Summary
Teen Vogue op-ed by Fight for the Future organizer Sarah Philips, anchored on the July 2023 Archive of Our Own (AO3) cyberattack. Argues KOSA is a “censorship bill in disguise” — the real threat to fandom communities isn’t religiously motivated hackers but state attorneys general empowered by KOSA’s duty of care framework. Traces SESTA/FOSTA’s documented harms to sex educators, workers, and LGBTQ content as precedent.
Key Points
- AO3 (Archive of Our Own) went dark 24+ hours in mid-July 2023 from religiously/politically motivated cyberattack — frame for KOSA argument.
- Ken Paxton (Texas AG) has called gender-affirming care child abuse; Texas legislators proposed banning abortion fund websites.
- Surgeon General’s advisory explicitly acknowledges LGBTQ+ youth have better outcomes with social media access — the most under-cited section.
- Research citations: LGBTQ+ youth happier/healthier with supportive online groups (Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, APA).
- FOSTA precedent: failed to fight sex trafficking (Columbia Human Rights Law Review), decimated sex ed + LGBTQ content online.
- Heritage Foundation saying quiet part aloud — explicitly wants to use KOSA to censor LGBTQ content.
- Author’s personal stake: queer community formed through AO3 comment sections; friends married through these communities.
Newsletter Angles
- The AO3 anchor is editorially strong: a specific, named community, a specific attack, a personal stake. Exemplary op-ed structure.
- The under-cited surgeon general finding: the Murthy advisory everyone cites in favor of KOSA also contains explicit language that social media helps LGBTQ+ youth. This is a contradiction worth surfacing.
- The FOSTA failure record: Columbia HRLR study showing the law didn’t dent trafficking but did destroy harm-reduction communities. This is the reusable empirical core of the anti-KOSA case.
Entities Mentioned
- Archive of Our Own / AO3
- Fight for the Future — Sarah Philips
- Heritage Foundation
- Ken Paxton — Texas AG
- Marsha Blackburn
- Vivek Murthy — Surgeon General
- Tumblr — 2018 adult content ban as cautionary example
Concepts Mentioned
- KOSA
- Duty of care
- FOSTA
- Fan fiction communities
- AO3
- Abortion fund censorship
- Surgeon General’s advisory on social media
Quotes
“When I meet KOSA supporters who claim to be ‘protecting the children,’ I have to ask: Which children are we talking about?”
Notes
Teen Vogue advocacy piece by a Fight for the Future organizer — disclosed. July 2023, early in the AO3/fandom mobilization against KOSA. Functions as a primary source on how the fandom-community political mobilization framed itself.