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Entry tags:
In which I try to write a short summary of What's Going Down At AO3
Wrote up part of this as a comment in someone else's post, decided to bulk it out a little.
Quick personal background:
In spite of that, the org overall is...kind of a hot mess!
Here's the stuff that's been coming out recently:
1) Organized online protest (#EndOTWRacism) alleges that AO3 is really bad at handling reports of racist harassment. By all accounts, this is a legit problem, and deserves to be fixed.
2) Resulting conversation makes it clear that AO3 is bad at this because their Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is micromanaged, poorly, by the OTW Legal committee.
3) PAC also handles the very occasional report of somebody attempting to use AO3 to distribute actual photos of actual children being actually abused (CSAM). Legal is also micromanaging this poorly.
4) Denise -- founder of Dreamwidth, synecdochic on DW for non-official business, rahaeli on Twitter -- starts weighing in. She's been working in the Trust & Safety field for decades (going back to the T&S team on LiveJournal), and has all kinds of relevant expert commentary.
5) More info comes out! Including a couple official statements from Legal! All of which makes things sound worse.
A few specific links I figure I might want to find again:
7) The members of Legal...do not seem inclined to resign. Or, as far as I can tell, to admit that there's anything in the world they could have handled even slightly better.
8) Present-day, the next OTW Board election is coming up fast. To fill a majority (4 out of 7) of the seats, no less. And a lot of this went down before the deadline for people to decide they were running, so you can bet all the candidates are thinking about it.
If we accept that "pressuring everyone to resign" is a long shot at best, the election is the biggest opportunity for the voting membership to have a meaningful influence on where the OTW goes from here. For the people who are keeping their eyes on the prize of improving how AO3 handles harassment...that's the place to focus on next.
And that's where we are now.
Quick personal background:
- I've been an AO3 volunteer since
2013ETA: 2012 (and a user for even longer). Tag wrangler, never anything higher-up - I was lucky enough not to get the email that a bunch of volunteers were attacked with in May 2022
- I am not a lawyer (or a coder, or a Trust & Safety professional)
In spite of that, the org overall is...kind of a hot mess!
Here's the stuff that's been coming out recently:
1) Organized online protest (#EndOTWRacism) alleges that AO3 is really bad at handling reports of racist harassment. By all accounts, this is a legit problem, and deserves to be fixed.
2) Resulting conversation makes it clear that AO3 is bad at this because their Policy & Abuse committee (PAC) is micromanaged, poorly, by the OTW Legal committee.
3) PAC also handles the very occasional report of somebody attempting to use AO3 to distribute actual photos of actual children being actually abused (CSAM). Legal is also micromanaging this poorly.
3a) Also, possibly not in compliance with relevant laws. (AFAIK, all of them are...copyright lawyers.)
3b) Also, without concern for how traumatizing this is for PAC volunteers. (A lot of specific details come from Azarias, a former PAC volunteer who's now speaking out about it.)
3b) Also, without concern for how traumatizing this is for PAC volunteers. (A lot of specific details come from Azarias, a former PAC volunteer who's now speaking out about it.)
- Here's an organized roundup of comments about Legal's micromanagement of PAC -- both about CSAM specifically, and about harassment in general. Also deals with the attack where someone sent CSAM directly to the emails of many AO3 volunteers. (And how there was an earlier attack focused just on PAC...after which OTW leadership could've taken safety measures that would've prevented the broader one, but did not.)
- Here's a carrd that's more of a summary, with highlights from the comments to illustrate.
4) Denise -- founder of Dreamwidth, synecdochic on DW for non-official business, rahaeli on Twitter -- starts weighing in. She's been working in the Trust & Safety field for decades (going back to the T&S team on LiveJournal), and has all kinds of relevant expert commentary.
5) More info comes out! Including a couple official statements from Legal! All of which makes things sound worse.
A few specific links I figure I might want to find again:
- This early message from Legal (shared only with OTW volunteers, but yeah, this is an accurate copy) coyly implies that maybe Azarias was the attacker in May 2022, instead of, you know, a front-line victim
- Denise goes public about how a Legal member called her after the May 2022 attack, not to benefit from her Extremely Relevant Experience, but to argue against it
- She also talks about legal responsibilities if somebody tries to use your website as a vector for CSAM distribution, both "what to delete from public access" and "what to preserve behind-the-scenes for the NCMEC report"
- James -- AO3's primary tech guy -- posts about the site's backup procedures, revealing that he doesn't have any official guidance about the site's legal data-retention responsibilities, he's just doing his best to guess
- Roundup of other comments about AO3's coding in general, hitting familiar themes of "treating volunteers poorly" and "not taking criticism from would-be volunteers with extremely relevant experience"
- An analysis of OTW's (non-)attempts to invest all that money it gets every donation drive, you'll be shocked to hear nobody is managing that well either
6a) Circling back to EndOTWRacism, here's some analysis of the specific actions they're calling for...and why those won't actually help AO3 PAC's approach to racist harassment, as long as OTW Legal is still poorly micromanaging them
6b) She also mentions that EndOTWRacism keeps citing, as one of their authorities, a person (Stitch) who has committed racist harassment. By which I mean, harassed some fans of color (particularly black fans) to the point of deleting their accounts, starting over in fandom with completely new usernames, and being afraid to talk about their experiences non-anonymously because that's how scared they are of the harassment starting up again
6c) Hey, remember Winterfox/RequiresHate? Whose harassment of other POC in fandom was so far-reaching that a meticulously-researched report trying to document them literally won a Hugo Award? I'm not just mentioning this as a general comparison. She and Stitch have friendly personal chats, about things like, say, how great it is that "most of" their critics will "probably get reinfected by COVID over and over"
6b) She also mentions that EndOTWRacism keeps citing, as one of their authorities, a person (Stitch) who has committed racist harassment. By which I mean, harassed some fans of color (particularly black fans) to the point of deleting their accounts, starting over in fandom with completely new usernames, and being afraid to talk about their experiences non-anonymously because that's how scared they are of the harassment starting up again
6c) Hey, remember Winterfox/RequiresHate? Whose harassment of other POC in fandom was so far-reaching that a meticulously-researched report trying to document them literally won a Hugo Award? I'm not just mentioning this as a general comparison. She and Stitch have friendly personal chats, about things like, say, how great it is that "most of" their critics will "probably get reinfected by COVID over and over"
7) The members of Legal...do not seem inclined to resign. Or, as far as I can tell, to admit that there's anything in the world they could have handled even slightly better.
7a) Some people are calling for some/all members of the Board to resign. Which also seems unlikely. (The idea being that they're supposed to have authority over Legal, so the buck stops with them)
7b) I'm not bringing this up to endorse it, just, this is context I think people should know: The OTW has experienced "the resignation of literally the entire Board" once already. Here's the November 22, 2015 AO3 news post where the previous mass resignation was announced, and here's the November 25 follow-up post by their incoming replacements
7b) I'm not bringing this up to endorse it, just, this is context I think people should know: The OTW has experienced "the resignation of literally the entire Board" once already. Here's the November 22, 2015 AO3 news post where the previous mass resignation was announced, and here's the November 25 follow-up post by their incoming replacements
If we accept that "pressuring everyone to resign" is a long shot at best, the election is the biggest opportunity for the voting membership to have a meaningful influence on where the OTW goes from here. For the people who are keeping their eyes on the prize of improving how AO3 handles harassment...that's the place to focus on next.
And that's where we are now.