One day in mid-July, the revered fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3), a bottomless repository for stories set in thousands of fictional worlds, suddenly went dark. AO3 was inaccessible for more than 24 hours. The volunteer-run site, we later learned, had been targeted by cyberattackers who reportedly had religious and political motivations for aiming to take down the site.
I’ve been an AO3 reader for over 10 years, and this isn’t the first outage I’ve experienced. But this one felt different. Not only was it longer than usual, it was apparently prompted, in part, by hatred for queer people.
A day later, AO3 was back online, but concerns have lingered: What would happen if fan communities, especially queer fandoms that are lifelines for young LGBTQ+ people, ceased to exist? And it turns out, one of the most worrisome threats facing sites like AO3 isn’t a small outfit of cyberattackers, it’s the United States government.
Right now there are a handful of bills being rushed through Congress in the 11th hour before August recess that could permanently damage the ability of AO3 to reach its audience. The main threat is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Framed as “protecting children,” KOSA creates a “duty of care” that requires apps and websites to “prevent and mitigate” harms to children, like anxiety and depression, their products might cause. If the app or website doesn’t take steps to mitigate those harms, usually through removing content, it can be held liable.
Protecting children from harmful content with Big Tech taking the fall may sound great, until you consider who will have the power to decide what content is harmful — and, therefore, what content is removed. KOSA authorizes state attorneys general to be the ultimate arbiters of what is good or bad for kids. If a state attorney general asserts that information about gender-affirming care or abortion care could cause a child depression or anxiety, they could sue an app or website for not removing that content.
To prevent that liability, the app or website could proactively remove content that a conservative attorney general might think is bad for kids. But a lot of attorneys general think legitimate content is bad for kids.
I live in Texas, where our attorney general, Ken Paxton, has called gender-affirming health care child abuse. Some Texas lawmakers want to make it illegal for abortion funds to have websites. The school district I grew up in is currently under investigation by the ACLU for discriminating against trans students. My teacher friends approach civil rights lessons with anxiety, fearful of triggering outraged reactions from legislators and parents. We don’t live in a country where there is a consensus about what is harmful to children, so how could the government determine what’s appropriate for every kid?
People who are afraid of social media’s impact on kids, I've noticed, often quote a recent advisory on the topic from the surgeon general as evidence that kids should not have access to information online. But the most under-cited part of that report is actually the most important: There is a whole section that acknowledges LGBTQ+ youth actually have better outcomes when they have access to social media and online communities.
Simply put, queer and trans kids are happier and healthier when they have access to supportive online groups, like the fandom communities I found through fan fiction published on AO3. Last year, I attended the wedding of a friend I met in a comments section while gushing about our shared favorite fan fiction. We talked every day for years, and then I finally got to meet her in person, the day before she married the person she loved. Two other friends from that same community are married to each other now, and others have moved across the country to live together. All of us are queer and, in our teen years, had turned to fandom as a refuge, yearning for more inclusive stories and supportive communities we didn’t have in our day-to-day lives.
KOSA’s champions claim the amended bill, which was tweaked after vocal opposition, represents no threat to queer people and online communities like mine, but those of us who lived through SESTA/FOSTA’s impact on sex education, sex workers, and online content know that just isn’t true. (And activists say the changes aren’t enough.) SESTA/FOSTA, legislation that was supposed to help fight sex trafficking, not only failed to prevent trafficking and help survivors, as research has shown, it decimated online communities and censored sex education content along the way. Much of this content was information many only had access to online, in places like Tumblr, because of conservative parents and abstinence-only sex education we received at school.
Like SESTA/FOSTA, KOSA creates the aforementioned duty of care for social media companies, giving state attorneys general the power to sue sites like Instagram or Twitter if they put up content they deem “harmful” for kids and teens. With SESTA/FOSTA, we saw that tech companies preferred to shut down already-policed content about reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ identities, and sex education than risk a lawsuit.
KOSA’s supporters might want to ignore the fact that it’s a censorship bill in disguise, but the Heritage Foundation is saying the quiet part out loud. The hard-line conservative organization has openly said KOSA will help them censor the content conservatives don’t want young people to have access to.
The question is: Are Democrats going to hand them the keys to the kingdom? We have a choice in whether we fall for the rhetoric about kids' “safety” bills and watch in horror as the Ken Paxtons of the world weaponize them against our rights or fight KOSA with everything we’ve got, pushing for better tech bills that would actually protect young people from the harms of Big Tech.
If Congress wants to hold tech companies liable, there’s a ton of low-hanging fruit. The United States is embarrassingly behind in data-privacy protections. That means that right now, it’s profitable for tech companies to spy on kids and teens and micro-target them with addictive and damaging content. If it wasn’t profitable, they would be pressured to move on to different, less harmful business models. There are other simpler options too: We could pass legislation to curb algorithmic harm, targeted advertising, and design features like endless scrolling.
In my day job, I’m a digital rights organizer who has been working against KOSA for months. I talk to young people daily who are scared about the future of their online communities. Sure, fandom is partly about reading silly little stories written by our friends, but it represents so much more. When we can’t come out at home, we can lead safer, anonymous lives online. When queer stories have been physically pulled from our library shelves, we can see ourselves in digital fiction written by people like us, for us. The panic about AO3 is not just about losing fan works, but about losing a lifeline in the midst of an onslaught of bigoted legislation.
When I meet KOSA supporters who claim to be “protecting the children,” I have to ask: Which children are we talking about? Because the children I know, the teenagers who email me every day with worries about KOSA, they live in fear of the future KOSA would create. I’ll be damned if their future is an internet where the people who want to harm them most have the power to cut them off from their loved ones — even if those communities are found through a screen.
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