synonymous

Please do not bother azarias about anything in this post. I am collecting everything they have said into one place so all the information can be cleanly laid out. I am not them nor am I attempting to speak on behalf of them.

Not all anonymous comments about PAC are azarias, but any comment where they refer to themselves as PAC CSEM nonny is (more than likely) them.

Successive blockquotes under a sourced thread indicate a thread, as in, comments from multiple people.

WARNING: Discussion of Child Sexual Exploitation Material (referenced frequently in passing)

Please see these posts for follow-up: 1 2

Initial comments on FFA

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1. PAC does remove serial harassers from the site. The harassment policy needs a substantial overhaul, the tools for tracking harassers need to be much better, and PAC needs a lot more person-hours than it typically has available. But PAC very much does yeet serial harassers off the site whenever they can.

2. Having a slur in your name isn't a TOS violation and PAC can't do anything about it. If the slur is aimed at a particular user, or accompanied by a threat, PAC can usually act, but only by applying other TOS rules to it. A policy specifically about usernames would have to come from Legal, and Legal would want to out it in the TOS. Until it does, PAC's hands are somewhat tied.

3. PAC already has workflows set up that auto-sort the majority of tickets by category. (One committee member decided to make herself a wizard with the ticketing system and dug into the features to improve the committee's workflow.) Having a drop-down category or otherwise more informative reporting form wouldn't be a bad idea, necessarily, but the lack of one is not greatly hampering PAC's mission. That's not one of the bottlenecks.

...

What gets to be on the site is the decision of Legal. It used to be the decision of Legal and Content, but Content was effectively a subdivision of Legal and the committees formally merged earlier this year. PAC can only interpret the TOS, not add to it. If the TOS doesn't cover something a user does, then the user isn't breaking the TOS and PAC can't act against them. So you can call yourself 88HitlerLover88 or the n-word and PAC can't stop you unless you give them enough rope to ban you from the site entirely.

From my admittedly limited understanding, the org chooses to err on the side of PAC doing too little, rather than giving PAC too much power that can be abused. Since PAC can remove content and ban users, the opportunities for abuse are many and PAC has a lot of speedbumps in place. Hence why actually setting policy is largely another committee's job. It's not a good system. It's frustrating as hell to try to enforce policy that way. But it's what it is.

There was an ongoing effort to update the TOS last year, but I don't know what the expected completion date of that is, and I don't know how much of this the update will address.

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I don't know to what extent Legal is intentionally keeping broad influence over other committees versus to what extent it's a feeling among other key people in the org that they ought to. I wouldn't expect Legal to tell any chair, "Don't consult us on this, we don't care." I do know that, depending on the Legal person answering questions, many of them are clear in a lawyerly way that their answers are, "Well, this is what the law/the TOS says" and not necessarily, "This is what your committee should do about it." They did sometimes overturn specific PAC decisions, but that was rare.

I do know from bitter personal experience that Legal has the power to suspend or expel any member of any committee (maybe not Board?) without consulting that committee's chairs. I don't think all chairs know that.

...

I didn't want to make this public because it only affected me and there are bigger fish to fry, but Denise's comments on how the org spoke to her during the CSEM spam attacks has made me realize the entire situation was more fucked up than I knew at the time.

Legal did not technically expel me from the org. Legal suspended me from the org on the 6th of May last year, two days after the initial attack. They let me back in two months later, but at that point my morale was gone and so was any momentum that would have kept me plodding on. I wound up just flaking on the committee and resigning a few months later without creating any of the documentation I said I would.

As for why, I'm not sure. I kind of have a hunch that they suspected me of being behind the attacks, but they denied it when I asked why I was suspended and I can't prove that they're lying. Here's the timeline:

4 May 2022, initial CSEM spam targeted OTW volunteers. The org locked down AO3's admin panel and other vulnerable spots, and did a force log-out of everyone from Slack. We were let back into Slack a couple of hours later after resetting our passwords. Slack became the central comms hub for news and mutual support. Unfortunately, it became clear that the attacker had ongoing access to Slack.

6 May, Slack and some other tools kick me out. I get notified that my Slack and Zoho (PAC's ticketing software) accounts have been deleted and I've been unsubscribed from various internal mailing lists. I assumed this was part of further efforts to secure the org's systems. As a couple of days passed, I was confused as to why there hadn't been any follow-up when the first outage was only hours long, but I know how long it takes for things to happen at the org, so I wasn't too worried.

