The Organization for Transformative Works (Archive of Our Own’s parent org) is abusing their volunteers, including the moderation team that deals with things like photographic depictions of real children in sexual scenarios. This came to light in the context of an anti-racism protest. The moderators are not equipped to handle the content they’re currently asked to moderate, which is more of a legal problem than “This fanwork is racist.” The racism is still a problem for the organization, but the framework to deal with it is a long way off. Many more details are available here.
If reading that makes you want to become a voting member before 6/30/23, the deadline for the next board election at the OTW, but you can’t afford 10USD to do it with, and you’re willing to share your PayPal/Venmo/mailing address with someone who can help you out, please leave me a comment on this post, which is coded such that no one will see it but me unless you specifically tell me to unscreen it.
Tags from @inklingofadream:
#ao3#fandom#i feel like… this is an urgent problem which adjacent structures to the racism problem#like the framework for effectively dealing with csam is a stricter bigger version of what you’d need to deal with racism
This is exactly what I was trying to communicate, yes! It’s not that racism has magically stopped being a problem at all, or that it should be minimized. It’s that the job of fixing the racism requires tools that are elaborations of the structures and tools that the org should already have. But when people said, “Okay, how *does* moderation work on the AO3?” the answer is “It’s really not working at all and it’s hurting a lot of people.”
This is not in any way “racism can wait while we solve other problems.” This is “We can’t solve the problem of racist content without improving the organization and its moderation.”
I’ve read an amount about this debacle in the last few days that is not good for my mental health, and while I want to tell people 1) do not do that, I’d also like to tell them 2) as someone who has done that, the connection between the two issues gets more and more obvious the more you read.
While “abuse of volunteers” is the headline here- and it should be! - a major component of how that came about is that the Policy and Abuse Committee have been forced to go through the Legal committee every single time they want to do something about any form of bad behavior that they haven’t already been given permission to respond to. For instance, let me highlight this comment from Azarias, the PAC volunteer whose whistleblowing is at the center of all this:
“Let me ask Legal” was a frequent response from PAC chairs about novel and ambiguous cases. For example, I had a ticket about a hateful username that sat with a previous chair “consulting with Legal” for about two years before I gave up asking for updates and accepted there would not be a username policy.
This is from a June 13th comment on the AO3 news post, “An Update from the OTW Board of Directors and Chairs.”
And speaking of comments on AO3 news posts, you know how any time a new post mention anything to do with functions meant to curb harassment, the comments always immediately get swarmed by racist trolls? Here’s another comment from Azarias on June 14th!
Regular PAC volunteers aren’t allowed to touch newsposts, unless something’s changed. Not even if you submit a report through the abuse form - those have to be assigned to PAC chairs to handle when they have time.
Newsposts are only moderated by committee chairs. Which chairs? All of them. Or none of them, if they don’t feel like it. I think there was a general understanding that the chairs of whichever committee owned the post had first dibs on moderating or answering comments, but afaik there wasn’t a set of rules saying anyone had to. And they would need to check in with other chairs first, if they did decide to moderate comments. […]
Believe it or not, this is an improvement over the previous system, in which newspost comments were not moderated at all.Institutional racism may be a complex and thorny issue that requires complex solutions, but, you know, call me crazy, but I think maybe the front page of AO3 could have looked a lot less racist all this time if the people whose job is to stop harassment had been allowed to… stop harassment. Instead, they’ve just been having to look at horrible shit that they can’t do anything about until they burn out, and when they talk about it the legal committee not-particularly-subtly accuses them of 900+ felonies. (No, that last part is not a joke.)
The people who told Azarias that she wasn’t allowed to remove works with embedded gifs of live-action porn with an identifiable child’s face edited onto them are the same people who are stopping PAC from banning someone with the username ‘ilovehitler1488’ for having that username.
(via titleknown)
