(disclaimer: this has turned into where JTN Finally Gets It Off His Chest; perhaps you want to skip it)
I dunno, I feel like it kind of is.
To some extent it’s a false dichotomy; the whole business of censorship is based on pre-compliance. Ada Palmer’s 2024 essay Tools for Thinking About Censorship[1] explains it well: “the majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power”. It’s almost always a matter of what degree of threat causes you to self-censor. But.
For a start, there’s the decision to jump this hard and fast in response to a potential extraterritorial demand, before seeing if it looks like Ofcom can make anything like this stick for overseas sites (or, say, end up preferring to use their powers to get UK ISPs to block any content they don’t like, instead). This whole show has been going less than six weeks.
Compare to, say, AO3/OTW, another US-based organisation hosting mostly-text content, some (rather more) of which is likely to be relevant to the OSA. I’m finding it hard to get definitive info, but signs indicate they’re not planning to do anything special (either in terms of geoblocking or “highly-effective age assurance”).[2]
Of course, OTW is an organisation explicitly set up, and presumably lawyered up, not to overcomply with this sort of thing; and they are starting from a different place with respect to tagging practices and such. Maybe other differences I haven’t thought of, I’m not big into AO3. Maybe they are foolhardy. But, still, clearly a range of responses is possible.
I don’t and can’t speak for the IFTF; I’m not in their shoes[3], they’ve explained to some extent their decision process, and while I’m pretty upset with the results, I believe they are good people doing their best. But the tragedy of this stuff is that good people doing their best can still be coerced or talked into making the world a worse place.
(If this is what happens in response to the actions of an allied but foreign jurisdiction, what happens when Uncle Sam comes knocking?)
And then, once your organisation has decided to get into the nitty gritty, and especially if they’ve decided to classify content on a case-by-case basis (rather than, say, geoblocking the entire UK and moving on), there’s the detailed decisions about what side of the line things are on.
Once you’re devoting a significant proportion of your organisational effort to worrying about this, you’ve got a lot of individuals having to come up with their own understanding to make tagging decisions, and the tendency is almost inevitably to expand blocks a little bit “to be on the safe side”, since the requirements are hard to interpret and the perceived penalties are so severe.
You’ve got the IFComp volunteers running themselves ragged trying to keep their show on the road; you’ve got a handful of IF Archive volunteers trying to classify ~20,000 files before the UK can be let back in; you’ve got folks like zarf trying to come up with least-worst technical and organisational workarounds in their spare time. None of whom want to be spending time and effort doing this, or thinking about it.
(Full disclosure: I am currently an IF Archive volunteer, and I am still trying to decide whether I can and want to face this.)
So, say, do you carefully play through all branches of the work in front of you to convince yourself that it is at no point (say) glorifying and/or facilitating suicide[4], or do you tag it as soon as it mentions suicide, maybe intending to come back later, and move onto the next one?
All the incentives are to over-comply.
Take IFComp 2025. Under the constraint[5] of turning this around in a month after learning about the OSA, after authors had started their work, and sticking to the original competition schedule (with its 3-day window between seeing the works and publishing them), I think there was never going to be a way to get a good result.
But I have to say that a system which has blocked nearly a third of IFComp entries (not a venue I think of as especially racy or edgy) is pretty objectively over-blocking, compared to my (uninformed) understanding of the OSA. (I haven’t tried to experience any of the blocked works yet, maybe I’m wrong and this is just the year IFComp got spicy.)
I see what I read as tendency to self-censorship all over these threads; it’s pretty natural. For example (and I’m sorry to pick on @mathbrush, he’s far from the only person who’s expressed this sort of thing in these discussions, this just seems like a particularly clear example to me):
Each of us are putting ourselves in the position of the government bogeyman, each according to our personal interpretation of what they want, and acting or speaking accordingly. Easy to end up anticipating things we think the bogeyman wouldn’t approve of, even if we haven’t actually managed to find them in the pages and pages of densely-written legislation and guidance. Easy to take what someone else in the same boat said on trust, and for it to expand it just a little bit as it settles into your own understanding.
So, is it complying in advance? What’s the threat level?
I think the main threat is that we don’t get to continue having and contributing to this community and sharing our works and craft and our reactions to them and keeping our libraries of institutional knowledge. That we implode the IFTF and everything that now hangs off it. The risk of personal ruin is nonzero, but unlikely, I think.
If it were your responsibility, if you’d put years into this community, would you decide to risk no more NarraScope, no more IFComp, losing thirty years of historical artifacts etc, for the sake of not introducing a few tags and inconveniencing some users on a rainy faraway island? (Would I?)
(And once all this effort is expended, and we can say that the UK OSA is no longer a threat, isn’t what we have built a smoothly-running censorship machine? Even if you agree that the sorts of things the UK OSA seems concerned about are reasonable things to filter for, after spending all this effort, it’ll be the tool to naturally reach for when new requirements come from the UK government, or the EU, or individual US states, or the USA as a whole. How do we react when Uncle Sam comes knocking, requiring us not to corrupt the youth with gender ideology? Can I honestly say now, as a volunteer, that the IF Archive is a safe place to put things?)
I don’t have a point or a call to action or anything, really. I doubt any of this is particularly insightful or even coherent. It’s all just a sort of extended keening noise about the world coming for my joy and my pastimes. It’s not like they’ve even taken my work or my expression. Thank you for your attention.
(in response to the 2023 Hugo Awards debacle; I don’t thereby mean to impute anything similarly sordid happening here in the IF community) ↩︎
(From late July; maybe I’ve missed something since. But I can still access AO3 works from the UK by clicking through an interstitial.) ↩︎
er, except inasmuch as I’m a UK resident currently listed on the IF Archive website, so in theory a potential target for Ofcom ↩︎
Or whatever the precise thing is that we think the OSA/Ofcom are worried about. ↩︎
(at least I guess this is roughly what happened, but I may well be wrong) ↩︎