8 May, you can see me in this thread surprised to learn that Slack isn't actually down: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/545160.html?thread=3311977608#cmt331

11th May, having heard nothing, I emailed Board, Legal, and my PAC chairs asking what was going on. I was pretty snippy about it, because by this time I was upset at the lack of communication.

Betsy the Legal chair responded We apologize. This was a move made specifically at Legal’s request, and we mistakenly thought someone had communicated with you about it – it is entirely our fault.

Don’t worry, you are not a suspect. We disabled your account temporarily as an emergency measure in an excess of caution because we thought, based on some timing coincidences, that it may have been compromised.

The rest of her message was telling me to change my passwords if I had reused the ones from Slack etc. (n.b. I use a password manager and randomized passwords. I didn't know what my passwords were and I still don't.)

I sent back another snippy response commenting on their lack of communication. Then I heard nothing. For two months.

22 July, I sent another email asking about my status. Betsy responded:

A well-timed question! We asked Volcom to reinstate your Slack access today which sure seems like a coincidence.

And then I was back in. All my accounts had been deleted, so my new accounts were fresh. My slack logs were gone, etc. My chairs pulled me into a private chat and apologized for what had happened. They told me that they were not consulted. They were given less than an hour's notice I was being suspended. They weren't told why, and their objections were overruled. They were told specifically not to speak to me or about me during the suspension. They weren't previously aware that Legal could unilaterally suspend a PAC volunteer.

Now, what makes me wonder about Legal's motivation is that some of this is nonsense. Being ordered to pretend I don't exist is strange if I wasn't under suspicion. Even if they worried my OTW accounts were compromised, my chairs and indeed the Board itself had my IRL personal contact details. Further, if my accounts had been compromised, then there may have been useful evidence of the attacker's location, means, or identity that deleting my accounts either erased or made accessible only by going through the service provider, like Slack, which can be an onerous process compared to an administrator just being able to look at the account directly. And the silence was deafening.

Anyhow, it sucked. I'm sure there were people glad to see me gone, and I can't say people who disliked me were unjustified, but the way they did it was nonsensical and cruel. And perhaps more importantly, the process they used went against the usual understanding of how the org works.

...

For what it's worth, I didn't have info on the investigation and I wasn't seeking any. I dealt with instances of CSEM on the Archive, but this situation was far above my paygrade. At most I told some other volunteers what to regarding deleting their cookies and saved images, where to look for their country/state's reporting rules (in some places everyone is a mandated reporter of CSEM), and gave them the usual speech on how it's not your fault you saw this, you're a victim of a crime. More or less what I said in the PAC channel a couple months earlier when we were targeted by a similar but less extensive attack, probably by the same attacker. That one I was involved in documenting and reporting to NCMEC, but mostly the chairs handled the investigation.

...

I spoke to L (the team busy bee) when I got back in and she told me the same. And the three chairs who were active at the time all told me they'd been forbidden from explaining it. It's fucked up that Legal didn't even tell the team what was going on - I know volunteer disciplinary stuff is confidential, but at least in theory I wasn't being disciplined and I would have given Legal permission to tell y'all if they'd asked.

The other time I know of someone being removed from the team for disciplinary reasons (years ago), the team was told it had happened, though we were very reasonably not given details and were asked not to speculate. That removal was also, importantly, a decision that was initiated by the chairs, not a separate committee.

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Your solution also necessitates changes to the TOS, which requires Legal. I'm not trying to be facetious here but based on the last thread, Legal's argument is apparently that anything not currently forbidden by the TOS (or can be interpreted as not permitted) is allowed on the site. Ayrt is saying that because usernames that aren't directly threatening are included in that "anything is allowed", for that to change requires the TOS to be changed too. Maybe the change could be something like adding a Code of Conduct! But it's still a change, and they've been "working on" changing it for three years now.

This. PAC can try to apply existing rules to a problem. A pretty common question the committee debated was, "Is this a fanwork or non-fanwork?" or, "Does this count as harassment or is the user just being offensive or a jerk?". Those aren't the only rules, of course, but they were aming the ones we most frequently had to apply. We couldn't always honestly answer "yes" to questions like that for things we would prefer to take down. In cases where there was no applicable policy at all, the default was to call it a non-violation and reject the complaint.

