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fabaulti · 11 months

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I’ve always been a fan of AO3 and the idea of OTW as a whole. I mean, how could you not, seeing as these guys are actively trying to support and preserve fandom culture? Having a place where all fanworks are welcomed indiscriminately and neatly archived sounded like a dream come true. It was a dream come true.

Except, well, you know…

AO3 has a lot of problems, and while I am extremely thankful for its existence and for the possibility to safely host my fanworks somewhere, I am not going to delude myself into thinking the OTW is a perfect organization. They have a big racism problem that they still haven’t addressed, years after. And now, on top of everything, the AI generated works bullshit. A lot of great points have been made regarding the matter and while I’m not going to go over them yet again (I invite you to scroll through the eight hundred something comments left on the original announcement), I can’t help point out the hypocrisy behind the OTW’s stance: they are against data scraping but have no problem hosting the results of said data scraping.

I think this is the proverbial slap in the face for a lot of fans that have been defending OTW and AO3 no matter what — they’re run by people, and people are shitty. While I get that the OTW ass kissing made sense in the anti/proship debate, I’ve seen a lot of people that take the archive for granted and are extremely uncritical about it. Yes, it is not run by a megacorp that wants to harvest our data and make a profit out of it, but it is still an organization, and a pretty big one at that. Organizations are run by people with agendas, and that’s a fact.

Perhaps there is a way out of this — as I said, OTW is not a megacorp that deals in user data and ads to generate revenue. Things can change through voting. Donating to OTW doesn’t only ensure that the archive stays running, but also that your voice as an user gets heard, and I encourage everyone to make your voices heard. Will anything change substantially? It’s hard to say. It’s been three years since their promises to address the racism in the community, but nothing has really changed. Perhaps the decision regarding the hosting of AI-generated works will have a similar fate, and it will be something that people will learn to live with. Should we learn to live with things like these? Absolutely not, but perhaps this is the price that has to be paid in order to have a place of our own. It’s never going to be a perfect place and we shouldn’t pretend it ever was. I genuinely wish there were alternatives to AO3. Not like FFN or wattpad, but alternatives made in the same spirit: by fans for fans, with maximum (although not unlimited) inclusivity, where any fanwork made out of love and good faith could find a place.

As for the time being, I am unsure what my future on AO3 is going to look like. I don’t necessarily want to archive-lock my fanworks, although that might be the best course of action. I am also wary about posting any new works on the archive, at least until we get a clear, not half-assed announcement regarding OTW’s stance on AI-generated works.

#ao3 #otw #archive of our own #ao3 ai #ai fanfiction #ao3 critical #end racism in the otw

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thebroccolination · 11 months

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Hey Key, why are your winteam fics on ao3 all titled End Racism in the OTW? Or am I tripping? 😵

Hi Anon!

I changed all my fic titles (all 183) to show support for the organizers of End Racism in the OTW. They’ll remain that way until the 31st as a signal to the OTW that the presence of racism hasn’t waned and needs urgent, transparent attention (to deal with attacks on nonwhite writers, targeted and intentionally hateful use of slurs in titles and descriptions, etc.).

Some actions have been taken on AO3 by OTW (like the mute/block function), but one of the main purposes of this event is to call attention to and hopefully receive transparent updates on the progress being made on other promises OTW made in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests.

This post explains the goals of the event in detail!

Essentially, AO3 has been a wonderful place for me, so I want nonwhite writers to feel as safe and welcome there knowing the organizers and volunteers have a system in place to protect them from racist action.

Fandom is escapism, and the reality that some people need an escape from their escapism is harrowing.

#kiranokira answers #end racism in the otw #end otw racism #racism #tw: racism

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bijoumikhawal · 5 months

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in light of that volunteer getting the boot over Palestine, what do we do in regards to AO3?

#cipher talk #End racism in the otw #End racism in ao3

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gingerbreadingwer · 11 months

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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Fall Out Boy Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Joe Trohman, Patrick Stump, Patricia Stump, Jo Trohman Additional Tags: Girl Out Boy!verse, making music, Friendship, Time - Freeform Series: Part 6 of Fall Out Boy Friendship Drabbles Summary:

Jo, Pat and their music - about friendship, growing old toghether and creating music.

#End Racism in the OTW #fall out boy #fanfic drabble #joe trohman #patrick stump #friendship #making music toghether #girl out boy

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end-otw-racism · 1 year

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End OTW Racism: A Call To Action

A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization

This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies

AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.

