No Racism/Slavery Warnings in AO3's TOS update #endOTWracism

[jesse_the_k]

Per an email from OTW a couple weeks back, I learned that they’re updating the Terms of Service (TOS) for Archive of our Own (AO3).

They finally address requests for including warnings for Hate Speech, Racism, Slavery at some length, but they’ve hidden the discussion deep in a draft.

tl;dr — No new warnings. Only a handful of people have commented. They’re soliciting comments until 17 November 2024. The rest of this post is linked excerpts from OTW’s reasoning against warnings, and from folks who've commented.

AO3 Terms of Service: 2024 Update Guide, Appendix https://archiveofourown.org/works/58283857/chapters/150137587

The discussion begins at the level 3 heading "The pitfalls of values-based moderation"

Brief extracts from that section:

After reviewing user feedback and reports from 2019-2024, PAC believes that implementing one or more of the suggested Warnings of "Racism", "Slavery", or "Hate Speech" would most likely lead to inadvertently enforcing them against fan creators of color and harming marginalized communities rather than protecting them.

[… snip …]

Disproportionate targeting of POC on AO3 by other users is not a hypothetical. For example, in 2019, AO3 was undergoing a migration of primarily Chinese users after a new wave of fandom censorship on Lofter and Weibo (popular Chinese websites). At the time the "Language" field on AO3 fanworks defaulted to English, and it was often overlooked by non-English creators new to AO3. This caused many Chinese works to be posted labeled as "English", and often with the wrong fandom.

A portion of AO3's English-speaking userbase began deliberately hunting these works down en-masse. Some left polite comments on the works to request changes to the language and fandom. Other English-speaking users left comments that were belligerent in tone or outright harassment. Some of the people enacting this targeting scheme also proceeded to use automated methods to overwhelm PAC with "incorrect language" and "incorrect fandom" tickets. Altogether, the number of "incorrect language tag" reports increased by 1530% compared to the prior year.

They continue with "Fictional Content and Real Life Harassment," as well as "The Archive is international; so are racism, hate speech, and slavery," and "Warnings must be about specific events within a work, not themes, characterization, style, or bias". The concluding paragraph:

We believe that the harassment policy, optional tags, filters, muting, and bookmark features do a better job at helping users avoid fanworks containing content they don't want to encounter. Users who create fanworks about sensitive topics are encouraged to tag appropriately, using Additional Tags if necessary. Other users can use filters, mute creators, or mute individual works that contain content that they find disturbing. Users who wish to screen or recommend works for other users are encouraged to use bookmarks to compile recommendation lists for works that they believe handle a topic well.

As I’m writing this post, there’s 3861 comments on the Open Comment Period for AO3 Terms of Service Updates https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/30349. The comment period closes November 17th — just 8 days away. There are only a handful of comments on the racism/slavery; I found these of interest:

EllanaCaldin highlights a distinction between tagging for racism and slavery

I still disagree about not including a mandatory archive warning for "slavery" though. To me, it's extremely similar to "rape/non-con", just not focused on sexual themes, and that particular warning isn't a problem on AO3 (even though society likes to say that it's extremely difficult to tell 99.99% of the times. Evidently not...)

https://archiveofourown.org/comments/836111881

sapphoenyx

I see no mention of archive warnings for slavery, racism, sexism, "homophobia", which I'd prefer to call queerism, or any other form of systemic discrimination. I remember that the Archive made certain promises in 2020, after George Floyd's murder and the resulting public outcry. I am disappointed in the lack of follow through on those promises.

https://archiveofourown.org/comments/836114524

dio_icaurtica

There also seems to be a misunderstanding or perhaps willful ignorance of what is being asked of the Archive. Users are not asking for a warning to be put on any possible instance of racism, but instead when a work has clearly, blatantly racist content that users would like to be warned of before reading the work - especially users that are personally affected by racism. This is the absolute bare minimum that could be done to make AO3 a less hostile and harassing place for users. If the PAC team is incapable of enforcing something like that and coming up with a concrete set of guidelines and rules like they have for every other current archive warning, then you have a serious problem. If you can enforce the "Graphic Depictions of Violence" Archive Warning, with the ambiguity of defining "violence" then you can enforce some kind of Archive Warning along the lines of "Explicit Depictions of Racism".

https://archiveofourown.org/comments/836191831

generalfrings

I am mostly fine with the arguments presented for why not to add a Racism tag, but disagree with assigning Slavery under the same reasons. A lot of the reasons noted for why it’d be unclear/unwise to have a Slavery tag are applicable exactly the same for the Underage tag - and yet, we have an Underage tag. You use the warning when it’s depicted in the posted work; the noted examples of e.g. fantasy works that would include slavery systems were particularly befuddling to me because you answer the proposed issue yourself already: do you require works to be tagged only when explicit slavery is depicted? The answer is yes.

https://archiveofourown.org/comments/836275231

Comments

[forestofglory]

Thanks for pointing this out! I read some of the documentation of TOS change but missed this!

