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thesecrettimes · 1 year ago

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Only Web3 Social Media Can Bring Back Power to Users — Phaver CEO Joonatan Lintala

The Advantages of a Web3 Social Media Platform

Lintala, however, told Bitcoin.com News that dozens of Web3 companies are currently working towards finding solutions to drive the adoption and embrace of blockchain-based social media platforms. Meanwhile, Lintala said he sided with those asserting that Web3 social media can potentially overcome problems often seen with Web2 platforms. He said the fact that such Web3 platforms are based on “user-controlled interoperable profiles” will assure prospective users that their data will not be controlled by a few entities or used without their consent. Also, in written answers to questions sent to him via Telegram, Lintala said in the future social media users will prioritize platforms that not only treat them as stakeholders but also those that value their privacy. He said failing to align a Web3 or Web2 social media platform with these priorities may result in the loss of users and ultimately revenues. The CEO of Phaver, a platform bridging users to Web3 social networks, also shared his thoughts on the so-called Reddit fiasco and how a decentralized Reddit would have pre-empted this. Below are the CEO’s answers to the questions sent. Bitcoin.com News (BCN): During his keynote speech at the recent Ethereum Community Conference (ETHCC), Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) partner Sriram Krishnan, who has worked at Meta and Twitter, argued that Web3 social media can fix a lot of problems found on Web2-based social platforms. Do you agree with the assertion? Joonatan Lintala (JL): Most definitely. While it’s not a fix-all, just the premise of starting with user-controlled interoperable profiles alone means that nobody can, nor should, ever again yield uncontrolled power over people’s social lives and news consumption, even political discourse. Having fair competition with low barriers will also mean the next generation has to reward creators fairly, moderate ethically and transparently and listen to their users, or else someone else will build an alternative that does and users can migrate in a matter of seconds. BCN: What would you say are some of the biggest headaches and challenges faced by users of Web2 social platforms today? JL: While most users will not know the difference nor attribute these to a platform’s centralization model, the issues become most tangible when you or someone you know gets banned from any Web2 app which often results in wiping a decade of memories and relationships with no path to recovery. This actually happened even to my grandmother when she accidentally changed her age to 12 in settings. She got booted out of Facebook and Instagram mid-pandemic with recurring refusal to be let back in. Furthermore, the lack of control over what you see, how many ads you receive and where they get their highly invasive targeting data are issues even the U.S. Congress has been recently alerted to. BCN: The recent Reddit fiasco is said to have angered moderators on the platform. Can you tell us what it was all about and what the platform should have done to demonstrate fairness? JL: In a nutshell, Reddit reminded their users who’s the boss by killing the fan-favourite community app Apollo and infuriating millions of power users and moderators who had enjoyed their superior user experience. This not only became the next sad chapter in the saga of social apps screwing over their closest API partners without warning, just like Twitter did post-Elon to theirs, but also ended up with union-busting moves from the leadership. If Reddit was built on Web3 rails this would not have happened in the first place as the data Apollo and others relied on would be on-chain and open, but furthermore, if a Web3 app would strong-arm their most loyal users by threatening banishment when protesting, they would very quickly become a ghost town. Of course, the fair option regardless of your power imbalance would be to treat your users as stakeholders, not data sources, which sadly has not been seen in Web2 so far. BCN: A fair and transparent social media platform — whether it’s Web2 or Web3 — needs to ensure that the platform’s interests are aligned with those of the users. Can you explain to our readers how this can be done particularly when the platform relies on advertising revenue? JL: The key here is to treat your users as stakeholders and acknowledge that at least in the next generation of social media they actually have alternatives. While advertising will still remain an important monetization tool, it’s far from the only one, and users can in a decentralized world choose the type of platform that suits their preferences. For free and polished experiences ads are the way to go, for more private options open-source apps will be your choice and finally, the ultimate convenience and privacy will likely come with a monthly price tag. Phaver actually aims to combine all 3 in a model where users can pay to avoid ads entirely, see ethically targeted ads for a free experience, or even get subsidized themselves if they help achieve more accurate targeting and attribution by opting in. Equally important will be the model that ensures the creators are fairly compensated for their work regardless, and the in-app economy is fair to the users as much as possible. BCN: Your company Phaver is said to use proprietary off-chain posting for flexibility and ease of use. Can you tell us the upside and downside of off-chain posting? JL: The upside and downside of that is that it is just as easy as Web2 apps because it actually is one. We look at the phase of development in a very pragmatic way and it’s clear we are not yet ready for mainstream adoption of fully on-chain social media, from user experience nor from the infrastructure scalability side. This means for Phaver that our gateway to Web3 is actually in Web2, and then bit by bit moves your experience on-chain with Lens and Cyberconnect profiles backing everything up to blockchain and NFTs improving your credibility and status. In the long run, all this will be more or less on-chain but for now, we are in the era where Netflix still rented mail-in DVDs. BCN: It is said that each social media platform taps into one of the so-called seven deadly sins. For instance, Twitter is said to amplify content that triggers outrage while Instagram is known to tap into envy or things like that. Do you believe the Web3 social media platforms could be different in this regard and if so, how? JL: Web3 as such will not make social media use any less sinful, but what I believe may do is that the same content can be accessed by numerous different apps and each one makes their own choices around algos, moderation and general altruism of their actions. This will hopefully mean we will see more wholesome alternatives to Insta built to index content in a new way, less toxic Twitters that moderate and deprioritize angry rants and maybe even a TikTok alternative where we don’t have to worry about possible Chinese government influence to our feed sorting. BCN: Web2 social media platforms are often accused of misusing their power, and there are fears that Web3 platforms could eventually behave the same way when they become widely adopted. As a blockchain-powered social network, what mechanisms does Phaver have in place to assure users that it will always maintain high ethical standards? JL: I have often been jokingly asked if I hope to become the next Zuckerberg, to which I always reply that my mission is to ensure nobody will. This is ensured by, as Chris Dixon put it, ensuring that “don’t be evil” becomes “can’t be evil” when social graphs are built on publicly audited smart contracts and things like algorithms and monetization are divided among numerous entrants all tapping into the same raw data. For Phaver we take this one step further with the first company value drafted upon foundation, net positive impact. This means we’re not okay with just not being evil, we believe social media can and should be rebuilt from the ground up to be for the people, not for monetizing the people and this can actually have a massive impact around the world. The key safeguard here is that by integrating Lens protocol as the first app ever, we gave the keys back to the users and whatever we build needs to retain the users voluntarily in a fiercely competitive environment, which means we have no choice but to obsess over the best and fairest social solution out there if we want a chance to succeed. BCN: In your opinion, what is holding back prospective users from trying out Web3 social media? JL: Currently, this is limited almost entirely by the progress of technology. None of the current generation Web3 protocols are yet ready to support multi-million user levels nor are their onboarding mechanisms yet ready for mainstream adoption. The great thing about Web3 is though, that there are dozens of companies working together on every little piece of this equation and they all naturally fit together. This means that by the end of next year, we expect a new user can create their first crypto wallet with one partner upon signup, then enjoy the Phaver user experience like any other social app while smoothly proving they’re real with a decentralized ID token, buying a cool unique profile pic from an NFT marketplace, and most importantly, unlock a whole ecosystem of apps that play together nicely and each has all of your information automatically filled from your new wallet. BCN: The debate about the ethics of data usage appears to have, at least to some extent, eroded users’ trust in traditional social media platforms. What are the key lessons that Web3 social platforms can learn from such incidents? JL: When the baseline data such as follows and posts are posted on the blockchain, that actually makes them public by default, which on the other hand can be scary but also levels the playing field and ensures that if you want to encrypt it you can and have to do so in a way that allows you to fully control who unlocks that piece of information, such as encrypted posts. Web3 as such, again, does not make your privacy any better, but it means the apps have more to lose if they invade your privacy or handle your data carelessly. What are your thoughts about this interview? Let us know what you think in the comments section below. Read the full article

#bcn #Cyberconnect #DVDs #Experience #facebook #Instagram #media #Netflix #NFTs #social #Telegram #Web2 #web3

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sardlaw · 2 years ago

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AI porn is easy to make now

The content she shares does not contain nude photos, she says. However, someone on the internet created and used a QTC Cinderella likeness of her in computer-generated porn. Earlier this month, celebrity streamer Brandon Ewing admitted that he had seen these images on a website containing thousands of other deep fakes, citing a growing threat in the AI age, namely that technology is a new threat targeting women. It attracted attention for creating tools.

"Those who say it's no big deal don't know how it feels to send family a picture of themselves doing something they've never done before," Cinderella said in a live streaming video. rice field.