In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)

As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.

We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.

On AO3

Change the title of ten (or more!) of your most recent or most popular fanworks to include ‘End Racism in the OTW’ in the beginning, and provide a link to this post in your summary or first/top creator’s note

Post a new fanwork any time between May 17th to 31st with “End Racism in the OTW” either as the title or at the beginning of the title. The fanwork does not have to be long - it can be a 100-word fic, a quick sketch, a podfic of a ficlet, a 20-second vid/edit, a short piece of meta, etc. In the summary or first/top creator’s note, provide a link to this post

If updating any WIPs with a new chapter, add ‘End Racism in the OTW’ to the title and provide a link back to this post in your summary or first/top author’s note

Update your AO3 icon using the profile pic graphic in our Social Media Toolkit

Plan to maintain these changes until May 31, 2023, or longer if you wish

Send a message to the OTW asking for an update on their 2020 commitments!

For Readers: leave encouraging comments on fanworks with the "End Racism in the OTW" title to show your support of this initiative.

On tumblr

Reblog this Call to Action with the tag #End OTW Racism

Update your profile pics and banners using the graphics in our Social Media Toolkit

Follow this account for updates and signal boost our posts

On Twitter

Follow @/EndOTWRacism (remove the backslash) and signal boost our pinned tweet

Update your profile pics and banners using our graphics, and change your display name to include #EndOTWRacism

Use sample tweets and graphics from our Social Media Toolkit to tweet about your fanworks, and use the hashtag #EndOTWRacism

Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!

What Do We Want?

Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:

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 abuse claims

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

These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.

OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:

Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months

Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings

Why Are We Doing This?

16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.

In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.

Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:

Improving admin tools for the Policy & Abuse team

Reassessing the current mandatory archive warnings with the possibility of implementing others

And, most importantly, reviewing the Terms of Service (TOS) to allow the Policy & Abuse team to address harassment that is currently not covered by the existing TOS

By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.

Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.

It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.

This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.

We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.

#fandom #ao3 #otw #EndOTWRacism #End OTW Racism #racism in fandom #organization for transformative works #archive of our own #antiracism #otw board

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lisafication · 11 months

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For those who might happen across this, I'm an administrator for the forum 'Sufficient Velocity', a large old-school forum oriented around Creative Writing. I originally posted this on there (and any reference to 'here' will mean the forum), but I felt I might as well throw it up here, as well, even if I don't actually have any followers.

This week, I've been reading fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a site run by the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit. This isn't particularly exceptional, in and of itself — like many others on the site, I read a lot of fanfiction, both on Sufficient Velocity (SV) and elsewhere — however what was bizarre to me was encountering a new prefix on certain works, that of 'End OTW Racism'. While I'm sure a number of people were already familiar with this, I was not, so I looked into it.

What I found... wasn't great. And I don't think anyone involved realises that.

To summarise the details, the #EndOTWRacism campaign, of which you may find their manifesto here, is a campaign oriented towards seeing hateful or discriminatory works removed from AO3 — and believe me, there is a lot of it. To whit, they want the OTW to moderate them. A laudable goal, on the face of it — certainly, we do something similar on Sufficient Velocity with Rule 2 and, to be clear, nothing I say here is a critique of Rule 2 (or, indeed, Rule 6) on SV.

But it's not that simple, not when you're the size of Archive of Our Own. So, let's talk about the vagaries and little-known pitfalls of content moderation, particularly as it applies to digital fiction and at scale. Let's dig into some of the details — as far as credentials go, I have, unfortunately, been in moderation and/or administration on SV for about six years and this is something we have to grapple with regularly, so I would like to say I can speak with some degree of expertise on the subject.

So, what are the problems with moderating bad works from a site? Let's start with discovery— that is to say, how you find rule-breaching works in the first place. There are more-or-less two different ways to approach manual content moderation of open submissions on a digital platform: review-based and report-based (you could also call them curation-based and flag-based), with various combinations of the two. Automated content moderation isn't something I'm going to cover here — I feel I can safely assume I'm preaching to the choir when I say it's a bad idea, and if I'm not, I'll just note that the least absurd outcome we had when simulating AI moderation (mostly for the sake of an academic exercise) on SV was banning all the staff.

In a review-based system, you check someone's work and approve it to the site upon verifying that it doesn't breach your content rules. Generally pretty simple, we used to do something like it on request. Unfortunately, if you do that, it can void your safe harbour protections in the US per Myeress vs. Buzzfeed Inc. This case, if you weren't aware, is why we stopped offering content review on SV. Suffice to say, it's not really a realistic option for anyone large enough for the courts to notice, and extremely clunky and unpleasant for the users, to boot.