Legal did sometimes directly overrule a decision PAC made, but tbh that was relatively rare. More commonly, when we lacked a policy, we'd ask Legal, and they'd tell us if the TOS could do anything about it. As precedent piled up, we asked Legal less and less because we had older decisions we could refer to. But a username policy was something I personally asked for for several years in response to getting a few tickets about some quite nasty ones, and I never saw progress on it. Ditto an icon policy. The only existing icon policy is that it must be SFW. This was interpreted mostly to mean no sex, and there were edge cases there with fetish content that did not involve nudity or more obvious sexual poses. Applying this policy to hate symbols in icons was difficult and inconsistent.

If the OTW gave me the chance to make one change to the Archive, it'd be a username policy, because it's silly not to have one. A more detailed icon policy would be my second wish.

As a reminder, my info is a year out of date at this point and anything I say might no longer be true, however given how long it takes the org to do things, I'd be surprised if NOTHING I've said here was still true.

...the idea that PAC can't change small details of the content or conduct policies that interpret the TOS without Legal's approval is fucking insane. You would not need to change the TOS to prohibit slurs in usernames! It is included under "any behavior that produces a generally hostile environment for its target" and it is explicitly prohibited by the TOS already! But even if it weren't, the TOS for any website allows a wide amount of enforcement discretion in how individual words are interpreted!

We tried to keep decisions in-house as much as possible because going to Legal was a PITA, only chairs could do it and only chairs could read the emails, and Legal's decisions weren't always things that were easy to enforce. Personally I preferred to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission as much as possible. Sometkmes it was unavoidable though.

The default assumption is that anything not forbidden in the TOS is allowed. This is one of the things that "maximum inclusiveness of content" means. AO3 will err on the side of allowing rather than forbidding, keeping rather than deleting, and not acting rather than acting.

The good side of this that it's VERY difficult for a fan with a grudge to get on PAC and misuse their power to punish her fandom enemies or take down content she dislikes. As I understand it, preventing that scenario has always been one of the major concerns.

You do not need to revise the TOS except when there is a major change in the law of the country you're incorporated in. The idea that you do is just perpetuating this weird idea Legal apparently has where everything has to be explicitly spelled out in there and they can't change any policy without changing the TOS and having it go through sixteen layers of lawyers. Just change the policies! Half of what's in the AO3 TOS shouldn't be in there anyway because it belongs in the non-legally-binding community guidelines anyway!

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It sounds like Legal also thinks they're necessary for everything. Like it really sounds like Legal would throw a fit if the PAC chairs decided to enforce things more strictly.

Bonnie who originally said it sounds like Legal is functioning as the unelected, unaccountable head of the OTW: that was precisely what I meant, yes. Every organizational dysfunction that people have talked about on meme in the last few weeks seems to boil down to Legal serving as the de facto shadow Board.

To jump issues not because I think they're comparable severity but because it's an example of what I mean: I just can't make myself believe Comms would have published that "make the AIs kiss" blog post if it had been anyone other than Betsy who wrote it because surely someone would have said "this is a flippant treatment of an issue people really care about, maybe let's not". The fact Legal can hand Comms something that tone-deaf and Comms feels like they have to post it and then get stuck cleaning up from people being furious about it means Comms feels they can't say no to Legal even when they are acting outside the scope of their legal advice. It very much feels like Legal is used to giving orders that the rest of the org has to obey (and requiring that they approve things that don't need to be approved) instead of giving advisory opinions that are one factor in decision making. That is very, very bad governance.

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DA

I was on PAC, but a while ago, so take my out-of-date personal opinions with a grain of salt. I handled many harassment tickets, and I found the harassment policy as written and enforced to be vague and insufficient to cope with even very common harassment scenarios.

In theory, the vagueness of the harassment policy is necessary, because it gives PAC the ability to respond to unanticipated forms of harassment and to cope with grey areas. If there were an extremely detailed list of what counts as harassment, harassers would immediately figure out how to game the list and make their victim's life miserable without technically violating the policy.

In practice, PAC is just as underresourced, bureaucratic, opinion-driven, inflexible, and incapable of foresight as the rest of the OTW. This isn't so much because of personalities involved. Most members of PAC in my time were earnest and willing in a way that would make the most OEA pale. It's just how the org works.

