I’ve largely been approaching the various “don’t censor fandom/the ao3″ conversations through a lens of race because many of the people arguing in favor of what’s essentially a free-for-all because desire is like sacred also don’t get that some of the stuff fandom desires leads to the erasure, objectification, or dehumanization of characters and fans of color
and i just saw this long ass “if you don’t like the ao3, make your own it’s open source” post and it reminded me of the fact that well… what happens when fans of color make our own?
We get accused of alienating white fans, reverse racism, and of causing drama.
I’ve been thinking about the AO3 controversy a lot, and how pointing out racism is so often categorized as “purity wank.”
AO3 prides itself on its transparency, its warning labels making it so, in theory, no one will be caught off guard reading something triggering.
If there is no intention to cut racist fanwork on AO3, there should be a “racism” content warning, and it should be something readers can flag, not just something the author chooses (because then it would only be used in fics where racial slurs are used and nothing else).
I know the chances of AO3 allowing (especially) Black people to tag fics as racist to inform other fans is below zero. AO3 will never prohibit racist fanfic, and it will never warn readers of racist content – unlike things like sexual assault, which they strongly encourage authors to warn readers of so “everyone” can have a safe experience.
I am 100% in favor of this idea (a racism content warning, and other bigotries while we’re at it).
May I ask something? Why do fics that are either explicitly, irredeemably racist or pedophilic HAVE to be on AO3 at all? If they can casually tell us to just go somewhere else if we don’t like it, then why can’t those stories be kept somewhere else? If people don’t want cp/racism mixed in among their stories, but a small group do, and make it so that their preference is what shapes fandom experience, then their claim of fandom space being egalitarian is an obvious lie.
The difficulty, is when you decide a particular category of fanfiction cannot be in the archive, then it is too easy to use that category to hunt down fanfiction someone doesn’t approve of.
If someone is moved to write a story against racism or pedophilia, do you want that fic to be banned? The precedent for just that exists.
Now, clearly something has to be done so people are not blindsided by something as serious as racist ideology. If someone writes a story that suggests a timeline where we can consider these questions is a lesser, invalid timeline, I’d want a warning on that. Equally clearly, the authors that would be most worrisome would be the very authors not to properly warn or “author chooses not to warn”; mostly what would get the tag is where the antagonist(s) are racist but the author is not suggesting they are right.
Until there is Racism warning (which will need some guidelines or it will become meaningless), promoting tags that would give some reader control might be one step.
I guarantee you that if AO3 banned racist fic or fic with racist themes, the absolute first thing that would happen is that you would have a wave of racists attacking fic by and about Black people. Oh, this fic talks about Character X dealing with the racism of the white people around them? That fic has racist themes and should be banned! Why do I know this? Because every time in history (real life or fannish) that I am aware of, whenever a group tries to enforce moral rules (however well-meaning) for the benefit of a vulnerable minority, that vulnerable minority bear the brunt of the problem and receive very little of the help the rule was designed to give.
The solution to this is twofold. First, lessen the harm that will be done when–not if–the rules are abused. If fics are removed, the author has been silenced. And while I don’t care about racism being silenced (I think that would be awesome) I am not willing to do that knowing that the innocent will certainly be targeted and silenced, as well. If the fic is given a warning label, the author has not been silenced–their content is still freely available.
Second, put some real thought into how you’re going to prevent abuse. How do you separate out the overzealous self-righteous white folks? How do you separate out the reports from racists who are sure that they’re not racist, they’re just telling it like it is, and are offended by having their racism pointed out and thus flag their attackers? How do you make the distinction between “this fic is racist and promotes racist themes” and “this fic is anti-racist and confronts racist themes” and “this fic is just including racist themes because it’s in canon”? They can be harder to tell in practice than you might think.
Okay, I am breaking my Tumblr silence for this post because it keeps coming around and I keep getting twitchy fingers, even though I will probably regret it.
1. Yes. If you allow works to be banned based on content, the first people who will use that ban are the oppressors. My only RL experience with censorship was when a parent got “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” banned from my high school curriculum. Why? They claimed it was “underage sexual content”; everyone knew the actual reason they had told other parents was “negative portrayal of white people.” This was made super obvious when it was replaced in the curriculum by a book with just as much sexual violence, and explicit torture scenes as a bonus – but one with nothing to say about race, and that treated the abusive noncon as a romance. *That* is how censorship works. Not by making a safer space for oppressed peoples.
2. If AO3 did have a mandatory “Racism” warning, what would people want it to include? This is a serious question – I was involved in some of the discussion around AO3′s current identity and warning related freeform tags, and it was tough, and we screwed up a lot, and that was with knowing it would always be creators’ choice to actually use them. What specific content in a work, that was clear enough that it could be explained to people with limited context, and restrictive enough that it wouldn’t be easily abused, would people suggest should enforceably require a racism-related warning? (Don’t say just “racism” – that could be made to include p. much every work, because racism gets in everywhere one way or another.)
3. Honestly, I feel like the best solution here is to work to make bookmarkers’ tags on AO3 easier to filter and sort. If there was an easy way to bring up or filter out only works that bookmarkers had tagged with a certain tag – well, it would still lead to problems, but it would provide some flexibility and additional options for people to make their own safety, anyway.