Report-based systems, on the other hand, are something we use today — users find works they think are in breach and alert the moderation team to their presence with a report. On SV, this works pretty well — a user or users flag a work as potentially troublesome, moderation investigate it and either action it or reject the report. Unfortunately, AO3 is not SV. I'll get into the details of that dreadful beast known as scaling later, but thankfully we do have a much better comparison point — fanfiction.net (FFN).

FFN has had two great purges over the years, with a... mixed amount of content moderation applied in between: one in 2002 when the NC-17 rating was removed, and one in 2012. Both, ostensibly, were targeted at adult content. In practice, many fics that wouldn't raise an eye on Spacebattles today or Sufficient Velocity prior to 2018 were also removed; a number of reports suggest that something as simple as having a swearword in your title or summary was enough to get you hit, even if you were a 'T' rated work. Most disturbingly of all, there are a number of — impossible to substantiate — accounts of groups such as the infamous Critics United 'mass reporting' works to trigger a strike to get them removed. I would suggest reading further on places like Fanlore if you are unfamiliar and want to know more.

Despite its flaws however, report-based moderation is more-or-less the only option, and this segues neatly into the next piece of the puzzle that is content moderation, that is to say, the rubric. How do you decide what is, and what isn't against the rules of your site?

Anyone who's complained to the staff about how vague the rules are on SV may have had this explained to them, but as that is likely not many of you, I'll summarise: the more precise and clear-cut your chosen rubric is, the more it will inevitably need to resemble a legal document — and the less readable it is to the layman. We'll return to SV for an example here: many newer users will not be aware of this, but SV used to have a much more 'line by line, clearly delineated' set of rules and... people kind of hated it! An infraction would reference 'Community Compact III.15.5' rather than Rule 3, because it was more or less written in the same manner as the Terms of Service (sans the legal terms of art). While it was a more legible rubric from a certain perspective, from the perspective of communicating expectations to the users it was inferior to our current set of rules — even less of them read it, and we don't have great uptake right now.

And it still wasn't really an improvement over our current set-up when it comes to 'moderation consistency'. Even without getting into the nuts and bolts of "how do you define a racist work in a way that does not, at any point, say words to the effect of 'I know it when I see it'" — which is itself very, very difficult don't get me wrong I'm not dismissing this — you are stuck with finding an appropriate footing between a spectrum of 'the US penal code' and 'don't be a dick' as your rubric. Going for the penal code side doesn't help nearly as much as you might expect with moderation consistency, either — no matter what, you will never have a 100% correct call rate. You have the impossible task of writing a rubric that is easy for users to comprehend, extremely clear for moderation and capable of cleanly defining what is and what isn't racist without relying on moderator judgement, something which you cannot trust when operating at scale.

Speaking of scale, it's time to move on to the third prong — and the last covered in this ramble, which is more of a brief overview than anything truly in-depth — which is resources. Moderation is not a magic wand, you can't conjure it out of nowhere: you need to spend an enormous amount of time, effort and money on building, training and equipping a moderation staff, even a volunteer one, and it is far, far from an instant process. Our most recent tranche of moderators spent several months in training and it will likely be some months more before they're fully comfortable in the role — and that's with a relatively robust bureaucracy and a number of highly experienced mentors supporting them, something that is not going to be available to a new moderation branch with little to no experience. Beyond that, there's the matter of sheer numbers.

Combining both moderation and arbitration — because for volunteer staff, pure moderation is in actuality less efficient in my eyes, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, but we'll treat it as if they're both just 'moderators' — SV presently has 34 dedicated moderation volunteers. SV hosts ~785 million words of creative writing.

AO3 hosts ~32 billion.

These are some very rough and simplified figures, but if you completely ignore all the usual problems of scaling manpower in a business (or pseudo-business), such as (but not limited to) geometrically increasing bureaucratic complexity and administrative burden, along with all the particular issues of volunteer moderation... AO3 would still need well over one thousand volunteer moderators to be able to match SV's moderator-to-creative-wordcount ratio.

Paid moderation, of course, you can get away with less — my estimate is that you could fully moderate SV with, at best, ~8 full-time moderators, still ignoring administrative burden above the level of team leader. This leaves AO3 only needing a much more modest ~350 moderators. At the US minimum wage of ~$15k p.a. — which is, in my eyes, deeply unethical to pay moderators as full-time moderation is an intensely gruelling role with extremely high rates of PTSD and other stress-related conditions — that is approximately ~$5.25m p.a. costs on moderator wages. Their average annual budget is a bit over $500k.

