End OTW Racism

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Fan Campaign
Name: End OTW Racism
Type of Campaign:
Aims: For the OTW to implement antiracist policies and actions to prevent harassment and abuse of fans of colour, especially on Ao3
Participants:
Date Started: 17th May 2023 - Present
17th May 2023 - 31st May 2023 (First Event)
Fandom: Multi
Campaign Website: Tumblr page
Twitter page
dreamwidth page
Ao3 Collection
“END OTW RACISM” in bold text, each word on a single line against a contrasting color in shades of red and brown.
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

This article documents a currently unfolding situation within the fannish realm. Content may change quickly, and the page structure itself may undergo major revision. New details are very welcome.

End OTW Racism is a fan campaign with the aim of putting pressure on the OTW to implement antiracist policies and actions in order to prevent and adequately deal with harassment and abuse of fans of colour, especially on the Ao3. The campaign comes three years after the organisation committed to addressing issues surrounding racism on the fanfic site, attempts of which participants of the campaign, among others, have criticised as being lacking.

Between 17th - 31st May 2023, the campaign encouraged participants to do several actions including, but not limited to: adding 'End Racism in the OTW' to the title of both new and old fics, changing profile pictures on social media sites such as Tumblr or Twitter, and sending a message to the OTW Board of Directors. There are also plans for further action later down the line.

The OTW officially acknowledged the campaign in a June 12 communication.[1][2]

Goals

  1. Updates to the AO3's Terms of Service that reflect a progressive, anti-racist and anti-bigoted stance on harassment and abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content.
  2. Improving admin tools for the Policy and Abuse team to tackle and moderate abuse claims better.
  3. Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3 to 6 months.
  4. Transparency in the process and internal communications about this topic, including quarterly updates in the OTW Newsletter.

FAQ

The other relevant information about the initiative is summarized here. See the dreamwidth FAQ.

  • The organizers are all longtime fans, both of color and white, and users of the AO3, but have decided to remain anonymous to protect themselves from racist harassment and to not entangle the campaign's message with their personal identities.
  • They all support the AO3's no-commerce rule and its commitment to being advertising-free.
  • In their opinions, the relevant committees are ideally the ones to update the AO3's ToS, as well as establishing the penalties for infringements and enforcing them; all in purpose of anti-censorship and inclusiveness.
  • The organizers all agree that fandom racism is real racism, and that fighting bigotry to make fandom spaces safe, welcoming, ours is important for the real people affected by this issue.

Participation

As of 2 June 2023, 1612 works in 594 fandoms were posted in the End Racism in the OTW AO3 collection. The End OTW Racism campaign also posted a stats roundup on its tumblr account and reported a total of 5602 AO3 fanworks with "End OTW Racism" in their titles.[3]

Many social media users changed or adapted their icons, including that of Fansplaining. Other users, such as destinationtoast, sent out emails to the OTW.[4]

Fan Discussions

Some fans supported the manifesto wholeheartedly, and others supported the movement without necessarily agreeing entirely with every point or wording.

[vex-verlain]
Your beliefs do not have to perfectly align with a movement (nor every person within that movement) in order to support that movement.[5]
[satsuma]
Going through the "proper" channels for feedback hasn't worked yet and we have no evidence that it will going forward. Public outcry has had some success in the past, but it's difficult to draw attention to an issue when all you have from the OTW to point to is...absolutely nothing. Fandom Against Racism's direct action campaign is taking a new approach to holding the OTW to their promises.[6]

Meanwhile, others decided not to support the current campaign for a variety of reasons.

[verity]
I haven’t engaged with the EndOTWRacism campaign at all and don’t intend to, largely because I think it misrepresents the scope of the problem and, with the exception of [chestnut_pod's] post and discussion on FFA, has led to confusion and misinformation about the actual issues and possible remedies for the current situation at the OTW.[7]
[flowersforgraves]
I see a lot of red flags with the campaign. They heavily cite works from stitchmediamix (aka stichomancery), who, while they have done a lot of valuable antiracism work in fandom, has also been known to promote harassment of fans who disagree with them, calling fans of color who disagree with ANY of their views "pick-mes" and "social justice pokemon of color" and accusing them of buying into White supremacy. They also misrepresent at least two of the cases they mention in their header (that of the MDZS fandom, and the work that allegedly incited harassment against Dr Pande). (I'm not willing to discuss much further in an unlocked post.) I'm also very, very skeptical of any calls for removal of "extremely bigoted" content. I understand that the campaign is calling for AO3 to put in their own policy rather than specifically suggesting a policy, which I think is the right way to go. But based on discussion I've seen, many people participating in the campaign don't really seem to understand that, and I've specifically seen people advocating for the removal of works they, specifically, deemed racist. It's also come to my attention that at least one of the organizers has been involved in harassing fans of color who aren't an arbitrary measure of "antiracist enough."[8]