“Beef up the ability to filter by bookmarkers’ tags” is the exact thing I was thinking of suggesting when I saw this post. The difficulty of making a workable policy out of mandatory racism or bigotry warnings (where workable = hard to abuse + can be applied semi-consistently at scale) doesn’t mean that’s where the conversation has to end. AO3 has built-in features for fan curation, which could potentially reduce people’s reliance on the firehose of whatever crap any fool has chosen to use the archive feature for. They’d just have to be better integrated into the site’s browsing and filtering functionality to be useful for something like crowdsourced warning tags.
I like this what I’m hearing here as a solution for this. Addressing fandom’s racism issues as a broad topic is well… it’s the same problem as addressing society’s racism issues. Tags just aren’t the tool for that job.
But for this specific need – right here – tagging specific stories with specific issues? Totally workable and bookmarks / curated content as sub-communities sounds like it has the framework that would work well for it.
@melannen – if this gets put into some actual concrete terms and some of the tasks are on the small to medium size… I’ve been looking to add Ruby to my resume. If the tasks get put into the issue queue at github – I can start writing code for this.
Sadly, I have no say in what AO3 puts on its features list, and only the vaguest idea of how things get into the issue queue. And the last time I made a coding contribution to AO3 was before they’d chosen Ruby. Also I think they’re still mostly concentrating on paying down technical debt and not crashing the servers, and better bookmark search would probably require a whole new search function nearly from scratch (with a lot of discussion about how to implement it – the main reason bookmarks aren’t currently used for bullying is probably that they’re too obscure to be effective, but if it was easier for other users to find it, we’d probably also need new tools that reduce that. Without removing the ability to use them to, say, warn for racism.) So it’s probably not coming real soon, if it comes.
However! If people haven’t seen it, AO3 just pushed a major search update that hopefully will start being available to users in the next month or two, and will, at minimum, make filtering things out WAY easier. It could be that solutions are already on their way, and hopefully it also means other search changes will be easier for awhile. So keep an eye on that, and be ready to play with it when it comes.
What I’d suggest as positive steps right now would be:
1. Put in a feature request with Support for better bookmark filtering; be polite and positive and mention this specific use case. While you are at it, if you want it, also put in a support request for a racism/bigotry archive warning – there is almost no chance you will ever get it, but it will at least create an official record that *something* along these lines is needed, moreso than tumblr posts or non-actionable abuse reports ever will. And if you want it, also one for a TOS change that explictly bans creating a hostile environment for protected identity groups as well as for individuals – that is possibly more likely to happen, given the current public discussion about social media in general. And keep posting on social media about specific, positive, actionable changes – like a new warning tag – that won’t fundamentally contradict AO3’s anti-censorship ethos and don’t target specific ships or users.
You won’t get immediate change – even if there were infinite resources for coding and modding and servers (which there aren’t), AO3 runs on consensus, which means every change is s-l-o-w – but it will help get the ball rolling and keep it rolling.
2. Good news! AO3 is currently recruiting Policy & Abuse Staff! Applications open until May 16 2018! It is a crappy job, and it requires a large time commitment, and it requires you to read a lot of things you would never read by choice, and be scrupulously polite to other staff and users even when you really, really don’t want to, and maintain confidentiality on things you want to scream about to the world, and enforce policies you may on occasion deeply disagree with.
But! If you are willing and able to do those things, I am absolutely sure they would love more diverse voices from diverse communities on their team, and you will provide an extremely valuable service. And if you want a voice in changing some of the policies, “from experience as an Abuse volunteer in good standing” is the best way to do it (and the best way to get inside knowledge of the kinds of problems they are solving every day, not just the ones that make it to Tumblr, in order to propose solutions that are workable.)
Also, if people to want set up some kind of separate moderation & warnings advisory, I can promise you that all the crap that Abuse faces is the exact same kind of crap you will face there. As is the workload. I was a pre-posting moderator on one of the big Harry Potter archives back in the day (because, yes, before efiction and web 2.0, most archives did have moderators approve works before they were posted) for a couple of months before I burnt out, and I can tell you: that is also a crap job. And we were mostly just doing checks for SPAG and ‘this is not PG-13’, not hot-button stuff. And it was several orders of magnitude smaller than AO3. And it predated callout culture. It would not be a bad idea to volunteer for an established Abuse team somewhere, even if not AO3, just to get an idea of the level of sewage that flows down onto it, and how experienced people manage that, before proposing to run something similar.
3. If you want better user-created-tag filtering to happen, start using bookmark tags and bookmark collections on AO3 more. It’s kind of a catch-22, because few people use them, so there’s not a lot of incentive to improve them, and vice versa. But showing that people are using them, and how they’re using them, and how it’s important, would be the best way to move it up in priority.
@astolat, who probably still knows more about AO3’s architecture than anyone else, just posted on a related thread about how to set up a bookmark collection on AO3 as a moderated safe space. That would be very doable right now, especially if you did it one fandom at a time – get together a mod team, and have them systematically go through every work in, say, Black Panther, and either only bookmark the OK ones, or bookmark everything while adding standardized warning tags. And then move on to another fandom or pairing. It would still be tough to filter on the bookmarkers’ tags, but people could browse and filter the collection by creators’ tags, and easily see all the mods’ warning tags as they go. And it would provide a proof-of-concept for what an archive-wide version might end up looking like.
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
tora42's nonsensne 