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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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mywitchcultblr · 9 months

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A republican politician trying to get into AO3 board beware!! Don't let her get into the OTW board!

Yeah no thank you, conservatives have been stripping away women rights and LGBTQIA+ rights around the world and now this? Can't we have one nice thing in life? Also her takes with the racism is just 😑🤦‍♀️

This kind of a candidate will be like "well we are concerned about how media affect teens, oh noooo there's 'abusive' stories" next thing you know NSFW and queer fanfic/media will be banned

#ao3 #archive of our own #fanfic #fandom #lgbtqia+#queer #writing #writer #EndOTWRacism #censorship #politics #homophobia #queerphobia #otw elections #otw board

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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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In sum, we’re watching this small fandom movement build momentum alongside a rise of open racist rage directed towards fans of color for trying to speak about something that is important to us: an unfulfilled promise that could help protect us in one of our biggest shared fandom spaces.

#fandom racism #endotwracism #end otw racism

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fiercynn · 10 months

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you know what’s fucking wild? when @end-otw-racism’s first action started in may, they were incredibly clear that they had narrow and specific demands for the otw, and that their demands were commitments the otw had already made. if you need a refresher, here are their demands:

Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months

and despite the fact that these were taken specifically from the otw’s own commitments, a lot of people immediately decided that this was an overreach on the campaign’s part. they fabricated supposed secret agendas that the campaign must have; they invoked slippery slope fallacies to say that this would lead to mass content removal for anything on ao3 that even skimmed the line of racism; they claimed to know who was leading the campaign and tried to discredit the campaign based on that, because they claimed that those people had larger agendas.

despite all of that, otw themselves came out reaffirming their commitment to these priorities. which is great, but that was not the end of the work, because those commitments were made by the existing board, which is about to turn over in the upcoming board elections. it's essential to hold the incoming board accountable to the previous board's commitments.

but when @end-otw-racism’s second action around otw board elections has continued to keep those specific, clear demands in their focus, they’re getting hounded for it from the other side: by people claiming that this analysis they did of the otw board candidates – in which eotwr made it clear that they were looking at whether the candidates talked about any of the eotwr demands or not – was racist for not counting the work asian candidates raised around reaching out to non-western and non-english speaking fans as fulfilling eotwr’s demands.

(which, let’s be clear, they don’t! issues around access for non-western and non-anglophone fans, around the way chinese and chinese diaspora volunteers have been mistreated by otw, around translation, are all worthy issues to be pushing on. eotwr has even uplifted some of them. but they are separate from eotwr's core demands.)

so first eotwr is overreaching and trying to bring down every fanwork that could be even slightly misconstrued as racist, even though they’ve always been clear about their narrow and specific goals…and now they’re racist for not addressing every form of racism, even though they’ve always been clear about their narrow and specific goals?

it is completely valid for eotwr to look at the board candidates’ platforms and say “they did not mention these things that we are looking for”, because the things that eotwr is looking for are commitments otw has already made. it is not eotwr picking out certain “keywords” that they’d like to see – they are looking at whether potential incoming board members are prioritizing those specific commitments and will uphold them. and otw has had those commitments for three years! this is not new stuff!

also, if you read that analysis again, eotwr is not even criticizing the candidates for not mentioning their demands! they are simply pointing out what we can glean about the candidates from their platforms and bios, because the platforms are the main information we have about the board candidates right now. eotwr has been incredibly clear that they want to talk to candidates and learn more about their priorities. they've also been clear in urging other people to come up with their own analyses of the board candidates, and they have in fact reblogged and uplifted other people’s perspectives on the candidates.

i cannot stress enough that we need more folks in this space to be pushing on anti-racism, and eotwr having a narrow scope is not a bad thing. there is endless work to be done, and others who disagree with eotwr’s tactics should start their own campaigns! eotwr literally only started like two months ago with a call to action. it’s very possible to emulate them and push for parallel priorities.

advocacy work also needs groups with different tactics and approaches. my day job is in climate change advocacy, and we do our most effect work when multiple organizations are representing different perspectives and pushing in different ways. i'd love to see that kind of advocacy ecosystem built up in fandom.

but right now, eotwr is the only campaign i know of trying to do large-scale anti-racism work around otw at all. and to actively push against the campaign because you think it’s racist to focus on specific goals and gently critique board candidates based only on those specific goals? is, i'm sorry, fucking ridiculous.

#end otw racism #otw #organization for transformative works #endotwracism #eotwr #archive of our own #ao3 #fandom racism

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seepunkrun · 11 months

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How to Find and Attend OTW Board Meetings

If you're interested in attending OTW Board meetings, here's what you need to know:

All Board meetings are open to the public. They're held quarterly and are announced on the OTW Twitter about a week before and again an hour before.

You can also find meetings on the Board's Google Calendar. If you add it to your own calendar, you can set up notifications for new meetings as well as event reminders. In recent months the agenda for the next meeting has also been added to the bottom of that page.

Meetings are held on Discord. Between meetings the room is set to read only so you can't post, but you can read back through past meetings, and if you join the server now, you should get a notification when they post the date for the next one. If it's your first time on the server, you'll have to agree to the rules of conduct in #01-some-rules and then you'll be allowed into the #public-board-meetings channel. Here's an invite link if you want to get a feel for the place.

