Archive of Our Own, one of the internet’s biggest fanfiction sites, blocked in China amid new censorship rules
- Archive of Our Own, also known as AO3, says its site is inaccessible in China and it is “not due to anything on our end”
- The site’s disconnection from China’s internet has angered some users, who blame fans of actor Xiao Zhan for reporting a story featuring their idol
Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the world’s biggest fanfiction sites, appeared to be blocked in China on Saturday as regulators further tightened internet controls, with some users furiously blaming fans of a popular actor for the government’s action.
“Unfortunately, the Archive of Our Own is currently inaccessible in China,” the Organization for Transformative Works, a US non-profit group that operates AO3, said on its Twitter account. “We've investigated, and it is not due to anything on our end.”
The organisation said it did not know “if it’s a temporary shutdown caused by server operators or a long-term restriction to access”.
It added that Chinese mobile network suppliers such as China Unicom and China Telecom appeared to have disconnected the connection between the local and overseas networks, according to a separate post by OTW late Saturday on popular microblogging site Weibo. It added that it could not resolve the problem since the disconnection is not caused by AO3’s servers.
Calls to the country’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), went unanswered on Monday.
Established in 2008, AO3 is an open-source platform for fanfiction, fanart and other fanworks contributed by users. It hosts 5.7 million fanworks in over 36,000 fandoms for 2.4 million users. Last year the site won a Hugo award, a literary award for science fiction and fantasy works, in the category of Best Related Work.