So, that's obviously not on the table, and we return to volunteer staffing. Which... let's examine that scenario and the questions it leaves us with, as our conclusion.

Let's say, through some miracle, AO3 succeeds in finding those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer moderators. We'll even say none of them are malicious actors or sufficiently incompetent as to be indistinguishable, and that they manage to replicate something on the level of or superior to our moderation tooling near-instantly at no cost. We still have several questions to be answered:

How are you maintaining consistency? Have you managed to define racism to the point that moderator judgment no longer enters the equation? And to be clear, you cannot allow moderator judgment to be a significant decision maker at this scale, or you will end with absurd results.

How are you handling staff mental health? Some reading on the matter, to save me a lengthy and unrelated explanation of some of the steps involved in ensuring mental health for commercial-scale content moderators.

How are you handling your failures? No moderation in the world has ever succeeded in a 100% accuracy rate, what are you doing about that?

Using report-based discovery, how are you preventing 'report brigading', such as the theories surrounding Critics United mentioned above? It is a natural human response to take into account the amount and severity of feedback. While SV moderators are well trained on the matter, the rare times something is receiving enough reports to potentially be classified as a 'brigade' on that scale will nearly always be escalated to administration, something completely infeasible at (you're learning to hate this word, I'm sure) scale.

How are you communicating expectations to your user base? If you're relying on a flag-based system, your users' understanding of the rules is a critical facet of your moderation system — how have you managed to make them legible to a layman while still managing to somehow 'truly' define racism?

How are you managing over one thousand moderators? Like even beyond all the concerns with consistency, how are you keeping track of that many moving parts as a volunteer organisation without dozens or even hundreds of professional managers? I've ignored the scaling administrative burden up until now, but it has to be addressed in reality.

What are you doing to sweep through your archives? SV is more-or-less on-top of 'old' works as far as rule-breaking goes, with the occasional forgotten tidbit popping up every 18 months or so — and that's what we're extrapolating from. These thousand-plus moderators are mostly going to be addressing current or near-current content, are you going to spin up that many again to comb through the 32 billion words already posted?

I could go on for a fair bit here, but this has already stretched out to over two thousand words.

I think the people behind this movement have their hearts in the right place and the sentiment is laudable, but in practice it is simply 'won't someone think of the children' in a funny hat. It cannot be done.

Even if you could somehow meet the bare minimum thresholds, you are simply not going to manage a ruleset of sufficient clarity so as to prevent a much-worse repeat of the 2012 FF.net massacre, you are not going to be able to manage a moderation staff of that size and you are not going to be able to ensure a coherent understanding among all your users (we haven't managed that after nearly ten years and a much smaller and more engaged userbase). There's a serious number of other issues I haven't covered here as well, as this really is just an attempt at giving some insight into the sheer number of moving parts behind content moderation: the movement wants off-site content to be policed which isn't so much its own barrel of fish as it is its own barrel of Cthulhu; AO3 is far from English-only and would in actuality need moderators for almost every language it supports — and most damning of all, if Section 230 is wiped out by the Supreme Court it is not unlikely that engaging in content moderation at all could simply see AO3 shut down.

As sucky as it seems, the current status quo really is the best situation possible. Sorry about that.

#archive of our own #endotwracism #end otw racism #content moderation #sufficient velocity #i hate how much i know about this topic

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unforth · 11 months

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Since I've seen several posts floating around that try to rebut the points of @end-otw-racism by saying that AO3 is too big to moderate, can we PLEASE take a moment and remember that AO3 IS ALREADY HEAVILY MODERATED.

We all know the obvious one - that if you post anything about monetizing fic, you will be moderated into oblivion. We also all know why! This is essential to AO3's survival as a non-profit! No one would propose changing this!

But a lot of people seem to forget that AO3 is moderated in other ways! For a personal example, several years ago I got a "change this or we're removing your work" e-mail. The work in question? A collection of pseudo-ficlets that were somewhere between outlines and sketchy fics. What I got moderated for? I said in the a/n that if anyone wanted to expand my kinda-outliney nonsense into fully fleshed out stories, they were welcome to do so! I was told this was a violation of the ToS, because fics that are collections of prompts aren't allowed, and that if I didn't change the a/n I'd have to delete the work. Of course I edited the a/n, and my work was allowed, and I moved on. I did, immediately, delete another work I'd posted, which WAS literally sets of prompts I'd written free to a good home. It was clearly in violation of those rules, and I just hadn't realized content like that wasn't allowed.