Board meetings last an hour. During the meeting the Board takes relevant questions about the business at hand. If there's time, there's an open question period at the end, but you have to get your question in before the end of the hour. If you'd like to ask the Board a question but need help putting one together, fiercynonym has a Twitter thread of excellent questions for the OTW regarding its anti-racist work (or lack thereof), or you can read the same thread on my Dreamwidth, which I compiled with permission.

As of May 23, 2023, there isn't a date set for the next meeting, but if you have any other questions, I'll do my best to answer them!

#otw board meetings #organization for transformative works #otw #archive of our own #ao3 #fandom #EndOTWRacism #end racism in fandom

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ryuutchi · 1 year

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I’d be a lot more positively inclined towards the stop-otw-racism blog if I didn’t catch their big post deliberately spreading misinformation for their own benefit— they cite “someone harassed a Fandom Scholar in their AO3 tags for criticizing their Nazi omegaverse”.

IN ACTUALITY a writer’s “Nazis-getting-tortured” kinky id-fic was put on blast as “racist Nazi omegaverse” by the Fandom Scholar on Twitter, and the tag was a response to HER off-site harassment.

You know, the thing end-otw-racism ostensibly wants rules about.

which goes right back to the problem “how are you going to define racist harassment and how do you plan to define fics that are harassing or racist?”

#end otw racism #endotwracism #AO3 #Racism

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raitala · 11 months

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New podfic: “End Racism on the OTW - The Reluctant Suitor” - chapter 1- Posting all week!

**Cover art image by the super-talented @sairusboom **

Find out more about the campaign @end-otw-racism !

https://archiveofourown.org/works/47330260

#EndOTWRacism #svsss #podfic

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macaron-tea-party · 10 months

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An example of racism in fandom (thanks I hate it✨)

Be mindful of racists in fandom. Personally I’m not a fan of indulging racist fans who say white supremacist talking points like the idea of “blackwashing” being a thing. The only people I’ve ever heard use the word are weirdo racists who get mad when folks reasonably raise an eyebrow at whitewashing nonwhite characters.

It frankly doesn’t surprise me a lot of “fandom elders” who are white, have issues with being racist.

Here’s an archived link to the post

https://twitter.com/VestaBlackclaw/status/1673067896589942784?s=20

#fandom #endotwracism #endfandomracism #racism in fandom #fandom racism #antiracism #is not being racist hard for some of you?#examples of racism #burn your idols

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andarthas-web · 11 months

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The way to hell....

[EOTWR edition]

One thing that's been bugging me about EOTWR ist that one of their bigger supporters has a post up with over 6k reblogs, where they claim that AO3's elections are rigged and that people should stop voting in them and instead "get angry" and give them "noisy, angry hell on every single fucking platform you can find.", which is pretty much a HUGE red flag. Why? For one, they present zero evidence on OTW's elections "being rigged" and that's an incredibly serious allegation to make. And as we can see with Trump and the GOP, it's an allegation that can be very well used to undermine liberal, democratic institutions and processes, so it should never be used without having serious evidence or at least a solid argument to support it. Nevermind that "don't vote" because "voting doesn't achieve anything" has been a hugely popular propaganda tactic and narrative that neo-fascist, authoritarian governments like Russia have spread via troll-farms in an attempt to sabotage western democracies and as a means of hybrid warfare, so I'm going to give anybody a major side-eye who replicates that kind of narrative, even in a different context. Also, this whole appeal to "get angry and give people hell" appeal? All without any kind of recourse to...you know....TALKING with each other and finding a way forward together? In a “my way or the highway” kind of sense? That's not something that shows interest in building better policies, that's instigating a harassment campaign against anybody who doesn't fall into line and agrees 100% with you. Which, given the diversity of the fandom community, with a wealth of people from different countries, different cultures, faiths and personal experiences? Also NOT a good idea. So overall....would be more anti-racist action a good thing? Yes. For now though, EOTWR looks to be a poster-child for "the way to hell is paved with good intentions" and has a higher probability of doing harm to fandom rather than good in a very orwellian sense.

#EOTWR #end otw racism #endotwracism #fascism #censorship #propaganda #GOP #vote #voting #rigged elections #troll farms

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end-otw-racism · 1 year

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On needing a comprehensive harassment policy

We've been getting some confusion about the part of our demands that talks about OTW needing to consider "off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users" - which is fair, because I realize that could sound like "OTW needs to monitor/regulate what happens on other platforms" - but that's NOT what we meant by it.

What we meant is: if AO3 users are getting harassed on AO3, and they provide proof in their abuse claim of off-site harassment, that off-site harassment should also be considered as context for making a decision in the abuse claim.

An example of this - which we have permission to share - is what happened to an abuse claim filed by Dr. Rukmini Pande. We won't be linking directly to what happened because we are not trying to target individual users here, but all of what happened is still in public record.

