Memes

Archive Of Our Own (commonly shortened to AO3) is basically the de facto fanfiction website. If you want to read fanfic, AO3 is pretty much where you’ll end up. A lot of fanfic is basically straight up LGBTQ+ smut. It’s a lot of “what if these two characters slept with each other” types of stories. A lot of LGBTQ+ people end up reading fanfic, because it’s often one of the few ways that they can find representation among popular media.

Russian hackers recently took the site down, and tried to blame it on Muslim hackers instead. They basically created a fake Muslim hacker group, and then took credit for the attack using that fake group. Except the hack was quickly traced back to Russian hacking groups who have done things like this in the past. The goal seems to be to stoke division between gay people and Muslims.

Lots of people have theorized that the ultimate end-goal is for all the gay people to start publicly hating on the Muslim hackers, so Putin can point to the anger and go “hey Saudi Arabia, the west sure does hate Islam. They have been a haven for gay people who all publicly hate Muslims. Maybe you should be more buddy-buddy with me (and raise your oil prices because these sanctions on Russian oil are bleeding me dry).”