![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptA call for fans to do significant actions to their works on AO3 and their graphics and posts off of AO3 in protest for the lack of forward progress from the OTW about racism on the platform and a lack of effective methods of deplatforming racists. For more background on the situation and additional resources about what's happening and the consequences of a lack of action, wistfuljane has a summary post, which beatrice_otter added additional resources, expansions, and additional context to as well as restating the core problems of a place that's supposed to be for fans having a Nazi Bar problem. (The endotwracism account is now on Dreamwidth as well, although it hasn't transported all of the Tumblr material over yet. naye has some highlights from Tumblr and Dreamwidth on the contours of the #EndOTWRacism hashtags and some of their asks.)
wistfuljane updated a post to draw a temporal line between things like RaceFail and earlier efforts to get fandom to acknowledge the bias and hostility to characters and creators of color, and the current issues regarding racist harassment in fandom. Because these things do not spring forth fully-formed or appear out of whole cloth. Even in just the summaries, without going into the details at the links, there's a trend there I expect and will talk about a little bit more at length after the links.
satsuma in discussing the relative speed that OTW took to prevent archive scraping by robots, also points out that the way that the OTW was not particularly forthcoming with policies and didn't like being nailed down on a position until they had to be, as well as burying some of their actions in updates that would have taken some sifting to potentially get to, or knowing where to look.
azurelunatic points out the current Terms of Service for AO3 already prohibit, or could likely be interpreted to prohibit, certain kinds of behavior, so the OTW Policy and Abuse teams could already be out there doing significant work to blunt the spread of harassment on the site.
chestnut_pod offers some SMART goals for the OTW to undertake that would provide them with an appropriate amount of structure to make decisions effectively and swiftly, provide them with useful data on where and how to concentrate their efforts, and then improve their technical implementations so that users can curate their experience or properly fork the code and run their own. That post also seems to have collected a significant amount of comments where people talk about their experiences with OTW, including situations where volunteers were being sent child sexual exploitation material to their personal addresses as a harassment vector, so be mindful of the comments if that's an issue for you.
(Several places mentionrunpunkrun's attempts to keep tabs on the OTW and get timelines and specifics out of them, which has not been very successful in wrangling commitments and timelines, but the attempts are good and ongoing. Also, a guide to finding and attending OTW Board meetings, in case this is something you would like to do to keep the OTW on task.)
As I watch this unfold and explode and push and suggest and everything, I find myself more and more going to "I expect the OTW to act in the same way that my professional workplace would and has acted so far when confronted with the problem," which is a damning thing to say to both the OTW and my workplace, to be clear. But, from what I can gather and what I've seen in OTW official posts and responses, they appear to be on the same pathway that many libraries are when those libraries are confronted with demands from their communities to carry less material from bigots, to carry less bigoted material, to change their policies so that bigoted groups can't use resources or spaces to promote their views, recruit, or make it appear like the library is legitimizing their positions by giving them space. Libraries are a slightly wrong analogue, as being publicly funded curtails some of the actions libraries can take. The OTW as a non-governmental organization isn't bound by those restrictions, but the library analogue is close enough because the mentalities seem to be the same between the two sectors.
Both the OTW and public libraries have bought into the idea that "bad speech is defeated with more speech," and that it's a point of virtue that they carry things in their collection that are offensive to others and refuse to remove those items even when it's pointed out to them how harmful those items are. You'll get a finger-wag from many library people (and, apparently, a fair amount of fandom) about "censorship" and how they have to carry all points of view if you suggest to them that perhaps they don't need to buy conspiracy-theory material or the latest tome from a talking head making claims that queer people have to be killed or forcefully re-closeted if the country is to regain a lost grandeur. Or someone's fiction efforts where it's not very subtle that the white-skinned women have to be protected from the dark-skinned men who behave in animalistic and violent ways. You could bring up their own selection criteria and point out how this particular material does not meet the definitions laid out in the selection criteria and shouldn't be bought. With most selection criteria, though, someone else can bring up how that material fits perfectly within the selection criteria, which mostly says the selection criteria is incoherent, honestly, and allows the selector to decide which criteria to apply and at what weights to apply them. Which should sound familiar about how much power an individual committee head might have to apply policy and enforce or refuse to enforce things in the OTW. The point, however, is that while edgelords love playing the "but I'm not touching you" game with whatever rules are in place, there probably should be at least some amount of element in place that says "we take these criteria more seriously than others in making our decisions," so that someone can be reasonably assured that, say, just because a person requested we add this to our collection, that the request from a person won't override the selection criteria and get a thing bought that would otherwise be rejected or otherwise was rejected on its merits. The OTW has a responsibility to be clear about what they will and won't do and what they take into account when it comes to someone making a claim of harassment or prevalent racism. They should get outside help with crafting those policies. They should also get outside help in determining what tools are going to be best for users to curate their own experiences when whatever is happening to them has been deemed to be something the OTW will permit, even as they acknowledge it as distasteful. And if that means people don't use AO3, that's their decision.
