Hi all,
We want to clear the air on our recent safety issues by detailing our security efforts. This is not wholesale permission to send hate or harassment to any party involved. My objective is to not cast blame on individuals, but to be transparent on how we approached this issue.
We do not condone any harassment and hate to any party as a result of this discussion. It is unfortunate we must share our private conversations to clear the air, as we do not believe issues of Safety are grounds for Content. Because this is an issue that involves real lives of individuals, we will be taking our efforts and investigations back privately after this statement. We additionally ask for speculation to be kept to a bare minimum given additional risks to all parties involved.
We’ve observed many individuals referencing decisions by VShojo Staff as grounds to release harmful content. When it comes to issues of safety, we ask the community and collaborators to respect the wishes of our talent. Our talent has every right to advocate for their own safety, and we will always stand by them.
We recognize now that the complex priorities between Nux and VSJ will not always align when it comes to safety. We still maintain that taking down the video should have been done more immediately given our talent’s feedback and the recommendation of our security firm.
This document will go through major misconceptions about Nux’s now deleted video, and his replies and apologies.
“VShojo stayed silent, while indies suffered”
Allegation — People were still in danger of phishing attacks from VShojo.org
Reality: Our cybersecurity team was able to work with law enforcement to obtain the target list from the threat actor. This list confirmed that only two phishing attempts were made. One to Nux and the other to Sakii.
Context Timeline: The Phishing Attempts for Audition Emails
- A threat actor creates fake acceptance emails to join VShojo.
- These are people who have had history doxxing and swatting VSJ talent
- They target Nux & Sakki using the domain VShojo.org
- Nux reaches out to me and I confirm it is fake.
- VShojo with our cybersecurity team, we investigated and worked to take down the VShojo.org domain
- We advise Nux that creating any content or bringing attention to the threat actor would lead to more of the same kind of harassment and disrupt our current law enforcement investigation.
Screenshots:
Our first DMs with Nux about why publishing information is harmful to the case.
Our DMs leading to the video where we reiterate our concerns with making public statements on threat actors.
Sakii reached out for support after tweeting that we didn’t reply to her messages. We worked it out with her and discovered it was an issue with her discord not sending messages at the time.
“VShojo Approved Nux’s Video”
Allegation — VShojo gave Nux approval to release his video
Reality: VShojo never at any point said that he had permission, nor were we asked
- VShojo was given limited time to suggest edits and create a statement
- Politeness in Twitter reply text was misconstrued as approval/endorsement
- Notes are written in a polite manner, but are critical of information Nux covered in the video.
- Suggestions for edits were ignored (beyond blurring of some names)
- Timestamps were provided with our feedback on edits. (screenshots below)
Context Timeline: Nux’s First Video
- November 21st: Nux makes a tweet suggesting that he will be shortly releasing a video covering the situation.
- VSJ Staff enlist their Cybersecurity expert Ph0enix to run communications with Nux
- Staff’s Context: There is a negative history of interaction between VSJ and Nux that lead us to proceed with extreme caution
- Ph0enix makes efforts to educate Nux on why this is a bad move which are ignored
- Edits were suggested and ignored by Nux
- Statement drafted and tweeted to contextualize concerns with the video.
- Video is released and our goals with the response were not achieved. We continue conversations with Nux to see what can be done to address this (e.g. take down the video).
- We recognize that not enough context was provided with our initial post and created this addendum which includes reiterating that we never endorsed his video.
Screenshots:
DM conversation leading up to video launch, conveying our concerns with the content
A limited time window for getting messaging out there. (remember that Ph0enix is treating Nux as we would any media professional, hence the polite tone.)
Learnings, going into the future
We were given limited time to react, but a stronger effort from the management to sync with our talent at the start could have been helpful in preventing this situation’s escalation.
We still stand behind our stance on allowing our talent the freedom to express themselves as they see fit and don’t wish to impair how they communicate with their communities. To this end, we will be increasing our efforts to ensure our talent is better informed with the company’s activities.
Acknowledgements
Any confusion that previously arose from this issue was the responsibility of VShojo Staff. For this we’d like to set the record straight.
We did warn Nux about releasing the videos by outlining concerns from our cybersecurity team, but these are not the same as asking him to pull down the video. From our perspective, we believed these were strong warnings and we could have been much clearer on the risks.
We absolutely stand by our talent’s statement to defend themselves. We also stand by the need to take action when content puts our talent and the community at risk.
Within the short time-frame, we had little opportunity for foresight to bring in the talent earlier to contextualize their feelings on the matter. We can and will do better moving forward.
Conclusion
We hope clearing the air here with our context helps put this drama behind all of us. I am understanding of Nux’s stance and hope our detailing from our side helps put everything into context. We do not wish to see this matter escalate further. Do not send hate or harassment to anyone.
We’re looking forward to continuing work as usual, and hope all fandoms can see the many perspectives of this complicated interaction between VShojo and Nux.
Thanks everyone for reading,
Gunrun