A major criticism of the campaign is that it advocates censoring the archive, that is, changing AO3's maximum inclusiveness of content policy to allow deleting fanworks deemed racist (and that fanworks that many people disagree are racist would also be deleted). The campaign and its supporters have argued that they are not advocating for censorship or any particular policy solution and that their goals are being misrepresented. Some campaign supporters have suggested that the charge of "censorship" is an excuse to not engage with the issues highlighted by the campaign. Both sides of the argument have cited the campaign's own FAQ in making their case.[9]

From fail_fandomanon:

It seems to me that what they're trying to do is bring "extremely racist works" under the umbrella of "racist harassment" by arguing that even if a work isn't targeting an individual, it can be classified as targeting a group. Which isn't untrue--effectively, what they're talking about is hate speech, and the possibility of categorizing certain fictional works as hate speech and determining that to be grounds for removal. I think it might be clearer if they'd just used that term....

And this is why citing Stitch is relevant, because Stitch has stated outright that they believe shipping any ship that a Black person has asked you not to ship is racist. There's a lot of things Stitch has implied without saying, but this one, she's actually said and it's in one of her essays that is currently up and available to be read. It is not unreasonable to believe that her work informs the criteria suggested by the movement when her work appears to be their main source of information.[10]

I'm feeling like such a fucking idiot for having thought EOTWR had any good intentions.[11]
I'm sure they did, and I'm sure many people still involved continue to intend the best. Unfortunately, it takes more than good intentions to achieve good actions. There was also some confusion or disagreement from the outset on what the scope of those intentions were, ie people believing they wanted to remove offensive content or enforce more moderation. I think Denise was right to point out the dissonance between their stated intentions and their heavy reliance on citing Stitch's work, though not because Stitch is allegedly a bully or harasser (based on receipts only Denise has). But, because Stitch very clearly states they believe racist content is part of the problem that ao3 needs to fix. EOTWR was saying they don't want to remove offensive works, yet linking and boosting writing by Stitch -- including Stitch writing about EOTWR -- who clearly does want such works removed. This, imo, reflected a lack of clarity in mission; some supporters and people responding to the campaign clearly DID want more content moderation and some supporters didn't and furthermore claimed EOTWR never wanted that. And there was enough leeway for people of either opinion to argue that in fact, their interpretation of the goals of EOTWR was correct.

le-bjorn Acknowledgment

After EOTWR's tumblr account posted about an upcoming OTW Board meeting in January 2024, Kutti reblogged with criticism about EOTWR for not acknowledging le-bjorn's November 2023 callout post or followup posts. le-bjorn, a former OTW volunteer, went viral after claiming that they were reprimanded "for my use of 'from the river to the sea, palestine will be free' on the OTW volunteer slack" , and they followed up with a detailed google doc of screenshots showing many arguments in the OTW's Israel-Palestine Slack channel. Kutti wrote,

Frankly, @end-otw-racism has been stone-facedly silent about Palestine and the OTW's Zionism. They haven't even reblogged @le-bjorn's posts or that statement with signatures that was going around. But they found the time and inclination to reblog a Substack supports Nazis post. So I wonder how many of their white team members are the kind of people who only want to talk about racism when it is decoupled from colonialism and genocide.[12]

le-bjorn reblogged Kutti's reblog, saying that,

I actually emailed EOTWR about the situation, and they told me that they would only reblog my post about it if I censored all of the names in my screenshots and had another OTW volunteer vouch for the entire thing.[12]

Where Discussions Took Place

Tumblr

The campaign has a tumblr account and did link roundups[13] of supportive commentary from other users, including beatrice-otter, elumish, and seepunkrun. The blog also received questions from users.

Olderthannetfic's blog received a flurry of anonymous tumblr asks, many of which were critical about the campaign.

Dreamwidth

A few days after the campaign started, chestnut_pod posted meta about structural issues in the OTW: Be more democratic, be more autocratic, OTW. This post generated a lot of discussion in the comments and elsewhere.

The anon forum Fail-Fandomanon hosted lengthy and detailed discussions about the campaign alongside concerns about OTW's internal operations.

End OTW Racism supporters also posted about the campaign on their personal blogs.