Numerous things are forbidden on AO3 and will get moderated and potentially deleted, including:

advertising

"find a fic" posts

spam

plagiarized works

virus spreading

doxxing

actual CSAM

lots of other stuff as listed in the tos

If the foundation of your argument is "AO3 is too big to moderate" your argument is bad. AO3 is already moderated.

So that means your ACTUAL argument is "I think AO3 is moderated enough as-is and I don't think AO3 should be moderated in a way that might better protect fans of color."

Having that attitude despite the many, many, MANY fans of colors who say "hey, we don't feel safe here, can this be better moderated to protect us?" (when, by the way, the existing harassment policy SHOULD protect them but clearly isn't being implemented in ways that actually DOES protect them!)

Well. That's sure a take.

(TO BE CLEAR: I am anti-censorship. I am pro-moderation. I am pro-AO3. I fucking love your dark fic, your underage works, your non-con stories, your kinky pwp with "no redeeming qualities," your dirty-wrong-bad ego fics. I would NEVER want a solution that removed that content. And I believe AO3 is the greatest thing to happen to fic in my lifetime and I want it to continue to be the wonderful thing it is. I think that what AO3 already is can be reconciled with the demands of fans of color that they be better protected. I believe fans of color when they say that the current policies don't protect them adequately, that they don't feel safe, that this drives them out of white western fandom. I've listened a lot, and I've seen a lot, and I've learned a lot, and I want AO3 to be better than it is in this regard. I'm honestly kinda depressed how many people seem comfortable with the status quo.)

#unforth rambles #racism #end racism in the otw #end otw racism #the specific post i saw made me so angry it's taken me the better part of a week to cool down enough to speak coherently about it #way to write a HUGE post that all starts from a very false premise #well two false premises actually #the first is that the end otw racism movement is calling for content to be deleted #which it's not literally no one is saying read billions of words of fanfic to protect fans of color #that's an absurd thing to say and everyone involved knows it's absurd so nice straw man #but even more fundamental than that HELLO THERE IS ALREADY HEAVY MODERATION #enforce the rules that are ALREADY THERE #BE MORE TRANSPARENT ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE DOING #these are not unreasonable requests #i'm really starting to think some people can't be bothered to actually read what's being asked for #and are instead seeing what they want to see there #and to be clear i also am surely reading the text with rose-colored glasses #i don't want to see yes we mean deletion yes we mean removal #i personally want a solution that's both as anti-censorship as possible and also is pro moderation and protects people #so that's the lens I read things through #but I KNOW the lens I'm reading it through and I KNOW that lens may be coloring my interpretations #have you taken a moment to take off your glasses and see how they might be coloring your own intepretations #because maybe you should

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fiercynn · 10 months

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yo so here are some things the ddos attack on ao3 should NOT provoke you to do:

decide that this is an excuse to be racist and islamophobic about who you think the attackers are (which is likely a front anyway)

assume that the people who care about fighting racism and the mistreatment of volunteers by otw are in alignment with this (if we were, why would we be doing all this work to try and make otw better)

use this as a reason to defend any lack of change on ao3 because it's too "at-risk" (fixing otw's dysfunction could only better serve the organization in emergencies)

think that the only way you can support the volunteers who are working hard to fix this is by donating to otw (the volunteers aren't going to be paid, and otw has $2.5 million in surplus that not only isn't being used for anything but has only earned $90 in interest in a year because it's not even invested well, it's just sitting there)

what it should provoke you to do – push the otw board to make changes, including:

addressing the racism that already makes ao3 and otw a hostile space for many fans of color, including volunteers

paying for workers and services with that budget surplus to help keep volunteers from burning out constantly

hold the board and the legal committee accountable to the volunteers who have already been mistreated and put at risk by their actions

probably more things! these are just off the top of my head idk!

tbh there's so much dysfunction in this org that it's really hard to know where to start. but the knee-jerk racist and "it's the antis out to bring ao3 down!!!" reactions are ridiculous, come on

#otw #otw board #ao3 #archive of our own #end otw racism

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pumpkinpaix · 10 months

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Regarding #EndOTWRacism’s summaries of 2023 OTW Board election candidate positions

Before I begin, let me say now that while I am a volunteer with the OTW, my views are personal and should not be taken as any kind of official statement from the org, its leadership, or other volunteers, especially not the candidates in question. My focus here is on the Asian candidates for obvious reasons, but this post is not meant as endorsement or disavowal of any of the candidates, whose bios and platforms can all be read here.

