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On A03 and Fandom Racism: What Will Actually Work?
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olderthannetfic:
lierdumoa:
I feel I need to clarify, since I recently made a post about AO3 needing better anti-racism measures, that THERE ARE OTHER, FRANKLY MORE EFFECTIVE MEASURES BESIDES PRESSURING AUTHORS TO TAG BETTER.
What we actually need to be discussing are BETTER BLACKLISTING TOOLS. Being able to permanently block racist authors and/or specific racist stories from appearing in search results would MEANINGFULLY IMPROVE my AO3 browsing experience. Racist authors tend to be repeat offenders. And in most cases, there are few enough of them that just blacklisting 5-10 names would, in many cases, clear a fandom tag of 99.5% of the offensive stories.
Right now if I run into a racist author, I have to memorize their name and type it into an exclusion filter with markdown code every single time I do a new search.
Moreover the one third party plugin that’s available doesn’t meet my needs. AO3-savior doesn’t truly hide blocked fic. Even after they’re blocked, the plugin still lets you know that they’re there, and the reason they were blocked. I DON’T WANT TO SEE THAT SHIT. I want those fic to be gone, gone.
You really wanna talk about tagging?
Bookmarker tagging is a thing. But it doesn’t work as well as it could.
Shift the focus away from author tagging. People are already use the “bookmarks” feature to identify untagged racist/otherwise triggering stories using “bookmarker tags” and “bookmarker comments” to review and warn for other readers. Bookmarker tagging is a fantastic feature, but it comes with huge, nonsensical limitations.
For example, there’s no way to effectively exclude fic from a works search based on bookmarker’s tags. In a works search, you can only exclude based on author tags. You can, to a certain degree, exclude bookmarker tags in a bookmark search. But it lacks many of the filtering features offered in a works search. A bookmark search, for example, only has 2 sorting options compared to the work search’s 9.
People are acting like we only have two options – make authors responsible for tagging their racism, or do nothing. I gotta ask, what is y’all’s goal here? Do you want to punish racist authors? Or do you actually want to PROTECT POC FANS FROM FANDOM RACISM?
We need to start looking at this as an infrastructure problem. We’re concentrating too much energy on exposing and confronting racists, when what I actually want, as a POC, is just to not be constantly blindsided by microaggressions every time I do a fic search.
This should not be an issue of author tagging.
By making fandom racism an issue of author tagging, you’re trusting bigots to implement your anti-bigotry measures.
People who are respectful of racial issues are already tagging their fic with racism warnings. Racists rarely view themselves as racist, and therefore cannot be trusted to implement a new racism tagging rule in a reliable enough manner to actually meaningfully protect POC from their content. We need victim-implemented anti-bigotry measures.
Any online community will have it’s share of shitty people with shitty opinions. It’s not a question of how to change these people’s hearts, nor is it a question of how to excommunicate these people from the platform.
The question is – does the average user have a hard time avoiding exposure to triggering content using the available technology?
Yes? Then we need better technology.
The technological infrastructure determines the online environment.
This approach also has the advantage of automatically accounting for different people’s/cultures’ definitions of racism.
olderthannetfic:
lierdumoa:
I feel I need to clarify, since I recently made a post about AO3 needing better anti-racism measures, that THERE ARE OTHER, FRANKLY MORE EFFECTIVE MEASURES BESIDES PRESSURING AUTHORS TO TAG BETTER.
What we actually need to be discussing are BETTER BLACKLISTING TOOLS. Being able to permanently block racist authors and/or specific racist stories from appearing in search results would MEANINGFULLY IMPROVE my AO3 browsing experience. Racist authors tend to be repeat offenders. And in most cases, there are few enough of them that just blacklisting 5-10 names would, in many cases, clear a fandom tag of 99.5% of the offensive stories.
Right now if I run into a racist author, I have to memorize their name and type it into an exclusion filter with markdown code every single time I do a new search.
Moreover the one third party plugin that’s available doesn’t meet my needs. AO3-savior doesn’t truly hide blocked fic. Even after they’re blocked, the plugin still lets you know that they’re there, and the reason they were blocked. I DON’T WANT TO SEE THAT SHIT. I want those fic to be gone, gone.
You really wanna talk about tagging?
Bookmarker tagging is a thing. But it doesn’t work as well as it could.
Shift the focus away from author tagging. People are already use the “bookmarks” feature to identify untagged racist/otherwise triggering stories using “bookmarker tags” and “bookmarker comments” to review and warn for other readers. Bookmarker tagging is a fantastic feature, but it comes with huge, nonsensical limitations.
For example, there’s no way to effectively exclude fic from a works search based on bookmarker’s tags. In a works search, you can only exclude based on author tags. You can, to a certain degree, exclude bookmarker tags in a bookmark search. But it lacks many of the filtering features offered in a works search. A bookmark search, for example, only has 2 sorting options compared to the work search’s 9.
People are acting like we only have two options – make authors responsible for tagging their racism, or do nothing. I gotta ask, what is y’all’s goal here? Do you want to punish racist authors? Or do you actually want to PROTECT POC FANS FROM FANDOM RACISM?
We need to start looking at this as an infrastructure problem. We’re concentrating too much energy on exposing and confronting racists, when what I actually want, as a POC, is just to not be constantly blindsided by microaggressions every time I do a fic search.
This should not be an issue of author tagging.
By making fandom racism an issue of author tagging, you’re trusting bigots to implement your anti-bigotry measures.
People who are respectful of racial issues are already tagging their fic with racism warnings. Racists rarely view themselves as racist, and therefore cannot be trusted to implement a new racism tagging rule in a reliable enough manner to actually meaningfully protect POC from their content. We need victim-implemented anti-bigotry measures.
Any online community will have it’s share of shitty people with shitty opinions. It’s not a question of how to change these people’s hearts, nor is it a question of how to excommunicate these people from the platform.
The question is – does the average user have a hard time avoiding exposure to triggering content using the available technology?
Yes? Then we need better technology.
The technological infrastructure determines the online environment.
This approach also has the advantage of automatically accounting for different people’s/cultures’ definitions of racism.