Twitter

Reddit

A positive post about the campaign to /r/FanFiction was deleted.[14]

The campaign was briefly discussed on /r/AO3: #EndOTWRacism: Why It’s So (Needlessly) Controversial, and What Should Be Done[15].

Additional Campaigns

Vote to End OTW Racism

VOTE-end-OTW-racism.png

After the May action concluded, the End OTW Racism group started a campaign to encourage supporters to vote in the upcoming 2023 OTW Board Election. This action included sharing information about how to become an OTW member and posting about the candidates' platforms. Supporters were also encouraged to attend the OTW Board's public meeting on July 2.

On July 6, a few weeks after the 2023 OTW Board candidates' bios and platforms were officially released, the End OTW Racism mods shared a summary for each "on how [they] feel [the candidates] align with [their] campaign's goals."[1] The summaries were a few sentences long for each candidate, and the EOTWR mods positively or negatively highlighted statements, or lack-thereof, from the candidates.

The post sparkled backlash from fans, OTW volunteers and even some of the Board candidates themselves. Fans expressed their disappointment because they felt the post was purposefully downplaying the lived experiences from the Asian candidates, and even the formal non-profit experience of one of the Asian candidates against that of a candidate with a white-sounding name; fans accused the movement of being USA and anglophone-centric[16], of having a bias against Asians and specifically being sinophobic, and of exploiting the buzz of the 2023 OTW Management Controversy only to then turn their backs to the very volunteers and fans affected by it.

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.

愚妹無憂 @pumpkinpaix on Tumblr [17]

I have been disappointed by the limited understanding of systemic injustice demonstrated by many members of the movement. Many members don’t seem to fully understand the complexity of grappling with racism on an international scale. Additionally, they appear to be unaware of the specific ways that systemic injustice is perpetrated in the nonprofit sector – namely, by emphasizing formal education over lived experience and evaluating the qualifications of candidates of color more strictly than the qualifications of white candidates.

Kathryn S. [18]

Other Effects

In the course of fan discussions on chestnut_pod's post and fail_fandomanon about internal org structures, a former PAC volunteer revealed that immediately following the May 2022 CSEM Attacks against the OTW they had been suspended for two months, with no explanation, by the Legal Committee, over the objections of the PAC chairs. This revelation led to the 2023 OTW Management Controversy.

Meta/Further Reading

References

  1. ^ An Update from the OTW Board and Chairs, Archived version, transformativeworks.org, 2023-06-12.
  2. ^ An Update from the OTW Board and Chairs, Archived version, AO3 News, 2023-06-12.
  3. ^ Stats Round-Up for the #EndOTWRacism Campaign!, Archived version, 1 June 2023.
  4. ^ OTW transparency, Archived version by destinationtoast, 21 May 2023. As of 23 July 2023 this tumblr post has 48 notes.
  5. ^ In response to the reactions I’ve seen to #EndOTWRacism by vex-verlain, 18 May 2023. As of 4 June 2023, this tumblr post has 624 notes.
  6. ^ A Chronic Habit of Avoiding Responsibility? #EndOTWRacism, Archived version, dreamwidth post by satsuma, 16 May 2023.
  7. ^ comment by verity on chestnut_pod's post, 25 May 2023.
  8. ^ comment on chestnut_pod's dreamwidth post, Archived version by flowersforgraves, 2023-05-26.
  9. ^ fail_fandomanon comment, Archived version, 2023-07-20.
  10. ^ Re: Archive of Our Own / AO3 / OTW, fail_fandomanon, 2023-06-20.
  11. ^ Re: AO3 / OTW - EOTWR containment, Archived version, 2023-08-16.
  12. ^ a b OTW Board Meeting on Jan 28!, original Tumblr post by end-otw-racism, reblogged by le-bjorn. Wayback Machine copy, 25 January 2024.
  13. ^ Tumblr post by @end-otw-racism. Archived from the original on June 15, 2023.
  14. ^ Twitter thread by @fiercynonym. Archived from the original on June 15, 2023.
  15. ^ #EndOTWRacism: Why It’s So (Needlessly) Controversial, and What Should Be Done, Archived version, 31 May 2023.
  16. ^ Re: AO3/OTW - EOTWR containment thread, Archived version, fail_fandomanon, 2023-07-18.
  17. ^ Regarding #EndOTWRacism’s summaries of 2023 OTW Board election candidate positions, Archived version, tumblr post by pumpkinpaix, 10 July 2023.
  18. ^ Kathryn S’s 2023 Q&A: Recent Discussions, Archived version, OTW Elections website, 2023-07-21.
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