Many teens like myself enjoy reading fan fiction. Fan fiction is great and despite popular belief there are plenty of fun, clean and teen friendly works. Archive of our Own is a very popular site for fan fiction. The layout is easy to use and it is easy to understand their tagging system. Great right? Well, not so much anymore. 

They do have a lot of explicit and mature fanfics. Not a problem. It is very easy to filter them out and because of the tags, you don’t stumble onto them accidentally. Should you click on an explicit or mature work, a page comes up asking you to confirm that you want to see such content. But there are new online safety laws coming into many countries around the world, especially the UK. These laws mean that AO3 could be blocked for having explicit content easily accessible by minors. In fact, many public wifi networks and phone companies have already blocked AO3. Germany has already had the site removed from their search engines. This is a disturbing trend that can’t continue. I have contacted Ao3 however I thought a petition might help.

The issue is a new Uk law coming in called the online safety bill. Under that law, all websites that can be accessed in the uk must prevent minors from accessing “harmful material” which explicit and mature fanfics full under. Sites have to prove that they have something in place to stop minors from accessing that material or else they get a massive fine and if they don’t change to conform to the law, they get blocked from the uk. Because of this new law, there is also talks of VPNs being banned too, in order to prevent teenagers from accessing stuff they shouldn’t be using VPNs (this is not confirmed yet, it is just speculation).

So what’s the solution? 

Instead of blocking the whole site, I propose that AO3 put up an age verification wall (similar to YouTube and Reddit’s one for mature content) that comes up whenever you try to access and fic that is mature, explicit or not rated. They already have a banner saying there could be adult content, it wouldn’t be too big of a change to have people sign in or verify their age. 

This way the site would be free for everyone to access and enjoy whilst still following the rules of the world and protecting minors. Please we don’t have much time till it gets blocked so sign and spread the word!