About

Fan Faction is an action-network dedicated to mobilizing anyone who participates in any fandom to effect change. Our community includes but is not limited to: fan convention attendees / staffers, cosplayers, artists, vendors, performers, voice actors, and gamers.

Outside of activism, Fan Faction will provide guidance and best practices for organizing people and problem-solving. These skills and more may be useful in rallying your own community for change, running a fan convention, or planning a social meetup.

Scope

We care about many things, but we would spread ourselves too thinly and burn out or simply lose if we try to solve everything at once.

Change starts locally. In our inception, we will be laser-focused on achieving strategic victories on issues of public interest relevant to fans local to Seattle, King County, and Washington State. For issues of nation-wide or global scale, we may act on a local component that is winnable.

While there are many topics that are important to the broader fandom communities, we are still human and limited by what a small team is able to manage at once. However, if you like what we do and want to replicate the same for your local community where we do not have the resources, please reach out at info@fanfaction.org. We will try to provide information within our capacity so you can scale out change where we cannot.

Our Values

As of this moment, our organization has identified 2 main areas which the fandom communities resonate with for taking action:

  1. Human Rights and Dignity
  2. Privacy

We describe these briefly on this page and will dive more deeply into each topic in separate, subsequent posts.

Human Rights and Dignity

At the time of writing of our values, the most immediate threat to human rights in the United States comes from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The government organization uses our taxpayer dollars to hire agents who hide their faces as they brutalize, detain, and deport our neighbors. In Washington, ICE runs their operations from two key areas.

WA is home to the Washington State Fairgrounds in Puyallup which was an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite the platitudes of 'never again', WA is now home to the ICE Processing Facility (formerly Northwest Detention Center, NWDC) in Tacoma, where it detains our neighbors in its modern day concentration camp. Then only a few minutes drive south from Seattle, our state allows ICE to deport our neighbors on flights from King County Airport.

Our organization seeks the abolishment of ICE nationwide. Yet on the way to that end goal, at a local level we demand intermediate steps including the closure of the concentration camp in Tacoma and the prohibition of deportation flights from King County Airport and all airports in WA.

Privacy

Privacy encompasses a wide range of issues affecting fan communities including, but not limited to:

  • Privacy from generative 'AI' and non-consensual intimate imagery.

    We vehemently reject generative 'AI' technologies that rely on scraping images, text, audio, and video from its creators without their enthusiastic and informed consent. Generative 'AI' also violates privacy when its users prompt for non-consensual intimate imagery, the leading usage of the technology.
  • Privacy of gender, sexuality, and personally identifiable information (PII) online and offline.

    With the sale of TikTok to joint US companies, the platform has updated its privacy policy to collect data including citizenship status, gender, and sexuality. The updated policy allows them to share that information with advertisers, governments, and third parties. This is not only an invasion of privacy, but a direct danger to the lives of minorities that the current administration has vilified and terrorized.

    Separately, several states have anti-'obscenity' laws and 25 states have enacted age-verification laws for accessing 'obscene' content which is purposely vaguely-defined. These laws target LGBTQ+ people by pointing to any content about gender and sexuality as 'obscene' and either banning them or requiring ID. These laws do not work to achieve safety for anyone and have only been the cause of leaking personally identifiable information.
  • Privacy to own and operate tools.
    Washington State House Bill 2321 would require every 3D printer be equipped with hardware that notifies the government of what is printed before it can be printed. This would brick cosplayers' non-connected printers overnight.

To address these violations of privacy, our organization seeks the passage of a privacy law that is at the same level or greater than GDPR in the European Union. The absence of a nationwide or even a state-wide privacy law enables corporations to mine data on its users unabated. We will achieve this at a local, state level first and replicate it across all states and territories over time. If there is appetite to jump straight to a federal law, we will join those efforts.

Summary

Fan Faction is focused on 3 goals at the local level to start:

  1. End all ICE flights from King County Airport and all airports in WA.
  2. Close the ICE Processing Facility in Tacoma.
  3. Pass a GDPR-style privacy law for Washington State.

By strategically narrowing our scope to our locale, we have a greater chance for success.

Privacy first

We believe privacy is a human right. That is why we seek a privacy law. To that end, our organizational practices also reflect our ideals.

If you wish to stay informed with us, you may sign up with a preferred email address and alias. We have selected ghost.io as our platform for communicating because it is private by design: we use no tracking cookies and collect no analytics. This website exists solely for communication and organizing, and it will disappear once we achieve our goals.