Itchio's censorship

Everyone knows by now the state of Itch and the censorship happening. My book, Open Wound, has been deindexed as has half of my work. Despite this book being about my own personal experience as a trauma survivor, and it serves as a discussion about issues to do with mental health, self-image, and difficult and messy recovery from sexual violence, I worry the context isn't going to matter and it may be deleted by Itch due to the content warnings alone. This book does not promote harmful things. It was written to help me recover from trauma and tell my story.

Because Itch over-complied with payment processors and handled this all so poorly, I worry the nuance of my work will not be considered. Sadly, this is going to silence a lot of sexual violence survivors just trying to tell their stories or cope with their trauma in various ways through art, games, and books. Censorship silences survivors, and it started with the social media shadow bans of words like 'suicide,' 'rape,' and other terms related to trauma. I have seen the death of at least one person in the writing community years ago who had been begging for help on their Twitter for a long time, but Twitter had hidden their posts from view because of the wording. If their posts hadn't been shadow banned, they might not have taken their own life.

I will remain on Itch as long as I can. I truly hope Open Wound doesn't get removed, but if it does, it just proves that survivors will be silenced.

I highly suggest to other authors to consider Payhip. They're pretty lenient with content and it's direct pay, no middleman. They also opened a marketplace to help with discoverability, and you get your own little store page that you can fully customize.

Keep fighting censorship. Right now, it's punk as fuck to keep telling our stories. It's punk as fuck to write kinky shit, to be as honest and raw as we can be and refuse to be silenced.

Kofi | Itchio | My Books