#she's definitely too green for the job but I really can't declare malicious intent when she could easily just be misguided

[lancrewizzard]

Okay, I've seen a lot of posts about the Tiffany G debacle. Some of them I've agreed with, some of hem I haven't, and one or two I've even reblogged, but now I feel the need to make my own.

Before we get started, I want to make it clear that I'm just some guy who decided to actually read things Tiffany has actually said, and I encourage you all to read the sources I'll link and use your own brains. As far as possible I'll stick to facts and when I stray into speculation I'll say so.

Fandom in general does still have a racism problem and more BIPOC people on the OTW board can theoretically help with that. It's not unreasonable to think some or all of the hate directed towards Tiffany does stem from sinophobia, and I did start looking into this under that assumption. There is definitely a lot of racism thrown around all sides of this debate that I've seen, but this is about Tiffany as a candidate.

There is no evidence I can see for the allegation that Tiffany is in some way a plant for the Chinese government. If no one can turn up proof of this, it's going firmly in the "racist fearmongering" category.

The rhetoric Tiffany uses in her Q&A sessions is exactly the same as what led to strikethrough. "I think a lot of external people are very concerned about the fact that some works contain child pornography, pedophilic content, and other illegal content. If possible (this is not entirely possible after I chatted with people from PAC though), I am interested in providing extra help to the PAC team and Legal team to update the ToS and policies on those." It is an objective fact that this led to censorship in fandom before. It is speculation as to whether this can happen to Ao3 which was set up specifically to avoid this, even if Tiffany's intention is what, to me, it appears to be.

Tiffany is very open about being very new to fandom in general and I believe this explains a lot of her opinions on things like "making the rating system more specific and obvious to users" (On a personal note, I do think an easy little "how to navigate Ao3" for newbies would be beneficial, but I figured out the tagging system as an idiot 15 year old with no tech literacy before exclude filters were implemented, which does make me personally question how well Tiffany understands the site)

This interview on preventing racism I think highlights Tiffany's tendency to be far too vague about what she can bring to the OTW and how she wants to change things. It also means people can interpret her words in so, so many different ways, which just isn't helping anyone.

I'm not tech literate, but Tiffany does seem to put forward practical, more specific solutions to volunteer security here, which to me shows that when she has knowledge on something, she can talk well on it, and it does contrast with her opinions on things like ToS changes, bigotry in fandom, and tagging.

I'm getting into personal feelings now, so this one is purely my subjective opinion. It would be great for the OTW to have more minority voices in high positions, but Tiffany is not the right person for that. Her inexperience and gaps in knowledge are huge and obvious, and her actual intentions are concerningly unclear or outright antithetical to Ao3's core values.

If you've got the time I highly recommend reading at least a few of the interviews collected here. You'll have a much better grasp of things than just going off tumblr posts.