For example, insults and accusations aimed at other fans are allowed in tags as long as they don't involve violent rhetoric or name a particular fan to harass. (Again, my info is out of date and this might not be the case anymore, but it was an issue for years.) Tags also don't have to be accurate except for a few specific tags, so you're allowed to use intentionally misleading tags to bait particular groups of fans into reading content they want to avoid. Obviously this leaves lots of room for bad-faith use of tags! The reason policy is so flimsy in this area is that the AO3 TOS says that AO3 won't tell you how to tag, except in very specific areas. Legal and Content, which are now the same committee and always kind of were, told us we were not allowed to do anything that could be interpreted as telling a user how to tag, and had to use the lightest possible hand in responding to blatant tag harassment such as death threats. This isn't because Legal loves tag harassment, but because the TOS is a legally binding document and there may be consequences for the Archive and the Org if we violate it. And because it's the work of years to make even minor changes to the TOS, PAC can't just decide on its own to expand the harassment policy to cover emergent forms of harassment.

Another example is that AO3 has no written username policy whatsoever, and the only icon policy is that icons must be SFW. We were able to apply other policies to respond to SOME cases of harassment via usernames and icons, but not others. For example, we could act on impersonation usernames, or accounts with usernames that insulted or threatened a particular user. We could act on usernames that blatantly threatened a particular group, like xX_kill_all_[ethnicity]_Xx, but could do nothing about HitlerLover1488. We could SOMETIMES justify taking down a hate symbol icon, but usually couldn't.

tl;dr PAC can only interpret what's in the TOS, with guidance from Legal. PAC can't make up policies for situations the TOS doesn't address, and the TOS is not/can't be updated quickly enough to address emergent harassment in a timely manner. I don't trust the people behind this protest at all, but that doesn't mean they're wrong or that all their suggestions are bad. I dislike the possibility that the OTW will use the bad faith of some protestors as a reason to dig its heels in further. My info is out of date and all my specific examples may not be problems anymore, but afaik the systemic issues that caused them are still around.

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Out of date info ahead. All of this has hopefully been changed, but was status quo for a considerable time.

It seems like PAC really isn't autonomous; I'd be curious to know what their internal triage

There was no formal system for prioritizing tickets, but there was a general understanding that, e.g., a ticket about harassment is more important than a wrong fandom tag, and gentle encouragement to handle the oldest tickets first.

or escalation processes are

A volunteer could always ask a more senior volunteer for help, or flag a chair. When users appealed a decision, another volunteer who wasn't involved in the original decision reviewed all evidence and commented on the decision. Chairs didn't have much free bandwidth, so we tried to flag them only for topics where we were stumped or where it seemed like someone in charge needed to be involved, like alleged misconduct by a PAC member. There were a few topics chairs told us to always hand over to them, and chairs would try to keep apprised of active tickets and step in if they saw a need or thought we were going off track. Chairs' ability to do that effectively was limited by the large volume of tickets and small number of active chairs. I was never a chair, so I don't know what chair policies were for escalating above their own heads.

Every response to tickets required at least two volunteers to agree to it and note their agreement on the ticket, so that no single volunteer could just enact their own opinions. We also frequently discussed policies and tickets in the committee Slack channel, and there was a pretty good atmosphere of discussion and collaboration, though achieving consensus could be sometimes rocky. Most volunteers were good at asking for help.

if they actually have written checklists and guidelines for enforcement

We heavily relied on institutional knowledge of long-term volunteers, training by chairs, and searching for precedents in prior cases. There were some explanatory notes attached to templates for common issues. If we really couldn't figure it out, chairs would ask Legal or Content, but we tried to avoid that because it's slow and because Legal could really only tell us what we're allowed to do, not what is a good idea to do.

Overall, we would err on the side of doing too little rather than doing too much, because of the goal of maximum inclusiveness of content and because there's concern that a PAC member with a personal grudge or cavalier attitude could do a lot of damage to users.

I think it was all deeply flawed, but at least kept the committee staggering along rather than collapsing.

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I've been trying to find out if the org provided any counselling resources to volunteers affected by the CSEM attackers last year. I feel like if they had, I would have had somebody say yes by now.

...

SA. Realized that came off weird. Looking at the resource channel provided, what we were given did mostly consist of 1) various amateur emotional support from other volunteers (including the chairs, who I think were doing their best but who had no resources available), 2) a list of psychological crisis contact info, and 3) some purely practical stuff about locking down social media in case they went through with the doxxing threat. AO3 did not pay for counseling for anyone, including the people who were directly sent CSEM and the people who were threatened with doxxing by name (that includes me), and I frankly can't imagine them ever doing that. By the time they could actually get it set up, it'd be far too late, and they know that.