Do not take this as an excuse harass the mods running EOTWR. I cannot make myself clearer.

I am making this post to express my extreme disappointment with End OTW Racism’s post purporting to summarize the platforms of the candidates for the upcoming Board elections. It is no longer rebloggable, but can be read here.

The way that the candidates with Asian names were spoken of is deeply insulting when compared with how candidates with English-language names were discussed. Asian candidates had their platforms misrepresented, their expertise downplayed, and their lived experiences reduced down to “bringing an international presence” to the board, which was then further caveated with, “diversity alone is not going to solve the issue of racist harassment currently allowed in the OTW’s policies and enforcement practice”. While it is true that diversity alone is not a solution, it’s pretty offensive to essentially have “remember! Just because they aren’t white doesn’t mean you should vote for them!” tacked on to one of the Asian candidates’ platforms.

End OTW Racism seems more concerned with whether or not candidates used the buzzwords they wanted to hear rather than with how racism is discussed holistically within the statements. While I can appreciate that EOTWR has a specific agenda, to say things like, “[s]he does not mention racism, racist harassment, or hiring a DEI consultant in her platform, so outside the outreach and support she mentions, there is not enough for us to conclude that these would be priorities for her” regarding Zixin Z.’s position, directly following the statement, “[s]he also mentions the need for outreach towards non-English-speaking fans and has a desire to provide support to volunteers from minority groups” is fucking laughable, especially after the initial mistake of stating that Zixin Z. only wanted to do more outreach to Chinese-speaking fans. Again, I understand that people make mistakes and that this mistake has since been corrected, but I hope it prompts some reflection on the sort of biases that would lead to such a mistake in the first place. It may have been completely innocuous, but in charged discussions about racism, please understand that it gives an impression that is difficult to shake. I do thank you for not trying to hide that this happened.

Why is Anh P.’s lack of discussion on TOS/PAC a point against her, while Zixin Z.’s years of experience on PAC, her role as a mod on Weibo, and her background in nonprofits don’t even warrant a mention? For that matter, why did none of the Asian candidates’ skills or experience warrant mention? Qiao C. and Zixin Z. have both been volunteers with the organization for several years now, and Anh P. has years of moderation and volunteer experience elsewhere prior to her work with the OTW.

It is so fucking frustrating that despite each one of these candidates specifically talking about the need for diverse voices, they had their platforms essentially passed over because they didn’t use the right words, and it is particularly fucking aggravating to see that EOTWR will use Chinese issues as props when trying to press OTW leadership on the racism that occurs within the org, but then completely fail to connect the dots on why these candidates are running because the wrong language was used. Zixin Z. is one of the Weibo mods, for fuck’s sake.

The entire post feels like an exercise in virtue signalling, from every time it was brought up that a candidate did not provide pronouns in their platform statements, despite every one of them having pronouns provided in their bios (why mention this detail at all? You could have simply used the pronouns), to what felt like willful obliviousness to the anti-racism stances in the Asian candidates’ platforms. It feels like the concern starts and ends with racism in Anglophone terms, on Anglophone terms.

I can respect the driving ideas behind EOTWR, even if I disagree with the way that EOTWR pursues their goals. I do believe that we want the same things in the end, and therefore chose not to interact with the many posts I have seen about the protest. However, I saw the summary post and could not let it pass without speaking.

For a protest group supposedly dedicated to ending racism in the OTW, this felt incredibly hypocritical, conscious bias or not. In my most charitable frame of mind, I can see this as misjudging and overcorrecting to ensure that there was no favoritism shown to the obvious non-white candidates lest EOTWR be accused of tokenizing– again, it is true, that diversity in and of itself is not a solution to racism.

In my least charitable and most bitter frame of mind, I feel inclined to wonder if EOTWR, much like the OTW itself, is uncomfortable with the lack of influence they could exude over an international candidate. It would be much, much easier to push their agenda forward with more culturally familiar candidates, particularly white ones. Guilt and public scrutiny are powerful weapons and easy to wield against those with perceived privilege in our current atmosphere, often to the detriment of the actual discussion at hand in my experience. I know that’s cynical. It’s hard not to be. (For clarity's sake: I do not know the other candidates' races. This is a hypothetical.)

