The Platformization of Fandom and its Discontents - Understanding Platform Harms Through the Archive of Our Own - Research article

Aug 21, 2026

This article examines how platformization generates harms beyond commercial motives by using the Archive of Our Own (AO3) as a case study. Centered on the 2023 End OTW Racism campaign, it argues that AO3’s design and governance reproduce core platform problems, including a fiction of neutrality, scale-related governance difficulties, hostility and harassment, and the ways platforms become infrastructural. The analysis shows that claims of openness and egalitarian facilitation can function anti-egalitarianly in practice, especially amid racism and coordinated abuse.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

From the End OTW Racism Campaign to Platform Harms

Campaign demands and documented harms

Platformization Defined: Beyond Commercial Platforms

Platformization as reorganization of cultural practice

Platform politics and infrastructural control

AO3 as a Platform and Its Consequences

Openness, scale, neutrality, and harassment

Platform centrality as participation-shaping infrastructure

The Platformization of Fandom and its Discontents: Understanding Platform Harms Through the Archive of Our Own MEL STANFILL University of Central Florida, USA While platformization is often discussed in relation to commercial platforms and the impact of the profit motive on their design and governance, many of its common problems also plague the design and governance of noncommercial platforms like the fan fiction archive, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) . Taking as its departure the 2023 End OTW Racism campaign, which urged the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) to address fandom racism, this article argues that AO3 demonstrates fundamental platform problems unrelated to commerciality. The End OTW Racism campaign arose in response to the long history of ignoring racism in Anglophone media fandom. However, it also demonstrated fundamental issues related to platforms, such as the dangers of the fiction of neutrality ; the problem of scale ; hostility and harassment ; and the ways platforms become infrastructural. Keywords: platforms, fan fiction, theory, racism, harassment From May 17 to 31, 2023, fans conducted the End OTW Racism campaign on social media, asking the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW)—“a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures” (“About the OTW,” n.d.)—to follow through on the promises it had made in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020: to address fandom racism, particularly in the OTW’s fan fiction archive, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) . The campaign cited examples such as a story “that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color” and “writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic” ( End OTW Racism, 2023, para . 2) . One of End OTW Racism’s key demands was for “A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content; by abusive, we are talking about fanworks that are intentionally used to spread hate and harassment, not those that accidentally invoke racist or other bigoted stereotypes” (para . 22) . Campaigners also sought “Harassment policies that can be regularly updated to address both on-site harassment and off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users, with updated protocols for the Policy & Abuse Team to ensure consistent and informed resolutions of Mel Stanfill: mel.stanfi[ll@ucf.edu](ll@ucf.edu) [Date submitted: 2024-04-26](Date submitted: 2024-04-26) Copyright © 2024 ( Mel Stanfill) . Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at [http://ijoc.org](http://ijoc.org). 4210 Mel Stanfill International Journal of Communication 18(2024) abuse claims” (para . 21) .1 An essential cause of this campaign was abusive content and harassment resulting from Anglophone media fandom’s “long history of white-centricity, systemic racism, and antiBlackness” (Pande, 2024, p. 108) . However, it only makes sense to make this complaint to the OTW because of the platformization of fandom. AO3 is a platform in the sense of Gillespie’s (2010) description of platforms as spaces—“designed to facilitate some activity” and specifically “a place from which to speak and be heard”—that proclaims itself to be an “open-armed, egalitarian facilitation of expression, not an elitist gatekeeper with normative and technical restrictions” (pp. 350, 352) . AO3 offers a platform for fans to post and share fan fiction, as it is (by policy) open-ended and egalitarian and allows anyone to participate . This organizational structure has made it a key infrastructure for large swaths of fandom, particularly in Anglophone media . However, AO3’slack of restrictions also means that it platforms racist stories and harassment, such that its openness is often anti-egalitarian in practice . Taking as my departure the End OTW Racism campaign, I argue that the tension between th

FAQs

What prompted the End OTW Racism campaign in 2023, and what did it ask OTW to do?

Fans ran the campaign asking the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) to address fandom racism, especially within AO3. Demands included stronger content policies for abusive racist content and updated harassment policies with consistent protocols for abuse claims.

How does the article define platformization, and why does it matter for noncommercial platforms like AO3?

Platformization is described as the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginations around platforms, along with platforms exercising infrastructural and political economic control. Even when AO3 is nonprofit and not part of a profit-driven platform economy, its platformization produces similar governance and participation challenges.

Which platform problems does the article argue AO3 demonstrates?

The article argues AO3 reflects problems such as the fiction of neutrality, the problem of scale, hostility and harassment, and platforms becoming infrastructural. It contends these issues are intensified because AO3 was conceptualized as an archive for marginalized, progressive people, yet functions as an infrastructure enabling racist harassment.

Aug 21, 2026

Upload by Callum