Nonny, they had warning. A similar event happened a couple of months earlier, probably the same person doing it, but it only affected PAC. PAC warned Support because Support uses the same ticketing system, and the chairs told Legal and Board what was happening. I handled reporting it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (who I have to say weren't at all helpful) for PAC and to my state's law enforcement (the sergeant I spoke with at least gave some useful advice). Chairs also spent multiple frustrating days trying to talk to Zoho about it, to no useful results.

The attacker escalating to affect more volunteers was predictable, and the Org sat with its thumb up its ass instead. I'm very sorry you were directly threatened. That did not have to happen.

...

I don't blame the org for not knowing what to do the first time. Like I said, PAC did sometimes deal with CSEM and CSEM-adjacent materials on AO3, and the org really should have had better tools, procedures, and volunteer support for those. However, I don't blame ANYBODY for not anticipating that someone would actually send us CSEM and try to trick us into seeing it because they were mad at us. That's a level of vicious and depraved behavior you just don't expect.

But when it happened to PAC the first time, that was the org's warning they needed to prepare for it to happen again. When it happened to PAC a second time, we expected it to continue, and we expected more committees to eventually get hit once the attacker figured out the right email addresses to target.

The org-wide attack was the third time, months later, and completely forseeable. The org just ... sat there, I guess.

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Admin logs who makes changes to an account (such as suspending) but not who looks at one in the admin panel. That's why the org locked everyone out of admin right away when the CSAM attacks happened, because if the spammer got admin access they would be able to see user data and it would be hard to figure out what they'd seen if they were smart about it and didn't make changes to accounts.

The GOOD news is that AO3 collects very little data on users. Seriously, AO3 does not want your private data. It would be very hard to doxx a person with admin info, though it would have been easy to send them CSEM. The BETTER news is that afaik the spammer didn't get within a mile of user data, it got locked down TIGHT right away, and the org has become a loooooot more paranoid about who gets admin access in response. They might even have instituted better logging, I have no way of knowing. Still, I would have preferred it to be better-protected than it was while I was there.

I have to imagine there are logs on a server somewhere, because don't servers log who accesses pages? Probably ADT could find out if they really needed to? But it wasn't logged in any systematized way, and not accessing data for shits and giggles if you had admin access was on the honor system. Most volunteers did not have admin access, but all of PAC did.

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PAC CSEM nonny here. I don't want to be too harsh on Legal overall. To whatever extent they're overinvolved in the org, it's not because they forced themselves on the rest of us, but rather it's how the whole complicated bureaucratic mess that is the org shaped up. I certainly don't want to accuse any of them of professional misconduct as attorneys. On the rare occasions I got to directly see what they said, they were quite clear on what they were saying and what they were not saying, and when they were or were not directing us to do specific things. To my knowledge, they used their best professional judgment at all times.

However, as I've mentioned, their advice did not always make enforcement easy. Here are two examples of where Legal's decisions made my life harder with CSEM tickets. One is photoshopping the heads of real minors onto explicit images of adult pornographic actors. The other is including gifs of pornography of unknown origin in fics about underage sex. In both cases, I wanted to disallow this content.

The photoshops I saw were generally of a very "my hed is pastede on yay" sort of quality and could not be mistaken for an actual image of real minors, but I thought allowing it was a dangerous precedent. A more skilled image editor could easily make the edit less obvious, and frankly, I didn't like having to ask myself "Is this good enough to be illegal?".

The pornographic gifs in Underage fic were more distressing to me. I can't swear that none of them involved minors. When the fic is talking about a fourteen year old getting fucked, and there's a gif of a hairless, small pussy getting rammed by an oversized cock, how the fuck am I supposed to tell if that's an adult or not? Probably it wasn't CSEM. Probably it was from regular pornography. I had no way to tell. I hated having to examine it closely. I hated having to wonder. I hated knowing I would have to find proof that it was illegal content, rather than being able to ask for proof that it wasn't. Even just asking the author to cite the source of their images would have helped, but PAC can't ask for that. I very badly wanted to ban this and could not, because Legal says gifs are transformative fanworks and Disney had recently implied it wanted to crack down on gifs. I didn't get to see their exact response, but I would guess Legal's position was based on whether or not AO3 would be liable if those gifs did turn out to be CSEM, which I see as a different question from whether or not the gifs should be allowed on the site in that context.