I'm sharing this post with other people who are concerned about racism in the OTW and I will leave a comment about this.

Oh thanks!

[jesse_the_k]

I've been a silent spectator to most of the #EndOTWRacism activity, and I'm so glad you know folks to share it with.

[soc_puppet]

I'm with the people who think a Slavery warning would still be appropriate/useful. It's a lot harder to be ambiguous about or to fall under various cultural differences than Racism, IMO. I'd love a Racism warning as well, but taken purely in terms of what's easy to detect and enforce? Slavery seems like a gimme. Hell, enough people are into slavery as a trope that it probably wouldn't even be difficult to find a PAC volunteer who likes it to check over any reported works!

I need a nap, but afterwards I might go and comment to that effect on the AO3 post.

[jesse_the_k]

Best wishes!

[soc_puppet]

My comment, which is not available publicly yet:

While I understand that the creation (and, perhaps more to the point, the enforcement) of a Racism warning might be prohibitively difficult, I don't feel the same way about a Slavery warning. While there are many cultural aspects to racism that can differ in time and place, I feel like slavery is less ambiguous. A modern-day American and European might disagree on whether it's possible to be racist against an Italian, for example, but I would argue that the concept of "owning" a person/sapient being is much more cut-and-dried by comparison. I would think that it would be relatively easy (again, in comparison) to come up with a definition of slavery that is easy to understand by AO3's userbase, and therefore easy for said users to figure out when and how to apply it. I would like to push for the inclusion of this warning to be reconsidered.

I feel like that covered things reasonably well.

[jesse_the_k]

Excellent! - - Jesse Kaysen jesse_the_k@pobox.com

[soc_puppet]

Sadly, I didn't think to expect people disagreeing with me in comments 😩 Definitely not enough spoons for that tonight! I may or may not have the spoons to reply in the next few days, but I am glad I at least said something.

[jesse_the_k]

Damn, I’m sorry

[alias_sqbr]

I tend to feel like they gave a compelling argument for why a general, not otherwise caveated "Racism" tag is a bad idea, but glossed over explaining why "Explicit onscreen depictions of slavery" is all that much more ambiguous than the underage sex or non-con warnings, given how often those are also parts of general worldbuilding. Yeah, there will always be some fuzziness, and people extrapolating all sorts of unfair bad faith assumptions about anyone who uses the tag, but that's true of the other warnings too.

[cesy]

This, yes.

Precisely

[jesse_the_k]

The discussion around generalfrings's comments convinced me.

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for the heads up!

[jesse_the_k]

Turns out searching scores of web pages for "slavery" is much more soothing than thinking about the news :,)

[bibliofile]

What a fucking world, eh?

(Watching these OTW conversations from afar, as it's a cool thing but not one of my things.)

Not really my thing either

[jesse_the_k]

but see the comment you replied to.

(Why yes I was also avoiding writing a grievance to my insurance company.)

[mlravenwrites]

Thanks for flagging this, I'd missed it. Wow, they really buried it. (yet more bad optics...)

I added a comment. Really love their spurious arguments for why not to add even "Slavery" or "Hate Speech" tags .

[jesse_the_k]

Yet more bad optics, indeed.

Thanks for commenting.

[yvannairie]

This convinced me that the Slavery warning is both doable and useful. Thanks for putting it all together.

[jesse_the_k]

You're most welcome!

[minoanmiss]

Thank you for this post.

I'm glad I could

[jesse_the_k]

contribute to the discussion.

[sovay]

They finally address requests for including warnings for Hate Speech, Racism, Slavery at some length, but they’ve hidden the discussion deep in a draft.

I can tell I am out of this discourse because it would never have occurred to me that a Slavery tag on basic grounds of narrative/worldbuilding didn't exist. I am even coming at this conversation from a grounding in the ancient world, where a wide legal variety of ownership of people was ubiquitous. You write a fic set in fourth-century Athens where that dynamic is particularly prominent, I'd expect the tag to be on offer.

I'm grateful that

[jesse_the_k]

sparkymonster taught me that "common sense" is a useless metric -- because which ideas are held in common widely vary with culture.

And YET! We share the belief that slavery is so fundamentally wrong that it belongs in a warning.

Re: I'm grateful that

[sovay]

And YET! We share the belief that slavery is so fundamentally wrong that it belongs in a warning.

I am afraid I cannot agree that we do when this community is having an argument about it, but I agree it's meaningful that the argument is happening at all. I hope it produces results.