Dr. Pande, a scholar of fan studies who wrote the seminal text on race and fandom, talked on her twitter account a few years ago about a Nazi fic on AO3 that was not only incredibly harmful, offensive, and antisemitic, but where the author had been sending their friends to harass people who criticized the fic. The author proceeded to add a tag to the fic that said "Rukmini Pande Lied About This Fic".

Because Dr. Pande tweeted her criticism from the account with her full name, people said this wasn't doxxing - which is true. But the author of the fic also was tweeting publicly to entertain the idea of reporting Dr. Pande to her employer, and they were also once again sending friends to harass her on Twitter.

When AO3 considered this abuse claim, Dr. Pande provided proof of what was happening on Twitter to show that the author of the fic added the tag of her full name with the intention of inciting harassment to her. But the AO3 Abuse team said that this did not constitute harassment under their TOS.

Cases like that are what we mean by OTW considering "off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users". Obviously OTW cannot control what is happening on Twitter, or Tumblr, or any other platform. But their Abuse team should be able to consider off-site harassment, when they are given proof of it, in determining whether a case on AO3 is harassment or not.

(Also if you aren't familiar with Dr. Pande's work, her book Squee From The Margins: Fandom and Race is not only fantastic but was the first to comprehensively look at fandom racism, and she also edited a great anthology of articles on race and fandom called Fandom, Now In Color: A Collection of Voices. If you can't afford to buy them, you can request that your local library stock them!)

#seriously check out her books #squee from the margins changed this poster's life #end otw racism #racism in fandom #otw #ao3 #endotwracism #archive of our own #organization for transformative works #fandom racism #image descriptions in alt text

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lisafication · 11 months

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So you belive racism should not be considered harassment? What is the impossible standard here is what I'm not getting. Ao3 has established a harassment policy only for it to not be fully defined or only cater to specific groups. What is end otw racism exactly "demanding" that apparently makes them a bunch of simple minded folks from the sounds of people against them

First off, not having detailed knowledge of an extremely specific area of industry expertise is not 'simple minded'. Let me make that very clear.

Secondly, they're asking for content moderation of Archive of Our Own's creative works. That's what can't be done. I'm not really here to comment on Archive of Our Own's existing policies and the practicality therein, but for my two cents the only harassment they can realistically cover is the sort that has them at least considering phoning the FBI.

#endotwracism #harassment #otw #ao3 #archive of our own

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wangxianficrecs · 8 months

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Hi, for the anon wondering about squidgeworld, please check out the blog fandomantiracism which has done a fantastic job reporting on the OtW's racism against chinese volunteers!

In reference to this earlier ask.

Thank you for sharing that blog! And yes, @fandomantiracism seems to be a good place to find more information.

~ Mod Kay

#ask #answer #squidgeworld #ao3 #archive of our own #fandom racism #otw #endotwracism

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fandomshatepeopleofcolor · 1 year

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I was thinking about all of the racists who kept being nasty about The Little Mermaid and that one trashbag who said that Ariel should be played by a white woman but that « Halle can still be the mermaid in a new, darker and sadder adaptation of the fairytale ». So I came up with this :

Imagine a more horrific version of The Little Mermaid where the mermaid is the villain. She is white, pale-skinned, blonde-haired and blue-eyed to show how evil and impure she is. The prince finds her on the beach. She’s naked and mute and he brings her to his castle to take care of her because he thinks she’s the survivor of a shipwreck. He finds her really beautiful but also very strange. He doesn’t know that she watches him sleep and she acts kind of possessive towards him but he finds it cute. He starts having nightmares about a mysterious figure drowning him but doesn’t think too much of it. She acts sweet when she’s in his presence and he starts to genuinely like her and then becomes infatuated with her. But when the prince’s fiancée arrives at the palace, he gets caught in a love triangle between the beautiful mysterious voiceless “siren” from the beach and the princess from another kingdom he’s always known and loved.

The mermaid becomes even more dangerous and tries to hurt her. She’s jealous of her gracefulness, beautiful dark brown skin and jet black hair that give her an angelic and innocent beauty that the mermaid doesn’t have. She becomes more and more aggressive towards her and when the princess tries telling the prince, he doesn’t believe her until a final battle on the beach where, after the prince confesses that he loves them both, the mermaid regains her voice and tells the truth : she wants a human soul to be immortal and in order to obtain one, she received help from a sea witch. She had to make a human fall in love with her without using her voice and needed him to confess his true love for her. And then eat his heart. So they fight and the mermaid wins and eats the prince’s heart but the princess manages to survive.

That way, those people would have their « white » mermaid and their « horrific fairytale ».

Hey I love this idea!!! I'm gonna file it under https://fandomshatepeopleofcolor.tumblr.com/search/fic+ideas

and I'm going through the archives and hopefully gonna add some more posts to the fic ideas tag.

Also a reminder!!! We've got the end the OTW racism post pinned but right now is the time to help out and you can do so several ways!!!

-comment on fics that are titled with End OTW Racism -change your profile pics to the official End OTW Racism icons -upload fics/rename fics on AO3 with End OTW Racism

Please pls help us out we just started the campaign yesterday!!!

mod ali

#fic ideas #end otw racism #endotwracism #ao3 #otw

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