Damn. Sorry. I'm rambling a little. The gifs really bother me, because they were the content that made me feel most helpless to know whether or not I was doing the right thing. I have no problem with adult porn, or Underage fic, or sexual fanart of underaged characters. But I really don't like not being able to answer the question of whether or not something involving real people is CSEM.

Giving PAC (not just me alone - I would have been happy to put it to the committee) the discretion to disallow those specific kinds of content would have been very helpful and I don't think it would have gone against AO3's mission or greatly contradicted the principle of maximum inclusiveness of content. But Legal/Content (they're the same committee now and always kind of were) said no.

You will be pleased to hear that things have changed: it is now PAC policy that works with underage sex and porn gifs illustrating it are actionable, MormonBoyz watermark in the corner or no.

Comments on chestnut_pod's post:

(link) azarias:

I thought the institutional incompetence, cowardice, and viciousness I encountered while handling CSEM and up through the spam attacks was just a me thing because I have it on good authority I'm a difficult person to work with. But no! Evidently the people in power at the time were just like that! And they're mostly still in power!

Just need to emphasize here that, as I said on FFA, the PAC chairs are NOT who I mean. They were just as far in over their heads as I was, but were supportive as possible and knew it was a crap situation. And when the Legal chair kicked me out of the org during the CSEM thing (Betsy swore when I confronted her that it wasn't because she'd somehow decided I did it, but uuuuuuh there are some holes in her story) it was over my chairs' heads and without consulting them.

Anyhow! Yes! Ass-covering, buck-passing, and reputation management were the order of the day! There is stuff I did not go into in that FFA thread because I do not want to dump details of this stuff on unsuspecting people! But holy shit!

(link) azarias:

I agree, we took the ideal of confidentiality too far. By making it impossible to contact us outside of an abuse report, being as miserly as possible with the info we released while handling a report, keeping our boilers intentionally vague and at too high a reading level, and generally not having any way for the non-volunteer membership or site users to see us, we made ourselves scary and unaccountable to the community. We prevented any possibility of community review or influence over us.

Now, I know, and I hope your experience on the committee agrees with mine, that we tried our best. Not everything I just listed was our decision, even; a lot of it was imposed on us, or at least no one from the chairs on down felt empowered to change it. We were extremely conscious of what powers we had and were very concerned not to abuse it. If anything, we kept too light a hand on the Archive and gave problem users too many chances, rather than remove content or suspend users too speedily. But nobody knows that because we don't tell them.

I've long said that it is impossible to read the TOS and be able to identify a non-fanwork, or to know what the commercial promotion policy actually is. I'm not sure I know, anymore, because I've been gone a year and there have probably been more rulings made since. Users also don't know what we can do about harassment, or how to report it to us, or that we actually do care very much about preventing harassment.

Users also don't know when our policies have gotten better. Take one of the examples given by EndOTWRacism organizers: in 2014, a comment section devolved into one side directing racist abuse at the other. PAC ruled that all users were equally at fault and refused to act against any of them. PAC would not make the same ruling today. PAC wouldn't have ruled the same even in 2018. It's a different committee, one that takes harassment very seriously, even if there are still serious gaps in our approach.

But users don't know that. The users who were called slurs in 2014 have no reason to believe PAC's changed for the better and will stand up for them. Because we don't tell them.

PAC's far from perfect. The harassment policy is far from adequate. And because the org puts up big rock walls between itself and the public, it's much harder than it could be to get better.

As told by azarias

(link) azarias:

I'm PAC CSEM nonny. I'm de-anoning so that it's absolutely clear who is making this comment. Meme rules allow for me to do this because I am partially the topic of discussion. Don't worry, I don't intend to make a habit of it.

