Yes, what would you like to ask.
Please help. Any little bit helps me pay off my medical debt.
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Not checking notifs, not checking anything. This is the platform I have the biggest reach on, so I’m making a post about this here. Please do help this poor soul that does not deserve anything that is coming his way.
A Brazilian YouTuber named Core has had his image associated with a school shooting by none other than a documentary aired on HBO Max. But it gets deeper than that. They used his image, his channel and his videos WITHOUT PERMISSION to showcase “how children can get groomed”. He has never done anything. I’m not even going to get into the whole “content creators are not babysitters and parents should monitor kids’ access to the internet” thing because that doesn’t even matter, they shouldn’t have used his image, full stop. I am going to come into contact with a Brazilian creator that has made a video on the matter to translate or caption his video to English so I can better inform you all.
This is disgusting and I have enough empathy to be suffering just thinking about what Core must be going through. He is the most gentle content creator I have ever seen on YouTube. The documentary does not try to call him a groomer - rather using his channel as an example of how children in the comments can meet groomers.
I know no one probably cares about this on Tumblr especially because there’s not a lot of Brazilian people in here, but if any of you see this, please at least sign the petition to have the episode of the documentary taken down. His image is damaged forever already.
He does not deserve this. This is Fake News. This man could be killed because of this, and he has already said he’s been followed out in the street. He is innocent.
I may take a very long hiatus from Tumblr and literally all other blogging platforms and forums and social medias and messaging apps that are not WhatsApp (family, friends and other important things). I really really need to focus for the ENEM and only taking away Instagram is not helping.
So this is a preemptive goodbye before I get home and really take the time to log off everything and uninstall everything. So yeah. See y'all after the first day of the ENEM which is on the funny day (November 5th).
Pokémon Human Character Tournament: THE FINAL SHOWDOWN
TIESWEEP
Jessie - 49.6%
James - 50.4%
Guys we need them to tie please we must
Blackspotted Puffer (dog face pufferfish)
Here he is inflated
scientists were right that pufferfish can dogface
queers ! I was looking at the tags on the original post of this and it got me curious to see actual numbers
idgaf if y'all "reblog for a bigger sample size" but if you're curious like me, it'd definitely help lol
Juneteenth is about Black people who were officially technically supposed to be freed from enslavement. Nobody else. Nothing else. It's not a POC day. It's not a "freedom for all" day. It's Black folk, Black culture, Black emancipation, SPECIFICALLY. Any other observation for Juneteenth is gentrification.
hey so uhhhhh just a heads up: ao3 may or may not be in deep legal trouble. specifically for mistreatment of volunteers and lax compliance with certain laws, afaict.
i highly recommend you back up any stories you have and any favorite stories/authors you'd miss.
here's how i'm doing it:
- download calibre. it's an open source ebook reader. link here.
- it has a plugin called fanficfare. download that here.
- open calibre and go to the dropdown next to "Settings", and then select "Get plugins to enhance calibre"
- Find and install FanFicFare (sort by title and scroll down to F to find it easier)
- go to the dropdown menu next to the fanficfare icon in the top bar and select "Get story URLs from Web Page"
- when prompted for a URL, you can post any URL that displays a list of stories, e.g. "https://archiveofourown.org/users/[username]/bookmarks?page=7" or "https://archiveofourown.org/series/[number]" or "https://archiveofourown.org/users/[username]/pseuds/[username]/works"
- click "Yes", then wait for it to gather the metadata and download the stories (you can give it another URL to grab stories from once it's done with gathering the metadata if you want)
- it will give you a little popup in the lower right corner once it's done, telling you how many it was able to download (usually all of them) and how many it didn't.
- if it misses one or two, you can click to see the details and find out which one didn't get downloaded, and go back to the page you got it from and download those yourself if you want.
- tell it to update your library.
- voila! all the stories on that page are now backed up on your computer.
notes: it will skip any fics that are locked to archive users only (the ones with a blue padlock next to the author's name in the listing), and you'll have to go back and grab those yourself. if your whole account is under archive lock, i highly recommend unlocking it for the duration of the time it takes to grab and download them (a few minutes to a few hours, depending on whether you have <20 or multiple hundreds like i do lol) before locking them again.
back up everything you love!! back up everything you moderately like!! back up anything you wouldn't like to lose!! even if the ao3 mess pans out to nothing, it's always good to have a "just in case".
link to a twit thread with more details shared by op in the comments:
ALT
It's best if you read the thread and come to your own conclusions since there's a lot of information, and I hate that Twitter's character limit makes this obnoxious as fuck to read.
What I'm getting from this is basically AO3s legal team are Copyright Law lawyers, but they don't have any Website lawyers. These are two different branches of laws to know, and the Copyright lawyers are playing a role they're not suited for.
