I am not one of the founders of AO3, but I have been a volunteer with the site since 2010, so I feel like I can speak to why I, personally, have supported the project since before its beginning and why I’ve given a decade of my life, thousands of hours of time I could have spent doing other things, and hundreds of my own dollars over the years, to help keep it running.
It isn’t because I am “a pedo”, or because I like reading/writing extreme underage content. It’s because I feel very strongly that there needs to be a space for fandom that isn’t owned by a corporation, that isn’t beholden to advertisers, that doesn’t risk disappearing overnight, and that allows any fannish content that is legal. It’s because I have seen, after participating in fandom for 20+ years, what happens every time a fandom platform tries to ban certain content.
All the content on AO3 is legal to produce and access under US law (other countries may vary, but the Archive follows US law since that’s where it’s based, and so that’s what I’ll be referring to.) Our Terms of Service specify that anything actually illegal (pornographic photos of real children, for instance) is not permitted. If you are a US resident and you dislike that written, fictional content about underage characters in sexual situations is legal where you live, please take it up with your government representatives, rather than with AO3.
I personally find some of the content on AO3 disgusting. That’s fine! Nobody is required to like all of the content on the site. But in using the site, even as a guest, you (general you) agreed to the site’s Terms of Service which includes the key line: “You understand that using the Archive may expose you to material that is offensive, triggering, erroneous, sexually explicit, indecent, blasphemous, objectionable, grammatically incorrect, or badly spelled.”
This is probably the most-quoted line in the TOS (at least in my line of work), and for good reason. In going on the site, you are agreeing that you might see things you don’t like. You are agreeing that there is content that is fully permitted to exist on the site, which nevertheless might not be suitable or enjoyable for you, or might even be actively harmful for you to read. You are taking that responsibility into your own hands - to say that if you come across something, you will look at the warnings, look at the tags, and decide whether you want to read any further or not, and if you make a mistake, you will backbutton away and learn better for next time.
AO3 provides tools to help you control what you see or don’t see. You can choose to exclude tags through the filters - the entire Underage warning tag, for instance, or specific pairings or additional tags. You can choose to receive an adult content warning any time you access a work that isn’t rated G or T. And if people don’t use the required warning tags appropriately (such as including explicit sex in a work rated G, or underage sexual content in a work not marked with Underage or Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings), you can report them to our Abuse team, who will investigate and can either require the tags to be changed or remove the work.
Now, let me go back again to what happens when a site used by fans imposes content moderation (particularly new types of content moderation that weren’t previously in place). One or both of the following things happen:
1. People wake up one morning to find that their work, which they previously believed followed the rules of the site, no longer does, or has been lumped in with other types of forbidden work, and has been deleted without warning.
2. Work that includes said inappropriate content still exists on the site, but is not warned for or tries to hide what it actually is, in order to avoid being removed. People therefore stumble across it without warning, and have no way to choose to avoid it.
You don’t need to take my word for it, although I’ve watched it happen numerous times (Livejournal, Fanfiction.net, DeviantArt, Tumblr, just to name a few.) You can peruse the Fanlore list of purges and read more from there. But the short version is that, when sites start to impose rules about explicit content, underage content, RPF, or whatever they’ve decided is bad and wrong on that particular day, whole swaths of work get wiped out, including work that you or I might think had artistic merit, wasn’t “gross”, or whose only violation was being LGBT+ in nature (while comparable F/M works were left alone). This is not a wild speculation about what could happen - this is based on very real first-hand experience on the part of the people who founded AO3 and its early users. They (and I) decided that it was worth protecting even work we found disgusting, in order to ensure that work we loved would stay safe. That was the bargain that the site was made under, and that we continue to uphold today.
For instance, although I said above that I don’t like reading extreme underage, I have both read and written works that were tagged with the Underage warning. Works that feature older teenagers having sex, for instance, or that address things like child abuse or assault as part of the story. I looked at the tags on the works, made my own informed decision about whether I wanted to read further, and if I decided that I chose wrongly, I’ve backbuttoned out of the work and moved on with my life. But in some cases, I’ve found the works were very tasteful, artistic, moving, sad, heartwarming, or whatever other terms you might use to say “this work was good and I’m glad it exists and was allowed to be posted here.”
You might not agree with this position. You don’t have to! Maybe you think all underage work is equally vile and you never want to read it - that’s your right! And you certainly don’t have to donate to help support the site if you don’t want to - nobody does. But what you do agree in using the site is that if you see something you don’t like, and it was properly warned for, you scroll past it. You recognize that it is allowed to be there. Thousands of people have worked hard for over a decade to create a site where people can feel safe posting, knowing that their work will not be taken down because the rules changed overnight, or because a thousand people reported their work for having the wrong pairing and it was easier to just delete it than deal with the torrent of reports, or because a specific moderator decided they didn’t like it.
My work on AO3 is one of the things I’m proudest of. It is an important and valuable site. It isn’t under an obligation to advertisers who might ask it to censor certain content. It isn’t acting in order to make money or get sold off eventually to the highest bidder. It isn’t selling people’s browsing history or personal data. And authors can feel confident posting there that their work isn’t going to vanish overnight. If you think those things are worth supporting, you can certainly donate, but you don’t have to. The site will always be free to use, and those who can afford it and wish to support it will do so, ensuring it continues to exist for those who can’t or don’t. That’s pretty amazing.
