When Wattpad quietly rewrote its content guidelines last month, its writers didn’t wait around for the hammer to fall. Overnight, they began packing up their archives (years of stories, millions of words) and migrating them to Archive of Our Own (AO3).
Wattpad had just banned stories “created primarily for sexual arousal.”
From the outside, it’s easy to dismiss this as a niche squabble over fanfiction. But platforms like Wattpad and AO3 are massive, thriving ecosystems where young and marginalized writers figure out who they are. What we’re watching is a preview of legislative overreach disguised as a corporate policy update.
We believe this is dangerous, because allowing algorithms and payment processors dictate morality is an effective way to stifle expression and creativity.
Take that phrase: “created primarily for sexual arousal.” How exactly do you measure that? You can’t. It’s an impossible, subjective metric. Wattpad claims adult themes are fine as long as they serve the plot. But who acts as the literary critic here? Is it really going to be a human reading a chapter to gauge its narrative merit?
When rules get blurry, people don’t test the boundaries. They just straight to self-censoring where they start stripping the intimacy out of their work just to pass the filter.
We have history to show us who gets caught in these nets first, because censorship rarely falls evenly. A heterosexual romance novel might skirt the algorithm, but queer relationships, trans narratives, and stories exploring sexual trauma are historically the first to be flagged as “gratuitous.” In the attempt to censor the explicit, it inevitably censors the marginalized, their very identities treated as inherently inappropriate.
This is where the conversation usually hits a wall. People hear arguments against content moderation and immediately think of the worst-case scenarios. Let’s be clear: protecting children from real online exploitation is a deeply valid, urgent priority. The fears driving lawmakers right now are entirely justified.
But the laws they are drafting are fundamentally broken. Current and proposed child safety bills wield the exact same blunt instruments as Wattpad’s terms of service. In their rush to sanitize the internet, lawmakers are collapsing the crucial distinction between a photograph of actual abuse and a fictional story written by a survivor processing their trauma.
Why do humans write dark, transgressive, or explicit fiction? Because fiction is a safe sandbox for exploring unsafe ideas where fear, desire, trauma, and fantasies can be processed without hurting anyone in the real world.
Criminalizing fictional text does nothing to save real children. It simply turns the internet into a surveillance state. In the process, trauma survivors and marginalized teens lose one of the safest, most accessible outlets they have for making sense of their lives and experiences.
We need a sharper approach that draws a hard, undeniable line between real-world abuse and synthetic or fictional material. Abuse requires an actual victim. Fiction, by definition, has none.
On September 28 at Medical School Berlin, we’re sitting down with child safety researchers and digital rights advocates to figure out how legislation can protect the vulnerable without policing the human imagination. Be part of this conversation. Learn more about the workshop here.