(As an aside, OTW also has a responsibility to the open source community to make their code not just available, but usable and forkable in such a way that someone who wants to run their own archive under their own guidelines can get set up and running easily enough and possibly contribute back upstream with improvements and patches.)
And if OTW is following the way that my organization has gone, having a consultant won't actually appear to help them, because my organization has had a consultant for years, but the progress and the deliverables and what actually came out of them was basically not publicized to staff or the public until it was done and being implemented. Anything that was solely involving the administrators wasn't communicated as "something we're doing, it doesn't involve you yet," so we basically ended up surprised when the deliverable that was meant to involve us appeared, and our administrators claimed they'd been working on this for years. It was also mealy-mouthed, had very few specifics, and recommended the creation of teams that would produce specific deliverables and gather input. That happened, and there's been no word from our administrators about what proposals were accepted and are in the process of being implemented, so the likely conclusion at this point is that the administration made a lot of noise about it and has quietly spiked all of the proposals. Whether that's "until the things that are on fire have stopped being on fire" or "we don't want to do any of that, so we're going to quietly ignore the recommendations until they fade from memory" is yet to be determined.
It's not like the OTW isn't already having to deal with plenty of people who want certain works removed from AO3 because it offends their sensibilities. And others who want works removed from the AO3 because they're targeted harassment against them. Since AO3 doesn't have a selection policy where they get to curate what goes in, they have to have strong Code of Conduct and strong de-selection policies in place, and the tools for curation. And they have to be able to say those things out loud and accept what consequences will come to them for it. And to have the necessary structures in place to make decisions and communicate those decisions in a timely manner, such that the people doing that don't get burnt out or overwhelmed. There's a lot that's happened since the Organizaiton and the Archive were first founded, and we need to get into the current time with this. (And if the OTW can do it, that'll give me hope that our libraries can do the same and do so in a way that protects our people and stops us from having a Nazi Bar problem.)
wistfuljane has a summary post, which beatrice_otter added additional resources, expansions, and additional context to as well as restating the core problems of a place that's supposed to be for fans having a Nazi Bar problem. (The endotwracism account is now on Dreamwidth as well, although it hasn't transported all of the Tumblr material over yet. naye has some highlights from Tumblr and Dreamwidth on the contours of the #EndOTWRacism hashtags and some of their asks.)wistfuljane updated a post to draw a temporal line between things like RaceFail and earlier efforts to get fandom to acknowledge the bias and hostility to characters and creators of color, and the current issues regarding racist harassment in fandom. Because these things do not spring forth fully-formed or appear out of whole cloth. Even in just the summaries, without going into the details at the links, there's a trend there I expect and will talk about a little bit more at length after the links.satsuma in discussing the relative speed that OTW took to prevent archive scraping by robots, also points out that the way that the OTW was not particularly forthcoming with policies and didn't like being nailed down on a position until they had to be, as well as burying some of their actions in updates that would have taken some sifting to potentially get to, or knowing where to look.azurelunatic points out the current Terms of Service for AO3 already prohibit, or could likely be interpreted to prohibit, certain kinds of behavior, so the OTW Policy and Abuse teams could already be out there doing significant work to blunt the spread of harassment on the site.chestnut_pod offers some SMART goals for the OTW to undertake that would provide them with an appropriate amount of structure to make decisions effectively and swiftly, provide them with useful data on where and how to concentrate their efforts, and then improve their technical implementations so that users can curate their experience or properly fork the code and run their own. That post also seems to have collected a significant amount of comments where people talk about their experiences with OTW, including situations where volunteers were being sent child sexual exploitation material to their personal addresses as a harassment vector, so be mindful of the comments if that's an issue for you.(Several places mention
runpunkrun's attempts to keep tabs on the OTW and get timelines and specifics out of them, which has not been very successful in wrangling commitments and timelines, but the attempts are good and ongoing. Also, a guide to finding and attending OTW Board meetings, in case this is something you would like to do to keep the OTW on task.)As I watch this unfold and explode and push and suggest and everything, I find myself more and more going to "I expect the OTW to act in the same way that my professional workplace would and has acted so far when confronted with the problem," which is a damning thing to say to both the OTW and my workplace, to be clear. But, from what I can gather and what I've seen in OTW official posts and responses, they appear to be on the same pathway that many libraries are when those libraries are confronted with demands from their communities to carry less material from bigots, to carry less bigoted material, to change their policies so that bigoted groups can't use resources or spaces to promote their views, recruit, or make it appear like the library is legitimizing their positions by giving them space. Libraries are a slightly wrong analogue, as being publicly funded curtails some of the actions libraries can take. The OTW as a non-governmental organization isn't bound by those restrictions, but the library analogue is close enough because the mentalities seem to be the same between the two sectors.