Here's what was said today in the ppen Board Slack channel that's open to all volunteers:

1) Does Legal have the authority to suspend an OTW volunteer directly without the approval of the Chairs of the committee(s) the volunteer is working for?
2) Does Board have the authority to suspend an OTW volunteer directly without the approval of the Chairs of the committee(s) the volunteer is working for?
3) Does VolCom have the authority to suspend an OTW volunteer directly without the approval of the Chairs of the committee(s) the volunteer is working for?
4) Does any suspending committee have the authority to destroy a suspended volunteer's data, including their chat logs?
5) Is the procedure covering every way a volunteer can be suspended documented anywhere so that every volunteer can access it?
6) If a volunteer is suspended, what is the process by which they can appeal their suspension? Are they provided with the document detailing this process, given that they will be locked out of the internal org wiki?
7) If there is no written documentation regarding the suspension process, who is in charge of creating it, and what is the time frame for it to be made available?

Alex:
For normal times, aka not a situation where actual crimes are going on and outside org law enforcement is involved, the CCAP link applies.

For these emergency situations we do not actually have a documented process, which is something we do need to create

(same tag wrangler)
Hi Alex, is there anything written anywhere which covers what the repercussions are when actions are taken in emergency situations which do not follow the CCAP procedures?

Alex:
No, we do not have any procedure or process about situations like this in place because nobody really predicted situations like “outside legal council recommended these steps” and since the attacks last year we got as far as identifying that we should really have those but we haven’t got around to actually creating them.

Several current volunteers have independently reached out to give me this. No, I don't know who the tag wrangler asking this is. No, it's not one of the people who passed me the transcript. The only tag wranglers I know were ones who were also on PAC, or briar_pipe, whom I can't imagine cares. Contemplate the culture of fear and silence that has caused multiple people to feel the need to keep this person's name from me, because they're worried the tag wrangler will face repercussions for asking questions about how the org works.

Here's what you need to take away from this. It's been an ENTIRE YEAR since the CSEM attack and the Board has still not got its shit together. They don't have a procedure for the next time an emergency happens. They haven't considered it important to "get around to" documenting what they've done and what they're supposed to do.

They knew months in advance that the CSEM attack was likely. They've now had twelve months to regroup after it happened. They don't have to predict anything. They just need to spend five fucking minutes giving a shit about their volunteers.

On another note, I got confirmation that my suspension was due to a faction of sitting Directors, Emerita Directors, and chairs who wanted to get rid of me (but couldn't figure out the existing process for doing it) teaming up with a faction who genuinely believed that I committed nine hundred separate felonies across three dozen international borders because I was butthurt at not getting to be the Board's paperwork bitch for the DCRO project that they desperately wish they could bury. Evidently Betsy let me back in over their objections because she wasn't willing to be the point person for a move that stupid. So, that happened.

If you're reading this and you work for the org, quit. This cannot be fixed. It will hurt you if you try. These people are utterly unserious and incompetent to the point of malice. They don't care about you.

It doesn't matter if you think I'm the most heinous bitch to ever inflict myself on the org. It's not about me. I'm not there anymore. The next time an emergency happens, they're not going to be able to deflect it onto me. They're gonna have to ble someone else. Volunteers were needlessly hurt last time. They will be needlessly hurt next time, and Board doesn't think it's worth the time to "get around to" figuring out how to tell their collective ass from their elbows. IT'S BEEN A YEAR.

If you contacted me before this and I advised you to just keep your head down and stick to the parts you enjoy, I'm sorry. I was wrong. Quit. You can still have fun in fandom. You don't have to love a thing that will never love you back.

Current PAC volunteers: Quit. You're stuck in a sick system and no one in power is interested in making it better. It doesn't have to be like this. Feeling despair about ever being able to meet your responsibilities is not normal. Being stuck at the end of a game of telephone when you need information is not normal. Having Rebecca Tushnet overturn your decisions from her seat on Legal is not normal. For every single procedure PAC uses, there is a well-known and easily-implemented right way to do it that is the exact opposite of how PAC does it.

Whoever is PAC's current CSEM bitch: Quit. Run, do not walk, for the door. My familiarity with handling CSEM was one of the factors that let Board convince themselves I was the attacker. They will do it to you. They will not help you or protect you. Quit.

Current PAC chairs, Ranowa, Aenya, Mai Daye: Quit. You don't have to keep rolling that boulder up the hill. I'm sorry for the headache me airing dirty laundry has to be causing you all, but I didn't know it was this bad. I thought it was just me being hurt, and it isn't. You can't protect the users and you can't protect your team. Quit.

Lydia, team MVP: Quit. You do two thirds of the tickets by yourself. PAC will fall apart without you. Let it. You can't keep it going by yourself. If the org can't figure out how to keep AO3 functional without you, don't make that your problem.