Broadcasters usually do not reveal her real name and only use a pseudonym. Cinderella did not respond to a separate request for comment. She said in a live stream that her response to the case was "heartbreaking" and shouldn't be part of her job.

Until recently, creating realistic ai porn required computer skills. Thanks to new easy-to-use AI tools, anyone with access to images of a victim's face can now create realistic-looking explicit content using AI-generated bodies. Abuse experts say incidents of harassment and extortion are likely to increase as malicious actors use AI models to humiliate targets ranging from celebrities to ex-lovers to even children.

Women have few ways to protect themselves and victims have few recourse, they say.

In 2019, an analysis by AI firm DeepTrace Technologies found that 96% of deepfakes on the internet were pornographic content, and virtually all pornographic deepfakes featured women. Since then, the presence of deep fakes has proliferated, but law enforcement and educators have been slow to respond, said Daniel Citron, a law professor and online abuse expert. Only her three states in the US have laws against deepfake porn.

Criminals didn't need powerful machine learning to create deep fakes. Deepfakes were already easy to create with “face swap” apps available in the Apple and Google app stores. But the latest wave of AI makes deepfakes more accessible, and the models can be hostile to women in novel ways.

Since these models learn what to do by ingesting billions of images from the internet, they can reflect societal biases, sexualizing images of women by default, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in analyzing digital images. As AI-generated images improve, Twitter users have asked if the images pose a financial threat to consensually made adult content, such as the service OnlyFans where performers willingly show their bodies or perform sex acts.

Deepfakes` harm is amplified by the public response

People viewing explicit images of you without your consent — whether those images are real or fake — is a form of sexual violence, said Kristen Zaleski, director of forensic mental health at Keck Human Rights Clinic at the University of Southern California. Victims are often met with judgment and confusion from their employers and communities, she said. For example, Zaleski said he used to work with a teacher in a small town who lost his job after his parents found out ai generated porn was being made without the teacher's consent.

parents

The growing supply of deepfakes is driven by demand: Following Ewing`s apology, a flood of traffic to the website hosting the deepfakes caused the site to crash repeatedly, said independent researcher Genevieve Oh. The number of new videos on the site almost doubled from 2021 to 2022 as AI imaging tools proliferated, she said. Deepfake creators and app developers alike make money from the content by charging for subscriptions or soliciting donations, Oh found, and Reddit has repeatedly hosted threads dedicated to finding new deepfake tools and repositories.

Asked why it hasn`t always promptly removed these threads, a Reddit spokeswoman said the platform is working to improve its detection system. “Reddit was one of the earliest sites to establish sitewide policies that prohibit this content, and we continue to evolve our policies to ensure the safety of the platform

Machine learning models can also spit out images depicting child abuse or rape and, because no one was harmed in the making, such content wouldn`t violate any laws, Citron said. But the availability of those images may fuel real-life victimization, Zaleski said. Some generative image models, including the

Dall-E, have limitations that make explicit image creation difficult. OpenAI minimizes nude images in Dall-E's training data, blocks input for certain requests, and scans output before displaying it to users, Dall-E's chief researcher Aditya Ramesh told The Washington Post. Told.

"It felt almost eerie," she said. "It's as if a man takes a picture of a woman he's just found online and puts it in this app and imagines her looking naked."

Deleting your own existence is not practical. AI abuse. Instead, experts urge victims to avoid ingesting non-consensual sexual content and understand its impact on their mental health, career, and relationships.

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the-final-sif · 2 years ago

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Some updates regarding the Dream situation on twitter, in effort to keep people on here informed.

The accuser in question, Amanda, went on a bit of a spree of activity on twitter and tik tok. This included a lot of very ill advised things including doxxing herself, tweeting at Keemstar to cover the situation (later retracted after I think she was told that Keemstar was not someone she wanted to get involved), and making a lot of tweets that brought up some more questions about what her claims specifically were and what evidence she had. An account that she confirmed to be her BF showed up and provided some further information that has made some of the prior claims confusing.

Finally, it seemed that someone offered her good advice. She stated that she didn't have any physical evidence of what took place, and that she was going to the police/to consult a lawyer about what to do. She's been largely silent on twitter since that occurred, her tik tok has deactivated, although it is unclear if she took it down or if it got mass reported or something. Her boyfriend's account on twitter has also deactivated.

In looking through her prior tik toks, someone found a previous video she posted in 2021 showing off dms on instagram that she claimed were from Dream. The dms are partially censored, but when lined up with the current dms claimed, they appear to match up. Importantly, between the two periods, at least three of her messages to Dream were deleted if both videos are assumed to be true. A transcript of the conversations was complied here on reddit, including markings for deleted messages:

The entire conversation was rather dry, sporadic, and doesn't have much to it other than her asking him for advice on becoming a streamer, and finally the snapchat. It's important to note, that despite what some people have said, Dream said he believes the instagram dms to be real, he did not make any statement about the snapchat dms being real, fake, or somewhere in the middle.

Since then, there was some weirdness with a bunch of other accounts making unverified claims, that I am personally choosing to ignore until any of them provide literally any evidence.

One other account, someone called Bee, has very recently claimed to have gone to school with Amanda. They were able to post a yearbook page that appears to be of Amanda, including her full name (something she had already posted). They stated that Amanda had lied in the past about having sexual dms from Dream at their school, including creating fakes to show people. Bee said they don't know if the current instagram dms are real or not, but after they recognized Amanda, they wanted to put forward that she had done something similar like this in the past. Bee has not been able to/cannot prove that Amanda said these things, other than word of mouth, but they do appear to at least have a yearbook that contains Amanda's photo and name.

On Dream's side of things, he has made no further statements on the matter since his twitlonger. Assuming he has gotten in contact with lawyers, he's likely going to be silent about anything to do with this until such time as a court case is filed or his lawyers advise him otherwise. I would expect that to take awhile, particularly if dms have been deleted or removed.

As of this time, we have no statements from lawyers, and it will probably be awhile until we get those from either side.

I am personally still waiting for legal action until I cast any sort of judgement on this situation. The allegations could be true, or they could be false. Lawyers will be better suited to sort this situation out, and it does appear both sides have thankfully gotten lawyers involved. Nothing has been proven as of this point, and it will likely be awhile before we know anything as a matter of fact.

#dreamwastaken #mcyt #discourse #sif speaks

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gentil-minou · 3 years ago

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There are plenty of posts going around about Adrien and his responses to trauma, and in light of the recent trailer @flightfoot made this great post about how Kuro Neko highlights Adrien's trauma response

But I want to explain how Marinette's actions this season are also trauma based. Which is why I'm here because you cannot tell the story without both sides.

IMPORTANT: if you like what I wrote and want to share it somewhere else, PLEASE ask me first so I can get credit and monitor the post. I have seen this post on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and those are just the ones I've found or have been shared with me. I'm flattered you like my post but please ask me first. I've come across people making extremely cruel and invalidating remarks and I am trained to handle that but you might not be. Trauma is an extremely sensitive subject and needs to be handled with care and I don't want to be responsible for causing someone harm without even knowing it.

First a refresher of Mari's trauma: Pressure related to being Ladybug, Losing Master Fu (aka the only person she could trust), and most notably in this instance: Chat Blanc and recently Ephemeral (where she doesn't know what exactly went wrong, only that something did when identities were revealed)

I wanted to find an infographic that had everything I wanted but I couldn't so here's a link to the US Department of Veteran Affairs and common reactions after trauma.

Specifically, I'm looking at this list, where I've highlighted what Marinette has shown in canon since the events of Chat Blanc/S3 finale

I explain each of these with examples under the cut

1. Losing hope for the future: Truth and Gang of Secrets where Mari actively stops pursuing all romance. (Though Mari has managed to heal from this in Mr Pigeon 72, but she doesn't know Adrien is Chat yet so that will likely change things)

2. Feeling distant, detached: Distancing herself from Chat, whether this was intentionally or intentionally done.

3. Being unable to concentrate or make decision: could also be ADHD but she usually is able to figure out akumas even then. Ephemeral was the best example where she appeared all over the place (remember the notable absence of Chat)

4. Feeling jumpy/getting startled easily: Truth and probably other instances.

5. Feeling guard and alert all the time: Gang of Secrets, likely other episodes as well

6. Having dreams/memories that upset you: Sentibubbler nightmare

7. Having problems at work and school: Gang of Secrets and one can argue being Ladybug is her "job" and she's also had challenges there.

