Online Fanfiction and the Roots of Online Censorship

Design Credit: Annie Zhu

In the modern digital age, it’s not uncommon to see websites self-censoring — tweets removed for violating community guidelines, YouTube videos taken down for containing sexually explicit imagery, and Instagram posts deleted for nudity are all variations of the same familiar internet phenomena. But recently, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have come under fire for their choices regarding content censorship. Similarly, YouTube is scrambling to implement regulations on their site that comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and is facing significant backlash from their creators as a result. These changes may seem insignificant now, but they raise an important question for the future of censorship in cyberspace: What are websites allowed to host, and who gets to decide? As the digital age moves forward, stricter regulations seem inevitable. Legislation like COPPA and net neutrality, a bill that requires all service providers to treat communications equally, are only the start of a difficult balancing act between freedom and regulation. However, such regulations can be dangerous if implemented indelicately and have the potential to greatly impact the future of free speech on the internet. It may be useful for legislators to look to the history of online fanfiction for guidance.

In 2007, LiveJournal, a website that allowed users to create small posts called ‘journals’ to their wall or various community boards, purged their website of hundreds of journals that contained graphic content, specifically related to pedophilia. Many users were outraged and upset that their works and communities had been deleted without notice and without any reference to website policy. The CEO at the time, Barak Berkowitz, claimed that it was not a decision based on “pure legal issues,” but instead was a matter of community interest. Similarly, in 2012, Fanfiction.Net, a website devoted to— you guessed it— fanfiction, cleared a large portion of the works on their site for violating a previously unenforced ratings rule that prohibited works over an M rating on the website. Many fans were distraught because without the ability to revise and edit out offensive content, work that could have otherwise been considered acceptable was lost forever. Both of these websites faced considerable backlash from their user base for such sudden and permanent shifts in community interests, and many fans left the sites in favor of other, less authoritarian websites. Pro-censorship arguments from these sites seem to unanimously agree that works promoting illegal activity or graphic content breaches the community guidelines and generally abide by the Jacobellis v. Ohio (The famous “I know it when I see it” definition of obscene material) decision regarding explicit material. Websites like LiveJournal and Fanfiction.Net take a hard pro-censorship stance in the face of fanfiction, despite their platform initially gaining an audience from being some of the first websites that permitted explicit works. However, it is worth noting that this level of censorship online actually extends past what exists in the real world. In the United States of America, laws explicitly forbid the arbitrary removal of literature in schools and libraries. Websites like LiveJournal and Fanfiction.Net, by removing the literary works posted and archived on their sites, are sidestepping censorship laws that apply to their real-world equivalents.

An alternative perspective on the question of online censorship is that of cyberlibertarianism, a philosophy that argues “true internet freedom is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous ‘public interest.’” This ideology articulates the desire for a completely self-regulated internet experience, free from impositions by the government or other private groups on the content that a person may choose to view or post online. Such a view is highly controversial because it defends the rights of any individuals to post and view potentially graphic or explicit content. For example, the popular fanfiction site Archive of Our Own is notorious for its cyberlibertarian approach to works posted. Embedded in the terms of service, the website demands that “[users] understand that using the Archive may expose [them] to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled.” Archive of Our Own refuses to endorse the fanworks it hosts, but likewise won’t remove controversial works for simply containing graphically disturbing content, such as non-consensual sex or pedophilia. This perspective understandably has earned Archive of Our Own a significant backlash from a large portion of its users who disapprove of disturbing content. However, Archive of Our Own maintains that it is an archive, not a curation, and as such should not be required to develop a point of view regarding the types of work that are acceptable on their platform. In their own words, the Archive’s mission is to advocate on behalf of transformative works, not just the ones they like.

Presently, the internet is in an ideology war. As we move forward, it seems inevitable that laws around internet censorship will come into clearer focus, and websites will face more and more regulations. However, with these regulations will come the same dilemma we face outside of cyberspace: Who gets to censor content, and how much do they get to censor? Do we want an internet that is strictly an archive, or a curation?