You can't change the OTW. Don't try.

Alex Tischer is a bully who's driven multiple volunteers out of the org with petty cruelty, for no better reason than to amuse himself.

Aline Carrao said some of the most stunningly racist shit I've ever encountered in fandom, right out on the open channels, and had sitting Board members agree with her.

Danielle Strong was calling requests for a block function to curb harassment "whining about unimportant distractions" right up until the Board was forced to promise it in June 2020.

Natalia Gruber is just a fucking idiot.

If you're going to keep giving money to AO3, stop throwing your vote away on these people.

It has been a year. Board does not give a fuck about volunteers. Quit. I'm done.

Update 13/06/2023: Recent comments about Alex Tischer on meme have been added here, corroborated due to the power they seem to have in the org. More accusational, but less informative comments have been removed, but can be found downthread in replies to this comment of azarias's (linked above).

(link)

...1. George Floyd was murdered and the Board rejected calls to say anything about it, or BLM, or racism in general. IIRC, the reasons given internally were "That's a US problem and it wouldn't be fair to our international volunteers and users to prioritize it," "It's outside the scope and mission of our organization," and Board member Alex going off on a black volunteer with accusations of trolling when she asked about it in the Board channel...

(link)

...Alex has been Board for six years now, has been chair of Webs for longer, and has publicly (open channels) and semi publicly (large locked channels) driven many people, current/former/future chairs included and some of which are the most even tempered people I know, to extremes. Nobody would call Paula even tempered, and death threats are inexcusable, but Alex doesn't shy away from (and I think they actually revel in) riling people up past the bounds of civility...

(link)

FWIW, Alex has also been going hard in favor of shutting down the Weibo, and has been a dick to Chinese volunteers over it. The idea that she's worked to make the OTW more diverse and inclusive is laughable.

This interview with Alex from 2020 may also be relevant:

Alex Tischer, in response to, presumably: "What would you do to ensure that volunteers feel supported within the OTW, especially volunteers of color and other marginalized groups who may feel that their voices go unheard??"

...Being an international organisation we must also be aware that different marginalised groups experience harassment very differently, depending on location and their own personal background, and be mindful of those differences. By taking a US-based approach, or relying on US-sourced materials, we risk only addressing an US-based concept of racism, potentially missing large groups of affected volunteers. This is counterproductive to making the OTW more diverse and inclusive, and something I believe essential to how we approach the issue at hand...

Note: Alex Tischer's pronouns are not stated anywhere that I can find.

Concerns about Paula have been moved here, due to irrelevance.

(link) azarias:

The same unknown wrangler who asked about Board procedures also asked about PAC policies.

1.) Are PAC volunteers forbidden from directly emailing Legal regarding any questions they may have about tickets they are handling? If yes, what is the reason for this rule?
2) Are PAC volunteers forbidden from seeing the email responses made by Legal to their questions?

Current PAC chair:

1. I think "forbidden" is a strong word. We ask that PAC volunteers don't directly email Legal with questions and instead give them to the chairs, so that we can do so for them. We just do this to have a more solid and lasting record of any answers that come in, to not potentially drown Legal with emails (we have a lot of tickets, a lot of volunteers, a lot of questions- best to have a bottleneck), and because we often decide policy with these emails with Legal about borderline tickets. Deciding policy for the whole committee is going to have chairs involved.
2. Again, I think "forbidden" is a strong word. Legal has asked that we do not share their word verbatim, since their advice is confidential, but can give us words directly to share either internally or externally if we ask. Additionally, we've never had an issue with summarizing Legal's position to the committee, or had any complaints that I can recall about it.

So. There you have it. Advice from Legal is confidential, not just from users but from the actual PAC volunteers they're advising. Make of that what you will.

Addendums

30/05/2023, 02:32 UTC (link)

To be clear, the the first two attacks involved someone submitting CSEM to the public Support/PAC ticket addresses, not someone with insider access sending it directly to volunteer emails. PAC did take some security measures after that, they just weren't sufficient to prevent an insider attack.

The board member said they haven't "gotten around to" revising the policies around taking action against a volunteer during an emergency like the CSEM attack (i.e. what happened to azarias), not that they haven't gotten around to taking steps to prevent an additional CSEM attack. Steps have definitely been taken on the second front. (But not on the first front, presumably because they don't actually care about what happened to Azarias.)