8. Avoiding people, places, things related to event: See Chat Noir, putting more on Alya instead (possibly due to worries of letting Chat too close or reveal to him)

9. Trouble sleeping: Low energy early in the season and canonical nightmares

(There are less physical symptoms because Mari doesn't complain about those much and the show doesn't focus on it, but if it did I can bet she has some of those)

10. Feeling nervous, helpless, fearful, sad: See pretty much the entire season but especially early on and what I suspect we will see more of in Kuro Neko

11. Being irritable or having angry outbursts: Kuro Neko, as well as other instances. There are also unconfirmed spoilers as well, I can't remember if that one leak from the VA was the finale or Kuro Neko but that is there as well.

12. Getting easily upset or agitated: See above, also Gang of Secrets and a little bit of Mr Pigeon 72

13. Being unable to trust, getting into fights: See, Chat Noir, especially Ephemeral and Kuro Neko.

14 (made this its own one) trying to control everything: Mr Pigeon 72 where she tries to fix adrigami. Also Hack-san and her 500 tips to care for your catboy. In general, she feels and does this alot and partially it's her being the leader but she does it to the extent that it seems physically impossible for her to relax

15. Feeling detaches, not wanting intimacy: intimacy can have more than one meaning and if you ask my her relationship with Chat Noir is incredibly intimate. She's pulling away.

If I did a trauma screening for Marinette, I have no doubt she'd meet criteria for PTSD. So folks, please don't salt on EITHER of these characters. They've been through so much at such a young age and I cant be surprised at the result.

#sorry i meant to polish up that coffeeshop au to post but i got sidetracked sdkfjhsdkj #anyway no salt here you are not allowed #miraculous ladybug #ml spoilers #ml s4 #ml kuro neko #ml psychology #ml meta #cant believe i have to tell grown adults to stop bullying children again #ml sugar #marinette dupain cheng #bushy overthinks things

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5ummit · 3 years ago

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I’ve seen a lot of people on my original Censorship Nightmare PSA insisting that Apple is solely to blame for the recent tag ban fiasco and to please not get mad at tumblr uwu. And while this sentiment is mostly correct, I do take issue with it, particularly as a content creator.

Yes, The Ban would almost certainly not have happened at all if it weren’t for Apple’s insanely restrictive app guidelines. As explained in this post from someone who’s personally familiar with Apple’s ridiculous app approval process, it’s pretty clear from what we know that tumblr was probably backed into a corner and The Ban was a hastily thrown together bandaid solution to keep the app from being yanked from the app store right before everyone left for the holidays until a better longterm solution could be developed. I’m sure tumblr did not want this any more than we did.

However, while the situation tumblr found themselves in was absolutely Apple’s fault, the way it was handled rests entirely on tumblr.

I do not know how the banned tags were chosen, but what I can guarantee is that Apple did not hand tumblr a list with tags like “mine” and “reblog” and “my gif” on it and force tumblr to ban them. Apple told them the app was rejected along with the reason why (because NSFW content was found by whoever happened to review it that day) and it was up to tumblr to come up with and implement a solution to fix the “issue” before the app removal deadline.

Now a temporary ban on “sensitive content” tags in and of itself is not a terrible stopgap solution given the circumstances, and it could’ve been implemented in such a way that 99.9% of users were never affected by it at all (this is not me endorsing or approving of this solution btw, I think I’ve made my feelings on censorship pretty clear in previous posts). The Big Problem of course is the particular tags that were chosen.

There are many theories floating around about where The List came from given how absurd many of them are. As I’ve mentioned before, my personal theory is that a bunch of flagged blogs were scraped and all of their commonly used tags were dumped into a “banned tags” database. Regardless of the actual method though, what’s clear to anyone with half a brain is that no real human being was involved in picking these out. And herein lies the problem.

I get that this solution was probably hastily thrown together at the last minute by some overworked underpaid engineers on a very tight deadline. I get that. And using some sort of algorithm to assemble The List is not only perfectly acceptable, it's what should be done since it would be very hard for someone to know all of the common NSFW tags that may be used off the top of their head. However, on a platform like this with millions of users whose posts would potentially be blocked entirely from searches and their own followers depending on the tags chosen, there is no excuse for why there wasn’t even a cursory glance at The List from a real person at any point in the process. It would literally take 2 seconds to see that many of these words do NOT belong and that maybe a mistake had been made somewhere.

Absolutely the people who were hit the hardest and suffered the most from this disaster of an update were the very people whom tumblr relies on to bring users to their site at all: content creators. Engagement on this hellsite is already such a demoralizing struggle most days, but to significantly reduce the viewers of our content even further by blocking 80% of the common content creation tags (along with many other common tags) from both searches and dashboards? Unconscionable. And for what? It doesn’t even gain them anything. The vast vast majority of the posts tagged with “my gif” are completely innocuous and would not be cause for Apple to reject the app in the first place.

Not only that, but it’s not like an Apple-approved workaround for NSFW content hasn’t already existed for months, if not years. All of those sites (Twitter, Reddit, Discord) that cause everyone to wonder why their apps are able to remain on the app store when they have even more NSFW content than tumblr? They use the same toggle solution that tumblr is supposedly developing.

It would be one thing if the NSFW issue was a recent change in policy sprung on tumblr at the last minute (in which case I would be much more lenient in my judgement), but Apple’s strict guidelines are not new and have been a perennial thorn in tumblr’s side, supposedly resulting in multiple app rejections in the past. The latest app rejection that prompted The Ban was not an unforeseen event and they had plenty of time to preemptively implement the toggle solution, or something similar, before circumstances forced their hand.

Through their laziness and incompetence, tumblr actually ended up doing way more harm than any good that may’ve resulted from the app being allowed to stay in the app store until a better solution could be implemented. Remember, even if an app is removed from the store, anyone who already has the app downloaded will still be able to use it with no interruption to their experience – only new users wouldn’t be able to download it. And now, since it’s the holidays and nobody is working, we’re stuck with this horrible situation until the promised fix is finally implemented (with no timeline given yet).

So yes, blame Apple and their shitty policies and their incomprehensible app approval process. But don’t you dare let tumblr off the hook for this either.

#I doubt anyone is even going to read this #but I had to get it out of my system #all of my followers probably: 'shut up about the banned tags! SHUT UP ABOUT THE BANNED TAGS!'#tumblr purge 2: electric boogaloo #tumblr #my words #wendy's help desk

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antiporn-activist · 4 years ago

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The Children of Pornhub

Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Dec. 4, 2020, New York Times

This article contains descriptions of sexual assault. It’s also really long.

Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns.

Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.

After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.

Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.

Unlike YouTube, Pornhub allows these videos to be downloaded directly from its website. So even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late: The video lives on as it is shared with others or uploaded again and again.

“Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.

“I’m still getting sold, even though I’m five years out of that life,” Cali said. Now 23, she is studying in a university and hoping to become a lawyer — but those old videos hang over her.

“I may never be able to get away from this,” she said. “I may be 40 with eight kids, and people are still masturbating to my photos.”

“You type ‘Young Asian’ and you can probably find me,” she added.

Actually, maybe not. Pornhub recently was offering 26,000 videos in response to that search. That doesn’t count videos that show up under “related searches” that Pornhub suggests, including “young tiny teen,” “extra small petite teen,” “tiny Asian teen” or just “young girl.” Nor does it necessarily count videos on a Pornhub channel called “exploited teen Asia.”

I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.

Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen” and “Extreme Choking.” Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for “She Can’t Breathe.”

It should be possible to be sex positive and Pornhub negative.

Pornhub declined to make executives available on the record, but it provided a statement. “Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community,” it said. Pornhub added that any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site “is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.”

II.

At 14, Serena K. Fleites was an A student in Bakersfield, Calif., who had never made out with a boy. But in the eighth grade she developed a crush on a boy a year older, and he asked her to take a naked video of herself. She sent it to him, and this changed her life.

He asked for another, then another; she was nervous but flattered. “That’s when I started getting strange looks in school,” she remembered. He had shared the videos with other boys, and someone posted them on Pornhub.

Fleites’s world imploded. It’s tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. “People were texting me, if I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom,” she said.

The boy was suspended, but Fleites began skipping class because she couldn’t bear the shame. Her mother persuaded Pornhub to remove the videos, and Fleites switched schools. But rumors reached the new school, and soon the videos were uploaded again to Pornhub and other websites.

Fleites quarreled with her mother and began cutting herself. Then one day she went to the medicine cabinet and took every antidepressant pill she could find.

Three days later, she woke up in the hospital, frustrated to be still alive. Next she hanged herself in the bathroom; her little sister found her, and medics revived her.

As Fleites spiraled downward, a friend introduced her to meth and opioids, and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless.

