I am getting really frustrated with the discussion around AO3 and antiracism because while there are many changes AO3 should have made a long time ago, many of the suggestions being made now are fundamentally flawed in ways that would make things worse...

...for marginalized people using the site, and AO3/OTW communication is bad enough they aren't able to explain why the proposal would be harmful in a way that doesn't sound like blowing smoke. I need to write a long form post about this, but I don't have the physical capacity :/

The very quick version of the long post: for any content policy change, there will always be a percentage of users who don't comply, deliberately or not. If your policy change doesn't account for this and consider who the burden of enforcement will fall on, it is not anti-racist.

If your proposal doesn't consider who will enforce the policy, and how, and how you can reduce both bias in AND trauma to the people doing the enforcement, it is not anti-racist.

ToS work is trauma work. It is mentally draining, it is emotionally wretched, it is gruelling, and it causes long term personal harm to many people who do it -- and all that is in the absolute best of cases. I've tried for years to think of a way to get this across to people.

The vast majority of policy changes I've seen proposed for the AO3 assume, openly or implicitly, that the people using the site will voluntarily comply and enforcement of the policies will just work out under the existing structure. This is a fatal flaw to those proposals.

This is all without even getting into the ways any change will be weaponized as a fresh vector for abuse (if you can't think of at least half a dozen ways your proposed change will be weaponized and design around them, the proposal isn't thought through enough).

But just purely on an enforcement level, many of the proposals I see would require people from marginalized groups to immerse themselves in reports of content that attacks their particular marginalization in order to enforce the tagging/warning/etc being proposed.

There is no content policy without enforcement. There is no enforcement without people. With content about racism and oppression, that enforcement can be done by the group being oppressed, with associated trauma infliction, or by people without experience in the oppression...

...And without as much of the cultural competency necessary to determine whether the content that isn't in the "bright line" of your bright line test is oppressive content. Those are your two choices. They both fucking suck.

The problem is not unsolvable, but when you're talking about an enforcement team that is unpaid volunteer labor working for an organization that historically has had problems with communication and whose volunteer satisfaction and retention is so bad, a solution is really hard.

The changes to OTW operation and governance that would be necessary for the enforcement of a content policy around content containing expressions of oppression to be ethical, without reproducing that oppression, are valuable changes. But they must come first.

Otherwise you are both feeding marginalized people into the trauma work of addressing and enforcing those content policies, and implicitly promising readers a safeguard you can't deliver on. That is not antiracist.

The majority of effective antiracist changes AO3 desperately needs to make don't look like they're antiracist changes, because they revolve around letting users control what they see and who can contact them. There is A LOT that needs to be done there.

Advocating for those changes is, IMO, the single most effective option at the moment, because they would actually lower the enforcement burden (right now the enforcement of "don't contact me" is all done manually) as well as lower harassment, both individual and systemic.

But if you take one thing from this thread, let it be this: ToS enforcement work is much, MUCH worse than you think it is. A platform needs to reduce the number of reports its team gets, not make changes that will increase them.