Community

[bladespark]

Seeing Fimfiction overrun with Nazis and Nazi defenders right now has made me realize...

As much as I've often been frustrated by the way AO3 doesn't have any real tools to form community, I think that's for the best.

Because you cannot have 100% "any topic is fair" free speech, and diverse community. Allowing the Nazis to be present in a format where people directly interact would mean that, as in all communities, Nazi speech must be restricted, or the Nazis will make marginalized people feel so unsafe that they'll slowly filter out of the community, leaving only Nazis and those who can afford to be oblivious to them in an increasingly toxic cesspit. I've seen it happen over and over and over again.

But AO3's free-speech platform matters to me. I think it really is an important principle! It's just not one that's compatible with community. It's compatible with, well, archiving.

Like statues of racists. You can't have that kind of gorification in a fair society. But the historical accounts of the racists need to be archived somewhere, their likenesses preserved somewhere.

So I guess it's just as well that AO3 doesn't have the kind of community building tools other fandom sites do. Because it can be an archive, and the Nazis can have their stories there too, but in the actual communal spaces where fandom lives, we can tell them to fuck off, and keep their toxic bullshit to themselves.

(Just spitballing this, so I don't think it's a perfect take, exactly, but it's something on my mind right now.)

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Because you cannot have 100% "any topic is fair" free speech, and diverse community.

You can. Dreamwidth does. denise explains in a comment to the dw_news "welcome Tumblr-porn-ban refugees" post:

Fundamentally, it boils down to whether you're harassing people or are trying to recruit people to join you in horrible things or act on your beliefs: "advocating or inciting", for the most part. It'll probably be clearer if I give you a sliding scale of Okay vs Not Okay. I'll use "being a cat owner" as the example, not to trivialize the sort of beliefs that neo-Nazis espouse but because nobody wants to keep hearing about Nazis. (Fucking Nazis.)

as of that comment, end of 2018, there weren't a whole lot of Nazis on Dreamwidth, and afaik that hasn't changed. probably because Dreamwidth's Guiding Principles and Diversity Statement make it clear, by explicitly welcoming a bunch of people Nazis don't like, that Nazis won't like it here.

[hitokage]

Ah yes, the tolerance "paradox" - because the only way to deal with Nazis is to give them the boot as soon as they reveal themselves. What they want isn't free discourse, but the subjugation of everyone else and for every inch they're given, they'll take another mile, too.

As I recall, AO3's policies have the same intolerance for hate speech and inciting violence that DW has (tho probably worded differently), but it's also huge and I'm definitely not in any of the spaces where Nazis would try to get a foothold anyway (there's a certain level of irony in there, considering I *am* heavily in the VK fandom and oh boy visual kei and military uniforms are a whole shady history).

[silveradept]

That's the crux of the library neutrality debate, and I'm pretty well done with the idea that we have to give people with harmful views a platform to be harmful because all views matter.