OTW Fannews: Uncomfortable Topics

[otw_staff]

Fandom can't avoid uncomfortable topics but instead is part of the dialogue and process: http://bit.ly/1kWbIaG

Comments

Re: Hello Elizabeth

[elizabeth_rice]

Okay, so just to confirm: not outside of AO3/OTW committees?

Re: Hello Elizabeth

[otw_staff]

No, definitely not. We've seen cases where people discuss their own Abuse incidents publicly and there have been times where people have contacted other OTW committees on their own about an Abuse case, but Abuse itself does not discuss specifics of a case outside of their committee.

Re: Hello Elizabeth

[elizabeth_rice]

That's not really the question that I'm asking.

Okay, hypothetical example. Let's say you made a complaint about me to Abuse. The Abuse team contacts me. Will any member of the Abuse team reveal to me that you were the one who made the complaint against me? Will they actually name you, tell me your username and email address etc?

And let's also say that you're not a volunteer/staff member for OTW/AO3. Let's say that you're just a regular AO3 user in this hypothetical situation.

Re: Hello Elizabeth

[mattylynne]

Hi, I'm matty, the Abuse chair!

Abuse does not identify the the person who reported the case unless it's relevant to the situation. In the hypothetical example above, we'd simply say something like, "The Abuse Committee has received a complaint alleging that you have [uploaded problematic content, whatever]." Even if the user asked, we would not give them any information concerning who made the report.

If the identity of the reporter was relevant to the case, for example a harassment case where someone is targeting a specific user, then we might have to include the reporter's username so we can address the issue. We would only ever mention usernames though, we would never pass along email addresses or other privileged information.

We treat reports from AO3 volunteers/staffers the exact same way we handle reports from users. We would never say, "A wrangler/support/coder/etc reported you for [uploaded problematic content, whatever]."

Users are always welcome to send in anon Abuse reports, though it's helpful to send us all the data we need in the initial ticket since we won't have a way to contact anon reporters if we need more information.

Re: Hello Elizabeth

[elizabeth_rice]

Thank you, this was very helpful.