At 16, she advertised on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. It was a way to make a bit of money, and maybe also a way to punish herself. She thought, “I’m not worth anything any more because everybody has already seen my body,” she told me.

Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.

So today Fleites, 19, off drugs for a year but unemployed and traumatized, is living in her car in Bakersfield, along with three dogs that have proved more loyal and loving than the human species. She dreams of becoming a vet technician but isn’t sure how to get there. “It’s kind of hard to go to school when you’re living in a car with dogs,” she said.

“I was dumb,” she acknowledged, noting that she had never imagined that the videos could be shared online. “It was one small thing that a teenager does, and it’s crazy how it turns into something so much bigger.

“A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake.”

III.

The problem goes far beyond one company. Indeed, a rival of Pornhub, XVideos, which arguably has even fewer scruples, may attract more visitors. Depictions of child abuse also appear on mainstream sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. And Google supports the business models of companies that thrive on child molestation.

Google returns 920 million videos on a search for “young porn.” Top hits include a video of a naked “very young teen” engaging in sex acts on XVideo along with a video on Pornhub whose title is unprintable here.

I asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to compile the number of images, videos and other content related to child sexual exploitation reported to it each year. In 2015, it received reports of 6.5 million videos or other files; in 2017, 20.6 million; and in 2019, 69.2 million.

Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children. By contrast, Pornhub notes that the Internet Watch Foundation, an England-based nonprofit that combats child sexual abuse imagery, reported only 118 instances of child sexual abuse imagery on its site over almost three years, seemingly a negligible figure. “Eliminating illegal content is an ongoing battle for every modern content platform, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront,” Pornhub said in its statement.

The Internet Watch Foundation couldn’t explain why its figure for Pornhub is so low. Perhaps it’s because people on Pornhub are inured to the material and unlikely to report it. But if you know what to look for, it’s possible to find hundreds of apparent child sexual abuse videos on Pornhub in 30 minutes. Pornhub has recently offered playlists with names including “less than 18,” “the best collection of young boys” and “under- - age.”

Congress and successive presidents have done almost nothing as this problem has grown. The tech world that made it possible has been mostly passive, in a defensive crouch. But pioneering reporting in 2019 by my Times colleagues has prodded Congress to begin debating competing strategies to address child exploitation.

Concerns about Pornhub are bubbling up. A petition to shut the site down has received 2.1 million signatures. Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, called on the Justice Department to investigate Pornhub. PayPal cut off services for the company, and credit card companies have been asked to do the same. An organization called Traffickinghub, led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait, documents abuses and calls for the site to be shut down. Twenty members of Canada’s Parliament have called on their government to crack down on Pornhub, which is effectively based in Montreal.

“They made money off my pain and suffering,” an 18-year-old woman named Taylor told me. A boyfriend secretly made a video of her performing a sex act when she was 14, and it ended up on Pornhub, the police confirmed. “I went to school the next day and everybody was looking at their phones and me as I walked down the hall,” she added, weeping as she spoke. “They were laughing.”

Taylor said she has twice attempted suicide because of the humiliation and trauma. Like others quoted here, she agreed to tell her story and help document it because she thought it might help other girls avoid suffering as she did.

IV.

Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a private pornography conglomerate with more than 100 websites, production companies and brands. Its sites include Redtube, Youporn, XTube, SpankWire, ExtremeTube, Men.com, My Dirty Hobby, Thumbzilla, PornMD, Brazzers and GayTube. There are other major players in porn outside the Mindgeek umbrella, most notably XHamster and XVideos, but Mindgeek is a porn titan. If it operated in another industry, the Justice Department could be discussing an antitrust case against it.

Pornhub and Mindgeek also stand out because of their influence. One study this year by a digital marketing company concluded that Pornhub was the technology company with the third greatest-impact on society in the 21st century, after Facebook and Google but ahead of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Nominally based in Luxembourg for tax reasons, Mindgeek is a private company run from Montreal. It does not disclose who owns it, but it is led by Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, both Canadians, who declined to be interviewed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada calls himself a feminist and has been proud of his government’s efforts to empower women worldwide. So a question for Trudeau and all Canadians: Why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?

Mindgeek’s moderators are charged with filtering out videos of children, but its business model profits from sex videos starring young people.

“The goal for a content moderator is to let as much content as possible go through,” a former Mindgeek employee told me. He said he believed that the top executives weren’t evil but were focused above all on maximizing revenue.

While Pornhub would not tell me how many moderators it employs, I interviewed one who said that there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators). With 1.36 million new hours of video uploaded a year to Pornhub, that means that each moderator would have to review hundreds of hours of content each week.

The moderators fast forward through videos, but it’s often difficult to assess whether a person is 14 or 18, or whether torture is real or fake. Most of the underage content involves teenagers, the moderator I spoke with said, but some comes from spy cams in toilets or changing rooms and shows children only 8 to 12.

“The job in itself is soul-destroying,” the moderator said.

Pornhub appears to be increasingly alarmed about civil or criminal liability. Lawyers are circling, and nine women sued the company in federal court after spy cam videos surfaced on Pornhub. The videos were shot in a locker room at Limestone College in South Carolina and showed women showering and changing clothes.

Executives of Pornhub appear in the past to have assumed that they enjoyed immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms on which members of the public post content. But in 2018 Congress limited Section 230 so that it may not be enough to shield the company, leading Mindgeek to behave better.

It has doubled the number of moderators in the last couple of years, the moderator told me, and this year Pornhub began voluntarily reporting illegal material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After previously dragging its feet in removing videos of children and nonconsensual content, Pornhub now is responding more rapidly.

It has also compiled a list of banned content. I obtained a copy of this list, and it purports to bar videos with terms or themes like “rape,” “preteen,” “pedophilia” and “bestiality” (it helpfully clarifies that this “includes eels, fish, octopus, insects”). Diapers are OK “if no scatophilia.” Mutilation depends on context but “cannot depict severing parts of the body.”

So while it is now no longer possible to search on Pornhub in English using terms like “underage” or “rape,” the company hasn’t tried hard to eliminate such videos. A member called “13yoboyteen” is allowed to post videos. A search for “r*pe,” turns up 1,901 videos. “Girl with braces” turns up 1,913 videos and suggests also trying “exxxtra small teens.” A search for “13yo” generates 155,000 videos. To be clear, most aren’t of 13-year-olds, but the fact that they’re promoted with that language seems to reflect an effort to attract pedophiles.

Moreover, some videos seem at odds with the list of banned content. “Runaway Girl Gets Ultimatum, Anal or the Streets” is the title of one Pornhub video. Another user posts videos documenting sex with teenage girls as they weep, protest and cry out in pain.

While Pornhub is becoming more careful about videos of potentially litigious Americans, it remains cavalier about overseas victims. One Indonesian video is titled “Junior High School Girl After Class” and shows what appears to be a young teenager having sex. A Chinese sex video, just taken down, was labeled: “Beautiful High School Girl Is Tricked by Classmates and Taken to the Top of a Building Where She Is Insulted and Raped.”

“They’re making money off the worst moment in my life, off my body,” a Colombian teenager who asked to be called Xela, a nickname, told me. Two American men paid her when she was 16 for a sexual encounter that they filmed and then posted on Pornhub. She was one of several Pornhub survivors who told me they had thought of or attempted suicide.

In the last few days as I was completing this article, two new videos of prepubescent girls being assaulted were posted, along with a sex video of a 15-year-old girl who was suicidal after it went online. I don’t see how good-faith moderators could approve any of these videos.

“It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.”

That’s a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable.

Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.

“Why do videos of me from when I was 15 years old and blackmailed, which is child porn, continuously [get] uploaded?” Nicole protested plaintively to Pornhub last year, in a message. “You really need a better system. … I tried to kill myself multiple times after finding myself reuploaded on your website.”

Nicole’s lawyer, Dani Pinter, says there are still at least three naked videos of Nicole at age 15 or 16 on Pornhub that they are trying to get removed.

“It’s never going to end,” Nicole said. “They’re getting so much money from our trauma.”

Pornhub has introduced software that supposedly can “fingerprint” rape videos and prevent them from being uploaded again. But Vice showed how this technology is easily circumvented on Pornhub.

One Pornhub scandal involved the Girls Do Porn production company, which recruited young women for clothed modeling gigs and then pushed them to perform in sex videos, claiming that the videos would be sold only as DVDs in other countries and would never go online. Reassured that no one would ever know, some of the women agreed — and then were shattered when the footage was aggressively marketed on Pornhub.

Girls Do Porn was prosecuted for sex trafficking and shut down. But those videos continue to surface and resurface on Pornhub; last time I checked, videos of six victims of Girls Do Porn were on Pornhub, which continues to profit from them.