Both the OTW and public libraries have bought into the idea that "bad speech is defeated with more speech," and that it's a point of virtue that they carry things in their collection that are offensive to others and refuse to remove those items even when it's pointed out to them how harmful those items are. You'll get a finger-wag from many library people (and, apparently, a fair amount of fandom) about "censorship" and how they have to carry all points of view if you suggest to them that perhaps they don't need to buy conspiracy-theory material or the latest tome from a talking head making claims that queer people have to be killed or forcefully re-closeted if the country is to regain a lost grandeur. Or someone's fiction efforts where it's not very subtle that the white-skinned women have to be protected from the dark-skinned men who behave in animalistic and violent ways. You could bring up their own selection criteria and point out how this particular material does not meet the definitions laid out in the selection criteria and shouldn't be bought. With most selection criteria, though, someone else can bring up how that material fits perfectly within the selection criteria, which mostly says the selection criteria is incoherent, honestly, and allows the selector to decide which criteria to apply and at what weights to apply them. Which should sound familiar about how much power an individual committee head might have to apply policy and enforce or refuse to enforce things in the OTW. The point, however, is that while edgelords love playing the "but I'm not touching you" game with whatever rules are in place, there probably should be at least some amount of element in place that says "we take these criteria more seriously than others in making our decisions," so that someone can be reasonably assured that, say, just because a person requested we add this to our collection, that the request from a person won't override the selection criteria and get a thing bought that would otherwise be rejected or otherwise was rejected on its merits. The OTW has a responsibility to be clear about what they will and won't do and what they take into account when it comes to someone making a claim of harassment or prevalent racism. They should get outside help with crafting those policies. They should also get outside help in determining what tools are going to be best for users to curate their own experiences when whatever is happening to them has been deemed to be something the OTW will permit, even as they acknowledge it as distasteful. And if that means people don't use AO3, that's their decision.
(As an aside, OTW also has a responsibility to the open source community to make their code not just available, but usable and forkable in such a way that someone who wants to run their own archive under their own guidelines can get set up and running easily enough and possibly contribute back upstream with improvements and patches.)
And if OTW is following the way that my organization has gone, having a consultant won't actually appear to help them, because my organization has had a consultant for years, but the progress and the deliverables and what actually came out of them was basically not publicized to staff or the public until it was done and being implemented. Anything that was solely involving the administrators wasn't communicated as "something we're doing, it doesn't involve you yet," so we basically ended up surprised when the deliverable that was meant to involve us appeared, and our administrators claimed they'd been working on this for years. It was also mealy-mouthed, had very few specifics, and recommended the creation of teams that would produce specific deliverables and gather input. That happened, and there's been no word from our administrators about what proposals were accepted and are in the process of being implemented, so the likely conclusion at this point is that the administration made a lot of noise about it and has quietly spiked all of the proposals. Whether that's "until the things that are on fire have stopped being on fire" or "we don't want to do any of that, so we're going to quietly ignore the recommendations until they fade from memory" is yet to be determined.
It's not like the OTW isn't already having to deal with plenty of people who want certain works removed from AO3 because it offends their sensibilities. And others who want works removed from the AO3 because they're targeted harassment against them. Since AO3 doesn't have a selection policy where they get to curate what goes in, they have to have strong Code of Conduct and strong de-selection policies in place, and the tools for curation. And they have to be able to say those things out loud and accept what consequences will come to them for it. And to have the necessary structures in place to make decisions and communicate those decisions in a timely manner, such that the people doing that don't get burnt out or overwhelmed. There's a lot that's happened since the Organizaiton and the Archive were first founded, and we need to get into the current time with this. (And if the OTW can do it, that'll give me hope that our libraries can do the same and do so in a way that protects our people and stops us from having a Nazi Bar problem.)
