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I'm so scared that AO3 will be affected by the new "child safety" laws. The few places that seem to be safe havens for relative free speech are going to be restricted because they're deemed "unsuitable for kids", even when they were already marked as explicit and not for children. They punish both sexually curious (usually queer) teenagers as well as perfectly law-abiding adults by forcing them to use ID that reveals their identity. What will this mean for online privacy and freedom of artistic expression? Surely only bad things. It's not child protection; it's authoritarian control of anything they deem to be inappropriate or "dangerous" or misinformation. They want to start identifying people so they can track anyone who they consider to be "potentially criminal." Like people who make "weird" smut on this site, probably. I reckon we'll see AO3 get forced to introduce IDs, so if you don't put one in, you can't see content marked as explicit. This is REALLY BAD. Mostly for, as I already said, law-abiding adults who they deem essentially "degenerate" or whatever other fascist-aligned insults they want to use - and also for teenagers who want to safely explore their sexuality but now Can't, at least not without a VPN (and they could just ban VPNs for under 18s if they wanted that too).
So please, I just hope that AO3 is safe too. From this censorship of what I would call "art" (particularly; art that has explicit scenes occasionally. Now people can't really make art that's mostly SFW but has a few explicit scenes anymore and it's just like...... pls let people do what they want it doesn't hurt anyone). But I don't think it will be safe. So, save your documents, and save your hearts too - we need to stay alive.
And of course, they'll use this to censor educational things, but that's not even the base of the issue. The base of the issue is that they want to censor sexual content which is just like.................. Why? Who was this hurting? It's so authoritarian and I am terrified, I already feel guilt for my "disgusting" nature that we are being made out to have. That we're somehow endangering some imaginary children that, for the most part, do not exist. Controlling what information they can access isn't going to help them, it's going to blind them - it's like... I guess, very much like the strict Christian parents who get angry about their kids being gay or anything like that? And trying to hide them from the world? It's awful and I hate it, how people who are supposedly progressive are sometimes still backing it up too. This is BAD. It's REALLY bad because if you refuse to put in your ID (which I do refuse to put in), you are essentially getting a hard porn ban, which is obviously umm.. Not good. Because it's art censorship. Because you decided not to give up your privacy and security and potentially risk your identity getting stolen by some random site owner or being tracked by your government, you are being censored. You can't do what you were allowed to do before, because you tried to be safe, and tried to be yourself.
And that's terrifying to me (who is currently a minor in the UK).
Save me.
I want to be free, but I never will be