at the age of 13 [3], left FFN.net in September 2001 during The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle, and became one of the founding members of FictionAlley.Org)”
- It brought down the age restriction for signing up to 13 sometime after the first purge
“Registration was open to all people who claimed to be over 18, and by 2002 over 118,000 people were registered. (The age limit has since been moved down to 13.)” [4]
- But still had a pop up system to warn users that they were going to read mature content, asking to prove that they were over the age of 17. This was indeed deemed, together with the request of only admitting people claiming to be 18 for getting an account, insufficient. As many know, in 2002 the admin wrote an announcement, part of which regarded NC17 content:
“NC-17 based entries will no longer be accepted. Though they are very small portion of the site the adult stories have generated almost all of the complaints filed on record in the past year. Moreover, the highest concentration of them are growing in areas with subjects targeted to younger readers and with increasingly controversial subject matters. However, not all NC-17 based stories fall into the description but as result of their increasing volume a decision has been made to resolve this problem. Innocent writers will be affected but this has to be done considering the non-filtering scheme of the site.” [5]
- Still, things were peachy because the management of the website sucked majestically, with the admin himself disappearing into the void, leaving the website heavily understaffed for its huge content, making the users so used to not being able to get back from moderators after abuse reports etc, that our gorgeous fandom police started getting up. Like LU (The Literate Union) founded in 2009, or Critics United founded in 2010 (which fans blame 2012 purge on), or the LJ group Warriors Of Innocence (reportedly behind LJ Strikethrough)
Here things start getting fun.
- 2012 Ffnet goes on a purge for stories that violate the 2002 ToS. The fact that those stories managed to exist for 10 years tells you a lot about the website (and you can bet that there are still many more hidden there). Even though the purge should have focused on explicit content, songfic, RPFs and whatever else:
“Reports in ffdotnetrants on LiveJournal and the fanfiction.net M-Rated Story Purge forum say that a “swear word” in the title or summary of a gen story was enough to get a story deleted without warning.“ (<- this source has been deleted from LJ, so take it however you want)
- Huffingtonpost ended up making an article about it titled "The Book Burning That Wasn’t: Thousands of Works of Fiction Destroyed and No One Pays Attention” Initial estimate talked about more than 60k fanfic deleted in their top 20 categories, but then it was rectified to 8k. Considering the total number of works, 8k is barely noticeable. Still, putting together this info with the users complain that even the leaders of CU wrote stuff that shouldn’t have been on the site while still dogpiling reports on others’ stories, you can sum up the situation with “UGH”
It’s not the end.
- “Our” leader and saviour admin of Ffnet comes back with other incredible ideas, like in 2010 when he went on a forum purge:
“On the night of November 25, 2010, FanFiction.Net purged its forums, deleting threads not updated for 9 months. This was announced less than 10 hours before an automated engine mauled through forums by creation date. During the night after Thanksgiving, while most of the site’s chiefly American population slept and was away from a computer, over 60,000 forums were affected. As a result, 22 million posts (66% of all posts ever made) were deleted during the purge. Instead of "reducing clutter”, the intent posted on the front page, the event resulted in thousands of completely empty forums with no archive or backlog of any sort. Important forum discussion, sentimental and cultural value formed in forums since they were introduced in 2005 was lost. Only forum subscription statistics showed there used to be content. When the purge completed, 90% of the General forums were empty. The site took no action about forums with no posts prior to the purge. It completely changed the way users viewed their forums, from a safe haven, to something entirely temporary.[6][7]“
-Or that other time- actually the same day, when he went on a PM purge:
"This process took more than two days to finish, and some users were able to feverishly back up their old correspondence. After the event, users expected better service, or another type of compensation, but received none. The site is yet to keep its promise made on November 26 to bring mobile forums "in a few days”[7]“
- And it makes things just peachy when:
"the site removed "libel” as a forbidden practice from their ToS in 2008, and would not endorse petition movements such as letting writers delete offensive signed reviews on their own.[8] The staff took an idle stance during the flame war concerning The Author Alliance in 2004, when several thousand stories were removed in Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon fandoms, a deed Xing Li noticed in the site’s article on AllExperts.“ (<- link broken for the last part)
So you can see how I really really really can’t bring myself to be shocked at their "readers fic can make you a CP creator, congrats!” when all this is going on. Purges at the drop of an hat without warnings, ToS changed that although fought hard and nail (let’s remember that the first petition against 2002 ban had at its closure more than 20k signatures, the second petition for the 2012 purge counted more than 40k) was indeed ignored by everyone for 10 years before fandom police started doing the job moderators weren’t doing or couldn’t do, lowering the age restriction to 13 even though with this management I can’t in all honesty believe that there aren’t NSFW fics there that haven’t been picked up and that are perfectly available to random readers, though I hope they have reached their so hard-fought purity. I do pity the lot of them because they clearly weren’t ready to manage a website that big.
But this is also why antis trying to police AO3 make me laugh so much. AO3 rose from the ashes of FFnet and LJ purges. How quickly do they think users who were personally involved in these will forget about it all to convert to their moral crusade?
AO3′s code is open source. It’s not in easily installable format, but it’s all there on github. Any teens (or anyone else) who is unhappy with AO3′s content choices, are free to grab the code and set up their own website, with whatever content restrictions they like.
AO3, however, will continue to have a “NO LIMITS OTHER THAN THE LAW” approach to content. (That’s not strictly true; they also don’t allow doxxing, non-fannish content, or non-fanworks posts like “what should I write next” posts instead of stories.) AO3 was designed specifically to host content that was vulnerable to takedowns on other sites. AO3 is really, really fond of the “don’t like? don’t read” policy for controversial topics.
It has another focus: An archive that won’t vanish because of someone’s fit of pique. In addition to the FFN and LJ takedowns, AO3 started soon after the Harry Potter “Detention” archive, for Harry/Snape fic, vanished literally overnight because the owner got into a fight with one of her appointed mods. *Poof* hundreds of fics gone. Fortunately, they were available through Google cache for a while, and there was a mad rush to find & download all the fics. In the end, I believe only 4 stories were entirely lost - fics where the authors didn’t have a backup, and hadn’t been accessed recently enough to show up in the cache. AO3′s other purpose is to preserve fanworks that would otherwise disappear because of site host drama or just walking away from the fandom and not wanting to pay host fees anymore. So it’s not only created for controversial fic; it’s created to endure internal drama about its policies - a nonprofit corporation, unlike an individual fan, can’t just vanish the project overnight.
The current pack of antis, mostly teens and college-age kids, are generally not aware that cries of “your fic is HORRIBLE and GLORIFIES CRIME and IMMORALITY and SEDUCES INNOCENTS INTO PERVERSION” have been going on for literally decades, and that AO3 was created to host exactly that kind of fic.