One of the Girls Do Porn women I saw on Pornhub is now dead. She was murdered at 20, allegedly by an angry ex-boyfriend who is about to go on trial. I’m not disclosing her name because she should be remembered as a vibrant college athlete, and not for a sex video that represented her most mortifying moment.

VI.

So what’s the solution?

I had expected the survivors to want to shut down Pornhub and send its executives to prison. Some did, but others were more nuanced. Lydia, now 20, was trafficked as a child and had many rape videos posted on the site. “My stomach hurts all the time” from the tension, she told me, but she doesn’t want to come across as hostile to porn itself.

“I don’t want people to hear ‘No porn!’” Lydia told me. “It’s more like, ‘Stop hurting kids.’”

Susan Padron told me that she had assumed that pornography was consensual, until a boyfriend filmed her in a sex act when she was 15 and posted it on Pornhub. She has struggled since and believes that only people who have confirmed their identities should be allowed to post videos.

Jessica Shumway, who was trafficked and had a customer post a sex video on Pornhub, agrees: “They need to figure out who’s underage in the videos and that there’s consent from everybody in it.”

I asked Leo, 18, who had videos of himself posted on Pornhub when he was 14, what he suggested.

“That’s tough,” he said. “My solution would be to leave porn to professional production companies,” because they require proof of age and consent.

Right now, those companies can’t compete with mostly free sites like Pornhub and XVideos.

“Pornhub has already destroyed the business model for pay sites,” said Stoya, an adult film actress and writer. She, too, thinks all platforms — from YouTube to Pornhub — should require proof of consent to upload videos of private individuals.

Columnists are supposed to offer answers, but I struggle with solutions. If Pornhub curated videos more rigorously, the most offensive material might just move to the dark web or to websites in less regulated countries. Yet at least they would then not be normalized on a mainstream site.

More pressure and less impunity would help. We’re already seeing that limiting Section 230 immunity leads to better self-policing.

And call me a prude, but I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard and Visa.

I don’t see any neat solution. But aside from limiting immunity so that companies are incentivized to behave better, here are three steps that would help: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.

These measures wouldn’t kill porn or much bother consumers of it; YouTube thrives without downloads. Siri Dahl, a prominent porn star who does business with Pornhub, told me that my three proposals are “insanely reasonable.”

The world has often been oblivious to child sexual abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we prosecute individuals like Jeffrey Epstein or R. Kelly. But we should also stand up to corporations that systematically exploit children. With Pornhub, we have Jeffrey Epstein times 1,000.

#if you use pornhub you're complicit in this #sorry i don't make the rules

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thejudgingtrash · 4 years ago

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Annabeth is a good person,but not a nice or pleasant one,IMO.

YES.

That’s it. That’s the post. Pack it up everybody, we just cracked the case and cleared up one of the most compelling fights in the PJO fandom since forever. Good job everybody, clap it out and there’s the door! Don’t forget ordering the drinks at Starbucks, Mitch! They’re on me!

Okay, but on a more serious note: YES. YES EXACTLY.

And before some of you roll your eyes or grab your pitchforks – put your biases aside and hear me out for once. I like Annabeth. She’s my in my top three characters only second to Percy himself. I love Percabeth. It’s my favorite ship in the entire series and to be frank, the only ship that I care about PJO wise. Hell, I spend my time creating my own headcanons or writing my own fanfics with Percabeth being the star in them.

But that is not to say that I’m unable to see how certain things have developed over the years or where they stand now in regard to Annabeth. I’m not here to ignore things that have been said and/or done due to or in the name of Annabeth and I’m not here to vilify anyone that doesn’t like her. And I’m here to admit that I’m guilty of some of the things that may be addressed in this meta essay that you will read in just a second. However, I try my best to assure you, that I’m for once able to recognize my own bias.

Warning: a monster essay lies right upon you.

This should count as a paper of its own.

Back to the statement on top: I would go out even further to reframe your claim, anon:

Annabeth Chase is a good character but not a nice or pleasant person.

Annabeth is a wonderful character but she isn’t a nice one. Or at least not nice to everyone. She is (construction wise if I dare say) the best character out of the series. She has her positive traits (she’s caring, she’s emotional, she’s encouraged and volunteers, she fights for what she believes in, she forgives (even if doing so begrudgingly)) but she also has her negative traits (she’s stubborn, she’s brash, changing her mind takes forever, she is prejudiced, she baits others). That balances things out. She is branded as the intelligent kid but does irrational things (like I’ve just said a) she’s a kid and b) she’s not a robot). She should probably know better, but we all make mistakes and hopefully grow and learn from them. The clouds in the sky do blur and cover our visions sometimes.

Annabeth had clashes with other characters or was about to have fights due to her stubbornness or jealousy (Rachel, Reyna, etc.) and has of course her problems with the mortal world and her family but she also found new friends, some things cleared up throughout the narration and she was/is quite popular in Camp Half-Blood.

The thing is: she doesn’t have to be nice or pleasant (as a character). Or at least not all the time. Her character is humanized. That is what or who she is. Human. She does stand out as a character, not just because she’s the (future) love interest. She feels like someone you could meet in real life and either adore from the top to the bottom or declare as your biggest enemy. And that’s totally okay if you lean either way – liking or disliking her. Or even feeling indifferent about her. Also great!

To say that she has been the best character that Riordan has crafted is easy to say, because she has been sculpted after Riordan’s wife. He had a model he could rub some of real-life events or traits on. That’s not the problem. The problem truly doesn’t lie on Riordan’s side for the most part for once.

The problem is inherently on the fandom’s side. What the fandom does, how it acts and how it treats Annabeth as a character is the problem. The problems vary but it’s mostly the mischaracterization of Annabeth, starting fights and fan/ship wars, internalized misogyny (in some cases) and how some of the Annabeth stans lash out (ha, got firsthand experience in that field among many of my friends and mutuals!). There is a reason why many people are wary of people that have Annabeth or Percabeth related URLs.

The fact that we see Annabeth mostly through Percy’s lens and (until the Heroes of Olympus saga hits) we never really see her in chill everyday situations is essentially Riordan leaving the back door of the house open, ready for all of you asshats to rob his mansion in Boston. Because a frame on a character means that we don’t get to see the character in its entirety (unlike we do with Percy in PJO for the most part). That means a bunch of stuff is left open for interpretation which is the reason why Annabeth gets so many polarized headcanon and opinions tossed around. I think that is one of the true appeals of Annabeth. You can add on stuff and it necessarily doesn’t have to contradict itself.

We have people calling her abusive due to a (n admittedly stupid and unnecessary) judo flip and we have people that act like she’s never done anything wrong. People sorta use this excuse to form and shape Annabeth however they want and distort her characterization.

People in the fandom act like Annabeth is some weird prized possession. We perceive Annabeth mostly through the eyes of others (Percy, Apollo, etc.) and when we had some sort of insight in her ways (MOA, HOH) it felt… weird? Somewhat? Like Riordan left two bullet points of her characterization and told the ghostwriter: aight, fuck it up, gringo, see you on Tuesday and greet Fred the next time you see him for me.

There have been many posts lately (by Tharini, Simi, Sawasawako, Jewishpercy and Annie I believe?) that HOO Percabeth felt weird. That they felt weirdly constructed, that there was no conflict, no growth. It felt stagnating, like we’re turning back. We had five books prior where we had Annabeth and Percy slowly shifting from disliking to liking and crushing each other. True development. And when we finally got the cake it felt… dissatisfying. Like the cheap box stuff and not the delicious exquisite taste that we were promised.

I said it previously in my Percabeth ship roast, but let me repeat myself: many Percabeth related things are straight up fanon. Some of it is very old fanon so that’s been unable to distinguish unless you’ve read the books recently and subtract nearly 99,9% of things you see on Tumblr (and occasionally the other shitty parts of the fandom like Reddit, IG, Twitter. Although they mostly steal and recycle tumblr stuff oh well. But back to the topic).

The way people treat Annabeth is so strange. She’s either an innocent fluffy smush baby that’s never harmed a fly and all that she wants for Christmas is being Percy’s lapdog or she’s the devil incarnate, broke into your house, killed your parents Batman style, kicked your puppy and didn’t flush the toilet on the way out. I think this is what mostly makes people hate her or the ship Percabeth. And both extremes are wrong and right at the same time? She is multifaceted so both stereotypes are true and untrue and sorta cancel each other out in the same way.

