Why is there drama in the Facebook PDF sharing group?
The Short Answer
When some members call out oppressive behavior in the space, the backlash from reactionary members is supported by the complicity of group administrators and moderators. The pattern repeats itself as admins and mods fail to enforce their own anti-oppression guidelines, reproducing the elitist status quo.
The Long Answer
The Facebook group Ask for PDFs from People with Institutional Access was founded some years ago in the 2010s to accomplish the mission in its name: help people who are seeking texts (often shated in PDF format) get them, with the assistance of those who have access to them through affiliation with an institution like a university. While originally loose and informal in nature, as the group has grown to host tens of thousands of Facebook users, it has become something of an institution itself: a series of norms have been established over time around “proper” request-making and posting behavior in the group. As people attempt to reinforce or challenge these norms, depending on their interests, the underlying motivations and beliefs around people’s participation in and expectations of the group become more prominent. Conflicts develop from these tensions; both “popular” wisdom and administrator/moderator power play important roles in determining the outcomes of these discussions.
One of the most frequent recurring themes in these cyclical debates that to erupt in the group multiple times per year is the persistence of structural antiblackness. Intellectual and academic spaces, like the rest of the imperialist world many of us are forced to live in, reproduce the oppression of Black people. Non-Black people say offensive things; spaces with resources are overwhelmingly under the control of non-Black people or Black people who agree to advance the interests of oppressor groups; Black intellectual, emotional, and cultural labor is exploited while actual Black people are treated with a remarkable degree of disrespect, condescension, and/or hostility; etc. All of the above and more takes place within Ask for PDFs from People with Institutional Access. Because no group of oppressed people accepts mistreatment in total silence, there is frequently pushback. And an “incident” then blooms as people notice what’s happening and give their own opinions.
Generally speaking, there are three broad tendencies in these discussions:
- Those who demand oppressive behavior stop, and that people doing it are removed from the group or otherwise face consequences for their actions.
- Those who either openly engage in oppressive behavior in the space, openly defend it, or quietly encourage it.
- Those who frame the discussion itself as the problem (rather than the behavior being challenged) and mostly want a return to the status quo of requesting and receiving books and articles without any “drama”.
There are of course many positions that don’t fall neatly into these three categories (but may align broadly with one or another, depending on the circumstances), and people can and do change their opinions, but many establish an effective pattern. While many members of the group fall into each category, the group administrators and moderators typically fall into position 3. And while this position is not the same as position 2, it has the same effect of protecting and justifying the violent system of “business-as-usual” that oppressed people everywhere have had more than enough of.
Because of all this, each time the status quo is openly challenged, some members of the group quite reasonably conclude that they’re wasting their time and energy attempting to change the entrenched power dynamics in the Facebook group and silence themselves in or leave the space entirely, sometimes joining a splinter Facebook group (since people still want stuff that’s behind paywalls, and the reason the group is so popular in the first place is that many people lack the ability to bypass these paywalls. In other words: artificially scarce resources are being gatekept by an elite which just so happens to support the systems which gave them their privileges. Fancy that.
At the time of this writing (March 2021), we find ourselves in the middle of another one of these cycles. However, this time the issue of contention is group members spewing anti-trans rhetoric, while admins/mods deleted posts where trans users spoke out against this and closed discussion threads highlighting admin/mod hypocrisy. This time, something seems to be different; the group’s forward momentum seems to be deeply unsettled. And honestly, while obviously it’s Black trans people who suffer the most from anti-trans activity, because this is an issue that is understood to victimize many non-Black people as well, it wouldn’t be surprising if this becomes the incident that gives rise to significant transformation in the group — whether that means a new team of mods and admins, an exodus larger than the previous ones dating from June 2020 and earlier, or something else unexpected. The outcome is yet to be decided. Maybe these words will have some effect.
Examples
We’ll be coming back to this post in the future to share examples, collected from screenshots taken or shared by many different people who were in the group at one time or another, of the processes described above. However, as a collective we decided it was important and useful to have a post about this go up anyway. We felt that it would:
- challenge ahistorical (in other words, ignorant or deceptive) attempts to explain what happened in the group;
- make this explanation accessible to people who are unable or unwilling to keep up with “Facebook drama”;
- provide insight into similar dynamics in other spaces loosely organized around “free culture”, anti-intellectual property, and information freedom beliefs;
- hopefully appear in search engine results, which posts in closed Facebook groups generally don’t do.