This isn’t a demand for an apology. I think we fetishize the capital-A Apology to the point where I find them sort of meaningless unless they are given freely. I don’t need EOTWR to agree with me, and I don’t really want to keep talking about it. Rather, I would prefer that EOTWR take action to do better as they continue in their campaign. What that action is is their decision. If they truly mean to stand against racism in the OTW, then I’d like them to demonstrate it.

DO NOT HARASS EOTWR MODS. I AM FUCKING SERIOUS ABOUT THIS.

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spacebeyonce · 11 months

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wow this is such a normal and rational thing to say about having a diversity consultant to help ao3 fix their bullshit. there’s nothing wrong and unhinged about saying this at all.

#fandom racism #ao3 critical #end otw racism #are y'all okay?

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shivasdarknight · 9 months

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OTW reprimands & punishes volunteer of color for speaking out against racist practices

If you at all care about the working conditions of OTW volunteers, then you must be made aware of what OTW just did to one of their volunteers of color.

You can view the entire piece here - which I highly encourage you to - as it's the letter sent to volunteer, Dhobi Ki Kutti, as apart of the first steps of Constructive Corrective Action Procedure (CCAP). In effect, it is OTW punishing Kutti for speaking out against the racist practices of OTW towards their own volunteers.

Please read the full letter if you can for the full context. I'll post a few excerpts from the letter + Kutti's response. It should go without saying, but what OTW has sent to Kutti is deeply inappropriate given that Kutti has been speaking out against the racist treatment of their volunteers of color. To reprimand and punish Kutti for speaking out against this is extremely telling of where OTW stands in regards to anti-racist practices, and have shown that they are willing to maintain a space that is hostile towards their volunteers of color for the sake of their white volunteers' and board members' comfort.

For the letter itself, key highlights include:

-Accusing Kutti of publishing confidential internal documents:

Several volunteers have also reached out to us with concerns that you have shared the contents of internal communications publicly in violation of the Wrangling Communication Policy. As you agreed when joining the Tag Wrangling team, [Link to How_to_talk_about_wrangling_in_public redacted] specifically prohibits the posting of internal communications externally which have not been made available to the public. "Broad topic discussion is acceptable, but giving specific details or copy/pasting quotes from mailing list e-mails or Slack rooms to public spaces is not. Doing so may be subject to CCAP or immediate dismissal.” This includes quoting internal conversations or emails directly. It seems that you've been in violation of this policy a number of times over the last month or so in posts where you have made a point of referencing and posting internal communications or quoting conversations externally. The specific incident cited to us in several reports is in regards to the comment you made on this post: https://www.transformativeworks.org/the-otws-commitment-to-safety-responding-to-recent-concerns-about-ao3/ The concerns that have been relayed to us include the way that particular violation of policy has impacted the volunteers' well-being. Your willingness to share internal details publicly has made them feel disconcerted and unsafe. Some have also said that they feel their privacy has been invaded.

-Made volunteers "uncomfortable" for discussing "tense topics" (it's clear that they mean racism)

Additionally, while this is not a policy violation, a number of volunteers have informed us they feel that the way you have repeatedly brought up tense discussions in public rooms has made the work environment unpleasant. While we agree that the issues you’ve highlighted are important, many are things that can’t be addressed quickly, and will require a lot of time and effort from the org. We don’t want you to feel that conversations about change are unwelcome, but we would ask that you be more understanding of the fact that not everyone wants to participate in them. We also want you to understand that the changes you’re asking for require an immense amount of work from volunteers who already have an existing workload. All in all, these aspects of your behavior of late have generally made other volunteers feel unsafe, stressed, and uncomfortable. It has also made Slack a considerably less pleasant environment for those who have reached out to us, making it more difficult for your fellow volunteers to communicate on the platform, and impacting both their mental well-being and their desire to actively volunteer with the OTW while it continues.

-Actions against Kutti:

Actions:

- Due to an abundance of caution, cease linking to social media posts which may, however unintentionally, link the fannish and real identities of volunteers within the OTW together. - Do not quote or cut and paste sections of documents, email communications, or internal conversations into external conversations or public forums. - Do not summarize internal communications for external spaces. Internal communications are not, and should not be, considered material that can be shared elsewhere (even in summary form) if they have not been released publicly by the OTW. The fact that this is something you have been doing consistently over the past month or so is a large part of what is contributing to some of your fellow volunteers feeling unsafe. - If you wish to ask a question about a particular social media post or comment on a post, and feel it is necessary to link the post or comment for reference, email committee chairs rather than posting in the Slack public rooms. - Be more cautious about how you link things, and consider whether links to other posts are really necessary when asking your questions. You will not be welcome to continue to volunteer with the tag wrangling committee if you cannot be considerate and respectful of the needs of your fellow volunteers. We hope you will take the concerns of your fellow volunteers seriously and adjust your approach going forward to take those concerns and their well-being into account. We also hope you will strive to be respectful of your fellow volunteers’ time and boundaries.