These Copyright lawyers who are not equipped to be Website lawyers are the people the Trust and Safety team have to run all their decisions through. This is why your harassment cases and legitimate complaint forms take forever to process and more often than not they do nothing about it.
OTW who runs AO3 is systemically fucked, and are taking no steps to unfuck the process that allows extremely illegal non-fictional CSAM and racist conduct to grow and be preserved under their watch. And this is with them working with a surplus of donation money they could use to get real Website lawyers.
There's more in the thread I can't/don't feel the need to summarize. All statements are for what's considered feasible legal conduct of the organization and the site and NOT about content policing.
TL:DR- OTW is in a dangerous spot legally due to their own negligence and incompetence for how the site is systemically run. (Conduct, not content!) Nothing will happen until an official investigation is led by some department, and/or a group of volunteers go and lawyer up. If a process for this course of action has already begun or not is currently unknown. Don't panic, but feel free to preserve what you can as things develop and are revealed.
My own note, you can actually download stories locked to Archive Users Only in calibre, if you have an AO3 account, it just takes an extra step to log into AO3 through Calibre:
Go into Fanficfare > Configure Fanficfare > Select the personal.ini tab > edit personal.ini
Scroll down to the password section (Probably don’t actually have to do this, but I am a neat freak)
Paste this, replacing the generic with your login and password:
[www.archiveofourown.org]
username:youruserID
password:yourpassword
##default is false
is_adult:true
Click Okay, restart calibre, should be able to access now.
Having read the thread, along with a number of other connected threads, there is no reason the believe AO3 is going to go down
(that's not to say you shouldn't back up your own fics, or save copies of other people's fics for personal use, it's always a good idea to have backups)
the linked thread is discussing institutional problems with OTW's Legal and Policy & Abuse committees (although the latter primarily in the ways the thread's author believes they are being negatively impacted by legal)
It's primarily a conversation about the OTW having structural problems and being slow to react/change when needed, but three accusations of specific breaches of the law which could get the OTW into trouble are made:
- That the OTW does not retain works PAC identify as containing CSAM/CSEM for the legal minimum period of 90 days
- That the OTW suspends rather than deletes the accounts of those identifies as being under 13 so that they can restore the account once the user is over the minimum user age, which is a breach of COPPA
- Same as above, but this is a breach of GDPR
None of these could get AO3 taken down, and 2 of them are provably untrue
Systems have confirmed the first point is not true. While works are not retained on the archive for the 90 days, the archive keeps complete back-ups for longer than that, so the work can be restored if needed by the authorities. This is, as rahaeli points out, a pretty inefficient way of handling things, but being inefficient is not a breach of the law
Rahaeli corrects themself in their own thread when they realise that COPPA does not apply to the specific type of non-profit AO3 is, so that's moot
The GDPR point is slightly more complicated. I'm not a lawyer, but I work in the finance industry in the UK handling massive quanities of personal data, so I am required by law to be trained on GDPR.
Email addresses are not automatically personal data under GDPR. They can be, but only if they contain other personal information. So if your email is brony47@gmail, that's not personal data. If it's john.smith@company it is, because it contains your wallet name and employer. So, while it's fairly unlikely when dealing with AO3 accounts belonging to under 13s, especially as school issued emails are basically never wallet names because they just deal with too many people for that to be sustainable, it is technically possible that retaining this info is a breach of GDPR.
However, even if AO3 was found to have breached GDPR, that would not result in the website being taken down with no warning or fics being purged. That's not how any of this works.
AO3 would face fines (I don't actually know how those fines work for non-profits, since they're usually a % of annual turnover - I assume donations would be treated as turnover for the ICO's purposes, but I may be wrong about that).
It's possible that fine could be steep enough that the archive couldn't meet server costs and would ultimately need to shut down, but the ICO do not possess the ability to shut the site down, and AO3 owns its own servers so if the worst happened and the archive shut down, they would have plenty of time to warn people. It would not just vanish, that's not what the ICO does.
(The specific affected account would be need to be deleted, but since it would already be suspended and invisible to users, that would not affect any end-users)
(Also the entire process of it going through the ICO and being debated to get to the point of the fine would probably take at least a year, this is a massive pan-european beauracratic body, it is not famous for its efficiency)
None of this is me saying rahaeli doesn't have valid points, or that reform isn't needed, generally I agree that it is, and I think rahaeli's suggestions about what to change sound reasonable, although I'm not an expert and not on either of the affect teams, so that's just some rando's opinion.
But the this post is not about that, this post is about people worrying about the archive being taken down, and again, that is not what is going on here!