The true reason why people dislike Annabeth is because the stans are doing the most. (The haters as well, don’t get me wrong, but oh boy. Piss of a stan and you’ll know what I mean). That isn’t inherently new. Are you guys old enough to remember the ship wars that have happened cross platform? Perachel vs. Percabeth? Oh boy, oh boy. I saw some kids on tumblr a few months ago trying to infiltrate both tags and start shit (and also fail). The fact that Rachel still gets used as the bitchy (ex) girlfriend in fanfics? It’s 2020 guys. I know this apocalyptic year is far from perfect and over but I think we can let this trope die, right? Right? I thought we’ve established that Rachel is a pretty chill charcter by now… right?

If you posted your stuff on FFN back in 2010-2013 and it wasn’t the typical cutesy Percabeth story (Goode High, the gods read TLT, punk/prep Percabeth, college AU, etc.) people would’ve come for your fucking throat. Not because the story or the narration was shit. But because the pairing wasn’t Annabeth and Percy (in the sense that Annabeth had to be paired with Percy. I mean Percy gets shipped with everyone and their mother but for Annabeth it was strictly Percy. As annoying as this whole Connabeth thing is – the people behind it actually had a point. She never had a different love interest unless it’s a Percy centered story and he goes off dating Athena, Artemis and Zoe at the same time for some odd reason. Yeah, FFN Percy ships are something). Or it wasn’t the action filled canon compliant story or it wasn’t an AU that was popular.

People were really stubborn, snobbish and wanted their stuff in the four five boxes that were the most popular ones and that’s it. People have been bullied off the site in many fandoms, so it’s not a PJO-only thing but it’s still sad that it happened. (Off-note: most of these FFN tropes are still alive and well and thriving on AO3. Don’t be so snobbish and pretend that every piece you’d find there is a holy grail. There’s a lot of trash you have to waddle through. Same with Wattpad, Tumblr or anywhere else where fanfics get posted. Also had this discussion with Annabeth stans. Sigh).

And Tumblr back then? Forget it, wasn’t much better.

That view has sorta changed (at least for people that have been in the fandom for several years or have managed to find a way to navigate through it) but some of the negative sentiment from back in the day has survived. Be it by new fans coming in or from old fans that never let their stance die. The aggression feels differently and somewhat not. (I don’t know if the anon function had been abused that much back in the day. I was an observer not a participant in the fandom).

Crack a joke at Annabeth’s expense (Kal’s famous “Annabeth is a Republican” post or Dee Dee’s and many others “Annabeth has the education of a second grader, chill with the college plans, girlie” stance) and you have people insulting you, making callout posts, unfollowing and blocking you (based on only that? Okay, honey), making aggressive counter-posts, etc. in a minute. If you respond with “It’s a joke, it’s not real” you have a 50/50 chance of either getting blown off or embarrassing them so that they apologize for once.

This isn’t just about jokes. You can make a headcanon that’s not the cozy cute convenient mainstream saga and people would react the same way. Or art piece (no, not including the whole Tannabeth Blackchase shtick done by Viria and others) or fanfics.

People project so much onto the unfinished canvas that is Annabeth Chase that any form of negative sentiment as little as someone not liking her to straight up criticism, regardless of how tiny it may be, seems like an affront. Like an invitation to a fight. Like an insult to them, their character, everything they believe in. Let me state something:

You are NOT Annabeth Chase. Annabeth Chase IS NOT you. Annabeth Chase is NOT real. Her feeling cannot be hurt. Someone criticizing, disliking, joking about her or even insulting her will not bother her. Someone making a statement about her is not an insult to YOU.

Let me repeat that:

Annabeth Chase isn’t real. Annabeth Chase isn’t you.

So think a little before you act? I get it when you’re a kid and new to fandoms or haven’t been up with fan cultures in the past and are back in the scene. But if you’re in your late teens or even older as an adult and you’re unable to understand that you aren’t what you like – you aren’t the extension of a fictional character – I feel incredibly sorry for you. Because that’s just incredibly sad. Someone disliking something you like isn’t an attack of your character. It shows you that you are you and the other person is a human just like you. That they just have different taste. Disliking something you like isn’t a crime, you know? But me feeling sorry for the way some of y’all act won’t mean that that’s even remotely okay. Especially if you’re no longer in the intended audience for PJO age wise and should know better.

This isn’t a “white stans” only thing. I’ve seen and witnessed firsthand how people of color, mainly women of color, act the same or not even worse when it comes to her character. People have projected their problems and real-life occurring events into her character (I’m sure that she isn’t the only character nor that this is the only fandom where this is happening) and in some cases like I’ve said cannot separate their own personality from the fictional world. Fights with woc happened because of Annabeth fucking Chase. So many things have happened in the fandom the past few months, mostly due to people being forced staying at home because of the quarantine but I’d say it’s 10% on quarantine and 90% on people for acting up like this.

So here’s a little story: There was the act of Riordan blowing the fandom up because of his own stupidity and being unable to apologize for his mischaracterization and lack of research (the whole Piper fiasco) back in June (?) and admits the upset fandom, people on Twitter, Tumblr and Discord legit thought that none of that mattered and that the outcry was destroying Annabeth Chase’s birthday. That’s right. People thought that Annabeth Chase’s non-existing birthday because she’s a fictional character had a higher priority than the rupture and prevalent racism in the fandom. Okay. This isn’t a great look, Annabeth stans. And this of course pissed a lot of people off. I made a post about it and someone not only berated three other people on said post but no, we had a mighty argument which had disrupted many friendships in our circle which haven’t recovered until this very day. We both had our parts in it and no one is innocent. But the cause of this still remains Annabeth Chase or how people prioritize her non-existing well-being. Anyway. I’m getting agitated just thinking about it.

Let’s go back to the characterization thing with Annabeth. Let me remind you:

Annabeth Chase is an asshole. There I’ve said it in a post ages ago (too lazy to look it up, sorry) and I’ll say it again. And that’s not me insulting her. That’s me actually loving that about her. Annabeth is one of the very few unapologetic female characters that really showed all young readers across the world that you can be a girl, a badass, smart, strong, standing up for yourself and what you believe in. You don’t have to be nice. You don’t have to hide your feelings. You don’t need a man in all cases but it’s also okay to accept help and defeat.

A large reason why I think she’s an incredibly important character in children’s literature/YA because many other novels (mostly (sadly)) have the “Oh, I’m a white skinny dark-haired girl that likes unconventional things like READING. I’m not like the other girls, that take care of themselves and pamper themselves by enjoying shopping and wearing make-up. No, I’d rather be one of the boys but a sweet cute little boy and not the jock fuck that drank vodka shots out of a filthy shoe once. Despite me calling myself hideous every man in a 10-kilometer radius falls in love with me and tells me I’m oh so sexy and by the way I’m only 16 years old” shit going on for no goddamn reason.

Yes, I do blame Twilight for this mostly in recent years, but this trope isn’t by any means knew. Pretty sure that you could even use classics as Pride and Prejudice and dissect them in the same manner (Bold statement: Lizzy Bennet is the OG Bella Swan. There. Go fight somewhere in the corner, people). The new wave of YA focuses on girls belittling themselves and only starting to believe in themselves because someone else (mostly the male love interest) tells them they’re worth it. And these books hit the mainstream because they’re incredibly bland and picture perfect white.

With Annabeth it’s different. She shows up for the job and is done with it. (Brie Larson would probably be the perfect in real life version of her. You either like or dislike her. Or you really don’t care). That is what is so refreshing about her. Her unapologetic nature. Can it be off-putting? Yes. Is it annoying? Yes! Hell, every time I read The Lightning Thief, I want to rip her goddamn head off. And it’s just so well written. Her shift from mistrusting Percy but secretly still believing in him to her opening up. Wow, Riordan did something right there.

Annabeth Chase isn’t a young character. She has existed along with PJO for 15 years. She’s on her way to the second decade. I’m pretty sure that with the success of Percy Jackson (and Harry Potter) many lives have been warped and shaped.

But when I say the problem lies mostly in the fandom, it doesn’t mean that Riordan’s completely innocent. The only problem that I have with Annabeth lies not truly with her but the fact that Riordan is only able to produce three variations of female characters:

The sweetheart (Hazel, Silena, Calypso, Hestia)

The strong feminist (Annabeth, Piper, Thalia, Reyna, Artemis)

The bitch (Drew, nearly every female goddess in the goddamn Riordanverse next to every female monster)

And these female characters only know three endings:

End up married with a mortgage, three kids, two dogs and a cat somewhere in Connecticut by the age of twelve

Get dumped into the hunt

Chill on Mount Olympus and only come down to be a nuisance and/or give a cryptic message before going back and doing a godly rave party or something

We know Annabeth as the badass strong female first (or the bitchy character we’re supposed to actually like. Choose your approach), the blueprint so to speak, so some of the other characters feel almost pale in comparison and almost not needed? Doesn’t mean that other characters can’t behave similarly, but it feels kind of redundant especially if their character arcs end in a rather anticlimactic way (Thalia, Reyna). The new additions are the much needed woc as the main story with PJO was inherently white (anyway stan black!Percy and Grover, folks). So it’s not to bash on the new characters, it’s more Riordan’s fault more than anything.