Kutti's response:

-Permission to repost and quote:

I am waiving my right to confidentiality and posting the entirety of the CCAP text below this, so that other volunteers can decide for themselves whether your actions are warranted or not. I also give permission for anyone to share this text and my response to it here, along with my org handle, in any public internet location they wish to disseminate it to.

-Response to the actions taken against them:

For my part, I had not expected the organisation would provide me such a blatant example of racist retaliation, but clearly, I had not set the bar low enough. I reject the authority of white people in positions of structural power in this organisation to punish me—a volunteer of colour trying to hold you accountable for your structural racism—by intimidating me and placing restrictions regarding my participation in OTW communication channels.

-Regarding the accusations of breaking the confidentiality policy:

I reject a cultist confidentiality policy that denies volunteers any opportunity to provide citations to back up claims of abusive organisational practises. The only quotes I have publicly posted are from official statements made by the Board and Chairs to all volunteers, and I shared them in response to a post where the official organisation statement was denying an accusation of insufficiently protecting its volunteer base. As a member of said volunteer base, I have the right to provide proof of my own experience. You have accused me of violating the confidentiality policy a number of times, without providing any other citations. Because I have been entirely focussed on demanding accountability within the organisation, it is very easy for me to enumerate any public comments I have made (copies of which I have recorded here: https://dhobikikutti.dreamwidth.org/). If you consider me citing my own words, voiced in internal channels, to be violating my own confidentiality then... you have overstepped, because I gave myself permission to ‘violate’ my own privacy.

-Regarding OTW referring to Kutti's discussions of racism as a "threat" to volunteers:

I reject your framing of my actions as a threat to individual volunteers. Anyone who will look at the history of my comments will understand immediately where the false accusation of me ‘outing’ a volunteer comes from, and can also find the evidence of the volunteer themselves linking the identity in question. I can say much more about the racialised double standards that this accusation is a part of, but it is obvious that you don’t actually think I outed anyone. Because, as the CCAP makes a point to reiterate, this is cumulative action being taken for everything I have said over the past month. That my comments have made the atmosphere ‘tense’ and ‘unpleasant’. That I have made multiple volunteers feel ‘stressed,’‘disconcerted and unsafe’, to the extent that I have affected their mental well-being. I am not ‘considerate and respectful’ enough to be welcome as a volunteer.

-Regarding Kutti's actions going forward:

I will make no statement of victim impact regarding what my experience as a hypervisible person of colour speaking out against racism in this organisation has been, because I know that you do not care. For the record, I have filed no complaint against any individual volunteer because my focus has always been calling out the institutional patterns of racialised inequity and hostility. I will continue to document this organisation’s racism till you suspend me, and afterwards. I will always be open to hearing from current and former volunteers of colour, and I will continue to maintain the confidences of people who trusted me.

-Important final words:

The Organisation for Transformative Works has been weaponising its incompetence since its inception to argue that it is not racist, merely hapless. This CCAP is evidence that despite all the issues that plague the official machinery— when it feels a sense of urgency and desperation to lash out at someone, it is, in fact, right up there with the best of liberal white institutions at performing racism masked in policing.

Again: please see the full letter & response.

This is deeply inappropriate behavior on the part of OTW. To the people insisting that if fans of color should volunteer if they want to see/make any substantial change: this is what happens when volunteers of color try to make substantial change to the organization. Their volunteers are already at risk because they don't do a good job of ensuring their safety in a general sense, but their VOCs are at an increased risk of racist harassment within the organization from white volunteers, attacks from people outside of the organization, and apparently from the organization itself!

OTW has made its stance known that it will not support its more vulnerable volunteers, and will side with white volunteers who report VOCs because they feel "threatened" by discussions of racism. Telling FOCs to just volunteer is asking them to be subjected to the same reprimanding and punishment that Kutti has just experienced.

#otw #our transformative works #ao3 #end otw racism #eotwr #racism #original #important

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