Nothin' to say 'cause it's already said

Thursday I caught the post-Eurovision Doof nearly live -- I came in after the first half-hour -- so I was well in time to catch The Connells – 74 75 in THE COUNT... AH-AH-AH and of course I Felt Feelings.

I don't seem to have mentioned it on LJ at all at the time, but that song was one of the ones holding me together through a tough time around 2005. I'm sure it came to me through someone's LJ roundup of good songs, and today was the first time I watched the video. I liked it enough to put it on the regular rotation, which I'm sure was being managed by iTunes at that point, I think I might have just recently switched away from Winamp.

V was moving out to be with her new household, I was moving into a studio apartment, the Situation with Dad had recently dropped, I was quasi-dating a Mormon widower, my internal household was a shambles, and I'm sure there was more going on.

I go in phases where I don't listen to much music at all, and phases where I'm hardly ever not listening to music. This is one of the interim phases, but in general music is good for me. I should dust off some of my tunes.

Some others that I liked then:
Old 97's - Murder (Or A Heart Attack)
AstroCapella - Swift Song (no relation to Taylor)

Coordinating dogpiles needs to be against the TOS of every site & ENFORCED (End Racism in the OTW)

https://www.tumblr.com/end-otw-racism/716978822501875712/fandom-against-racism-a-manifesto

I have not studied the OTW/AO3 terms of service in depth, but I have been on the internet for a minute, and I have been listening to rah in general. I am a white fan, and I have been listening to fans of color point out racism in fandom for some time.

I'm going to focus on one aspect of this: using tags to coordinate dogpiling.

https://archiveofourown.org/tos#IV.G.
( Quoted )

This policy already, in broad terms, bans harassment and "a general pattern" of harassment. I support naming race as one of the specific axes of harassment that should be prohibited. But when racism is rising to the level of coordinated dogpiling, I submit that the existing language is enough to prohibit it. The policy as it stands even mentions "requests that others harass the subject" as a prohibited act. It does not name the things that are considered "Content" in this section, so I would understand it to include things that are not stories or comments, such as tags. So why aren't they:

* Removing harassment tags
* Removing fics that have harassment tags repeatedly added to them
* Suspending accounts that keep coordinating harassment
* Disallowing from using the service at all under any account any person who has created new accounts to evade a ban or suspension
* In the case of fics with multiple authors or users who can make edits, adding logging (if it does not exist) to determine who made which changes, making this accessible to their trust & safety team, and suspending the responsible account(s).
* If a tag that is being used to coordinate harassment cannot be removed from the tagging system or suspended, this should be added.
* If a work cannot be suspended, this should be added. LiveJournal could suspend specific entries; this existed before the split to Dreamwidth.

Offsite harassment/coordination has traditionally been a little harder to pin down, but can't be ignored in this era.

It seems likely that one of the things that most urgently needs updating is not the terms of service itself, which is broad enough to include quite a few of the current shitty and racist behaviors, but the internal rules and tests that the Trust & Safety team follow when taking action.

What does it take to change internal guidelines and standards at the AO3? I understand that some internal standards shouldn't get published. When a rule is published, people operating in good faith do their best to stay on the right side of it, but people operating in bad faith will play the "haha I didn't TOUCH you" game.

But such rules should be scrutinized by not only the racism consultant that there has been discussion about hiring, but by a consultant or group who has experience in Trust & Safety enforcement. The racism and Trust & Safety consultants should work together to craft internal guidelines and bright line tests that resist being applied in a racist manner, and that catch the racism that is blatantly on display for those who know what they're seeing.