Since Riordan only knows three female character arcs it feels like he tried to copy the formula several ways with different nuances. Some more or less successful. This is where fandom actually comes in handy and helps create more distinguished and fleshed out characters in form of headcanons or fanfiction.

But even in these cases people still make it about Annabeth when it’s time for characters of colors to shine. Remember that whole spiel and discussion that broke out when people (Kal, diver-up, Caitlyn, Bee, reynaisalesbian, etc.) joked about or criticized that Annabeth thinks that she’s having it harder because she’s a blonde? In front of Hazel and Piper? If she would’ve been a real person that’s an invitation for getting decked. And then all hell broke loose because Annabeth stans couldn’t accept the fact that in the real world and/or in fictional worlds the woc/coc have it harder? That the white woman wasn’t the victim that needed the coddling? Yeah, that was mad pathetic.

I hope you people get my point?

Well fuck. I wrote so many things and have the feeling I’ve said nothing. Anyway, I hope I made sense. This is way too long.

TLDR: Chill about Annabeth please. She’s an important character but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to like her, regardless of being a character in the books or a reader/fan of PJO in real life. She isn’t nice or a sweetheart all the time. She also isn’t the monstrous asshole that some try to make out of her.

Peace out.

#Mel answers #pjo #percy jackson #Annabeth chase #percy jackson and the olympians #Percabeth #pjo Meta #Heroes of olympus #hoo #trials of apollo #toa #hazel levesque #piper mclean #reyna avila ramirez arellano #rachel elizabeth dare #pjo fandom #coc #rick riordan #riordanverse

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utilitycaster · 4 years ago

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I maybe stupid and way off mark here but the way the fandom and sometimes the cast treat the warcrimes of Astrid vs essek really rubs me the wrong way the white woman who murders happily is victimised and seen as someone to be forgiven and the brown coded character is constantly reminded that they are horrible which I'm not refusing but it should be done to both is all I'm saying Caleb is so convinced Astrid is blinded but essek should just be constantly reminded? No one did that to Caleb either

Hi anon,

Pardon me if I’m really guarded/skeptical here but while I haven’t personally received any of the other trolling/baiting asks recently there’s been a spate of them, as well as in some other fandoms that I don’t follow as closely, of the form “I feel the fandom is really problematic” being sent to a bunch of people and then providing general concepts but no specific posts or examples. And while I missed most of it there’s been a lot of discourse this week on Essek specifically because of Talks. So you may be asking in good faith but like, it’s anon and I don’t know you, and if it comes out that this has been asked verbatim of multiple bloggers I’m going to feel very justified in my skepticism.

I also absolutely think there’s value in discussing racism/discrimination in fantasy media but I really do not like how it’s typically done on Tumblr or online in general; there’s a whole lot of performative hand-wringing in the absence of action. And while I’m not saying my experience as a Jewish woman is the same as the experience of a black person in fandom, I will say there’s been outright Jewish ethnicity-faking in fandom and a lot of posts on“here’s how to support Jewish people/avoid antisemitic tropes” that have made me go “huh. you don’t know a single goddamn Jewish person who plays D&D, do you.” Doing this on anon makes it even harder to engage fully. So what I’m saying is I just donated money to the NAACP LDF and suggest anyone interacting with this post who is in a financial position to do so donate to a charity that benefits people of color (or directly to someone like Omega Jones/Krystina Arielle/Orion Black/someone else of color in the actual play/D&D space who has experienced discrimination and harassment recently) as well.

Also to anyone reading this: I’m not interested in debate here of whether or not Essek is black or brown-coded; I think that’s a really complicated situation with dark elves in WoTC canon vs. how the Dynasty is depicted and this is not the place for it. If you want to discuss it, go ahead, but please make your own separate post.

But to answer this seriously and with all the benefit of the doubt I can give:

Without awakening the war crimes and semantics thereof discourse because ultimately I don’t think that’s important in this discussion, both Astrid and Essek have done significant evil actions that have directly or indirectly hurt the people of their own respective countries and in Essek’s case definitely helped precipitate an active war where considerable hostility already existed. I do not think many are disputing that.

With that said I have not personally observed what you are mentioning. I curate my experience pretty tightly - I am not involved in fandom communities on reddit or Twitter, and on Tumblr I rarely go into the main tags, and instead I usually follow people who consistently post/reblog things I like, and slowly expand out (or edit) who I follow from there. The general sense I have gotten from those people I follow is pretty much universally more positive towards Essek than Astrid - Essek has absolutely done harm, but the party knows him far better than anyone but Caleb knows Astrid, and he’s expressed remorse in a way that we haven’t seen from Astrid.

This also feels deeply at odds with what I literally just watched this morning, in which the party is treating Essek as their primary ally and entrusting him with quite a lot of information; most of the people I follow seem to have really liked this course of action and support Essek being brought in, and last week’s commune regarding Essek was also positive.

I think Caleb has a lot of concerns about both Astrid and Eodwulf, but I don’t think his motivation as a character is at all based in race. I think it’s based in the fact that he knows exactly what forces created Astrid, and that she was pushed into it as a child (vs. Essek who made the choices he made as an adult), and he knew her and was in love with her for several years, and that while she’s done terrible things since then as well he’s done many of the same things in the same service. Meanwhile, he met Essek less than six months ago and their relationship was heavily founded on deception - and he (Caleb) has still been fairly kind to Essek. I don’t think he’s reminded Essek; he showed considerable empathy for the situation Essek is in and towards Essek himself.

If you have specific examples you’d like to send please feel free to do so - despite what I said at the beginning, if you’re sending this in earnest and this is a widespread issue somewhere that I’m not seeing, I understand why that would be frustrating and I don’t like it either. But I’m not getting this sense at all from either canon nor fandom.

#anyone engaging with this post: keep it together or you will be blocked with impunity #critical role spoilers #not maintagging #Anonymous

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whenrockwasyoung19 · 4 years ago

Text

It’s Time to Talk about a Bespectacled Elephant in the Room

I’ve been in the Beatles fandom for 8 and a half years. I have had a Beatles blog for the entirety of those 8 and a half years, and I have watched as discourse about these four men evolve. The discourse inside and outside the fandom has become so toxic that I don’t think I can engage with it in the same way that I could before. Let me explain.

When I entered this fandom 8 and a half years ago, it was in 2012, quite an infamous year in tumblr history. That was the pique of “”cringey”” fandom culture. The Beatles fandom was as steeped in fandom culture as any other fandom. I know this because I was part of two of the top of fandoms at the time, Doctor Who and Sherlock. Believe me, I have seen cringe.

The fandom at the time was totally aware of the John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s flaws as individuals, but most fans tended to simply enjoy Beatles fandom as if it were the 60s. Some might call it ignorant bliss. If you asked me at the time, I’d have said it was self-aware ignorant bliss--if that even makes sense. At the time, there wasn’t a person with a Beatles icon who hadn’t heard the line “John Lennon beat his wife.” Everyone knew it, but everyone also knew the real story, and so everyone just made peace with it. As a result, people didn’t think about every bad thing the Beatles ever did on a daily basis. It was more like a once-a-month kind of thing. Otherwise, fandom discourse was quite fun and relaxed. There were no shipping wars, no one fought over who was the best Beatle, everyone gushed over the Beatles wives, and we all just had fun with fics and fan art.

Of course, in this period, people engaged in conversations about one bespectacled Beatles problematic behavior. These conversations usually came from outside of the fandom. It was usually randos coming into the tags or into someone’s ask box and ranting about John Lennon’s violent behavior. Some of it came from within the fandom. Some people really didn’t like John and gave others shit if they listed John as their favorite Beatle. A lot of the discourse boiled down to: ‘hey, I see you like John Lennon. You should know that he beat his wife. And now that you know that, you should feel bad about ever liking him in the first place.’ And the response was often, ‘Actually, John Lennon didn’t beat his wife. They weren’t even married at the time. And also he didn’t beat her, he slapped her once in the face, and then never did it again.’ No one’s minds were changed. The fans had made their peace, and the antis came off as cynical and pretentious.

