ao3 is facing a ddos attack from an overseas right-wing anonymous group because it contains “degeneracy and disgusting things like LGBT and NSFW”.
they’re not the only right-wing group that is attacking fanfiction sites because of queer & nsfw content. the Heritage foundation, the US right wing think tank that writes laws for republicans, wrote an article about how “big tech turns kids trans” in which they’re advocating for the Kid’s Online Safety Act to pass because it will give state attorney generals power to sue websites for “potentially harmful content towards minors”. in this article they point out websites like wattpad, tumblr, tiktok, twitter as sites that GOP attorney generals can and will target for censorship if this bill passes. all places where fandom, that’s mostly queer, hangs out.
if you think this bill has no chance of passing because of all the red flags it poses, think again. it currently has 38 cosponsors in the senate, and is being pushed by the democrats as a “protecting the children!!” type bill.
there are left-aligned orgs in congress rn lobbying for this bill to pass. july is extremely decisive, because if KOSA goes through to markup it’ll be bundled with the Earn It act, Restrict, and all the other bad internet bills and passed as a package, completely censoring the internet forever.
if you want to learn more about the bill, go here. also sign the open letter against it here
it’s ESSENTIAL that you call your members of congress, specifically Maria Cantwell (you can call from out of state) and tell them DO NOT PASS KOSA. this site here connects you to your members of congress and gives you a short simple script to read off of! super easy and doesn’t take much out of your day! please do this now!!
Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.
This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.
Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.
So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.
It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.
This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.
Vent ahead: Someday I don’t like where I am realizing my narcissism and constant need of praise too late but then again if it wasnt for a past mistake I wouldn’t have known and these things could’ve gone on longer. However, in the end I am where I need to be.