When Dashcon happened, and Tumblr took a hard look at its cringey fandom culture, the Beatles fandom evolved as well. The fandom became, frankly, less fun. It no longer felt like a group of people who found the Beatles decades after the 60s and were fangirling like it was 1965. There was still some of that left, but a lot of it kind of faded. So, most fandom interactions were reblogging pictures of the Beatles from the 60s and various interview clips and quotes. But the barrage of antis never really went away, and the response didn’t evolve.

Then, the advent of cancel culture came on. I always waited for the Beatles to get, like, officially canceled, but I also felt they were uncancel-able at the same time. Let me explain. I have been a Beatles fan primarily in an online space, rarely engaging with fans in real life. But I have met fans who are life-long Beatles fans, people who are a lot older than us and who’s fandom isn’t tied to the internet. They don’t give a shit about any of our discourse. They may or may not have heard it before, but they seem totally indifferent to all of it. I’m sure most of them have never heard ‘Mclennon’ before. These are the people that flock to see Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in concert (and pay astronomical prices for it). These are the people who go to record shops and buy vinyl. These are the people I run into at flea markets who buy up all the Beatles merch before I can even arrive (true story). So, the Beatles will never be canceled because there will always be people who love the Beatles and don’t engage with online discourse. Rarely said, but thank god for Gen-X.

As cancel culture took over the internet, fandoms changed. It’s not as noticeable in fandoms without problematic favs. For instance, I’m also steeped in the Tom Holland fandom, and that boy is a little angel who has done no wrong. No one has discourse about the unproblematic boy who plays an equally unproblematic character. But in fandoms with ‘problematic favs’ the mood has shifted. I’m also in the Taron Egerton fandom. Taron Egerton, for those who only follow me for my Beatles stuff, is a genuinely sweet and kind person who has had zero scandals in his six year career. There were some rumblings when he was cast as Elton John, and some people took issue with the fact that he’s a straight man playing a gay man. This discourse seemed to die quickly as a whole lot of straight people played gay people in that same year (Olivia Coleman as queer Queen Anne, Emma Stone as her queer lover, Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury). Why jump on this boy who at the time was still technically on the rise. He’s not exactly the same target as someone like Scarlett Johansson who has her pick of roles. Taron doesn’t have quite that some power in Hollywood, and I think most people made peace with the fact that this was a big role for him, and it’s not really fair to take that away from him. So, all in all, the closest thing to a scandal was something that died pretty much on arrival.

That was until this summer when everything changed. When George Floyd was murdered, celebrities flocked to social media to mourn his loss. Taron’s social media account was silent. For weeks, Taron said nothing about Black Lives Matter or Floyd’s death. This caused outrage in the fandom. Many raced to defend him, starting a hashtage #IstandwithTaron. Others sought to tear him down and anyone who supported him. The kind of mania this one incident caused tore through an otherwise peaceful fandom. What I saw was two sides in a total panic. The antis were people who once had faith that Taron was a good person and were now questioning that. Andthe defenders were people who desperately wanted him to be a good person and were afraid that he wasn’t. In essence, both sides could feel Taron about to get canceled. The defenders wanted to stop it, the antis wanted to ride that wave.

What this long drawn out Taron example is meant to convey: is that cancel culture has put fandoms on edge. One’s fav has to be perfect, otherwise it can jeopardize the existence of the entire fandom. I’ll admit, I was afraid that I’d be some kind of pariah for standing by Taron through all of this. My actions were to basically reason with the antis but still defend Taron. I defend him mostly because I felt that his silence was the result of a needed social media absence and that trying to shame him back onto social media was an invasion of privacy. But I was genuinely afraid that he would get canceled, and the fun of the Taron fandom would be lost.

In the Beatles fandom, it often feels like the Beatles, mainly John, have already been canceled. I see this coming from two different sources: antis from outside of the fandom and antis within the fandom. The outside antis are just the same as the ones from 2012. These are people who like to drop in that John Lennon beat his wife, posting this in the tag (which violates an ancient tumblr real by the way--no hate in the tags).

The antis outside the fandom speak to a larger anti-John Lennon sentiment online. I see references to John Lennon ‘beating his wife’ on Tiktok and twitter. The tone of anti-John Lennon posts has shifted. Before, it felt like the antis were being smug but also argumentative. They wanted to have a conversation about this bit of info they read on Reddit with no context. Now, “John Lennon beating his wife” is practically a meme. It’s a running joke online that John Lennon was a wife beater. I can’t look on my instagram explore page because every so often a John Lennon beats his wife meme will pop up amongst the other, normal, memes.

This change in discourse suggests that the internet has just accepted this as fact now. I should note that back in 2012, it seemed as if few people knew this fact. The fandom knew it, and these random antis knew it, but few others did. Now, because of how common these memes are, it seems to be widespread knowledge.

Consequently, the Beatles fandom, who used to ward off attacks from antis, seems to have given in. I recently saw a post from a Beatles blog (had the URL and icon and everything) that confessed they felt guilty for listening to the Beatles, and I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed in the fandom. People tend to put disclaimers in posts about John or even all four that John is an ‘awful man.’ It seems like the self-aware ignorant bliss has completely gone away. Occasionally, I still see posts joyously talking about Mclennon or reblogs of old photos from the 60s. But the culture has shifted.

Online, it no longer feels comfortable to be a Beatles fan. It feels like you have to own up to 8 decades of mistakes by four men you’ve never met. And, I should note, this is kind of how it feels to be a fan of anything right now. Taron is not canceled today, but he could be tomorrow. It’s this pervasive feeling of guilt that the person you’re supporting may or definitely has or is doing something wrong.

I’ll admit this uncomfortable feeling has expanded into other parts of my fandom life. I listen to their music, and I feel elated--the way I always have. Then, I get these intrusive thoughts which sound like all the worst parts of Twitter combined. It wasn’t always like this. Back in 2012, when I knew almost nothing about them, I saw them as four young men who were full of happiness, love for another, and talent. Back then, listening to their music was exciting and joyous. Sometimes, I fear that I can never feel that way again. Next year, when I finally go to Liverpool, will I be filled with excitement or guilt?

I say all this for a few reasons. One, I love John Lennon. I appreciate all the good he did for the world not just as a musician and an artist but also his advocacy and charity work. I love him, and a part of me will always love him, but observing the change in discourse has enlightened me as a historian. Part of my job is to observe people’s legacies, and John’s is perhaps the most interesting legacy I’ve ever observed. When he died, he was hailed as a saint. But tall poppy syndrome set in, and the antis started. This culture grew and grew to the point where it seems to, at least among the younger generation, taken over the sainthood.

But as a historian and a fan, I have never seen the saint or the devil. I’ve only seen the man, the incredibly flawed man. The thing that these antis never understand is that John Lennon was painfully aware of his own flaws to the point where it made him all the more self-destructive. In essence, his past mistakes caused him to make additional mistakes. But John, aware of his own flaws, always tried to change and was often successful. I’ve talked about this before, but John demonstrated that he was capable of being a good person, like properly so, again and again. After he struck Cynthia, he never hit her again. His shortcomings as a father to Julian weren’t repeated with Sean. He worked on his drinking, his drug addiction, and his anger, trying to overcome those demons till the day he died. By all accounts, the John Lennon that died in 1980 is not the John Lennon who struck Cynthia Powell at school. That John Lennon was living a cleaner, healthier life. He was a better father to both his sons by that point, and was trying to repair his relationship with Julian. He was a good husband to Yoko and saw himself living a long and happy life.

John Lennon cannot and should not be boiled down to just his flaws. It’s one thing as a fan to acknowledge that John is a flawed human being (news flash: they all are), but he is also much bigger than that.

So once again, why am I writing this long, rambling post, once again talking about John Lennon’s virtues? Because if I can’t engage with healthy discourse about the Beatles and John Lennon, then I can’t engage with discourse on the topic at all. So, I probably will post less Beatles stuff because I find it hard to go through the tags or even my dash (well, I can’t really go through my dash anymore for other reasons I’m not going to get into right now). If any of my followers have noticed a lot of Taron posts lately, it’s not just because I love Taron, it’s because Taron’s tag is pretty much the only location on tumblr I feel 100% comfortable in. Any foray into John or the Beatles tags becomes uncomfortable and guilt-ridden quickly.

So, I probably will post less about the Beatles until I can find a blog or a tag that doesn’t give me bad vibes. My fandom will likely outgrow tumblr and the internet. I have a ton of Beatles books; maybe I’ll rely on those. I am doing official scholarly research on them now. Maybe that will be my outlet. I’m sorry if I post less about them now, but it’s really for my own well-being.

#John lennon #the beatles

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