Culture & Community
by Lack of Lepers
Whistleblowers! Leaks! Treachery! Betrayal! Intrigue! Whodunnit, damnit?!
Part I: Preface
Chat leaks from private spaces in the SCP Staff have been detrimental over the past year and a half. They are responsible for the general userbase’s irritation reaching all-time highs, that requiring the Town Halls — a synchronized rake-stepping that occurred when Staff was eventually backed into the corner. The result was a slew of pleading apologies from Staff, and an overhaul in accountability with improved but ultimately underwhelming attempts at transparency.
The leaks of most consequence have been those that offer glimpses inside site67 — the official SCP Staff chat. The chat has long been given the jolly sobriquet “super secret”; that done initially as a bit of fun, now an awkward, lingering and above all appropriate way to describe the attitude carried by those within it.
Slowly over time — first in the hands of ignored community pariahs, some of whom were so by virtue of their curiosity and deviation from SCP’s groupthink — realizations from these leaked staff chats made their way into the mainstream and to the more visible and more credible words of individuals within the community. Now being flanked on all sides, and with no apparent answer for an abject failure to follow through with their pleading promises, the SCP Staff are the subject of an ever expanding field of microscopy, wherein the budding replication of a dead-set, spurious, and septically hypocritical bacterial colony is backlit into a more forced transparency.
Leaks themselves are a symptom of a cracking, failing structure. The larger the disconnect — and this one is very large — the worse the leak. There is only so much you can shove into and attempt to flush down the toilet before it gets clogged and strains the pipes. With a new anonymous Twitter account, a sponge has been lovingly placed around these leaks. And because these days, the ranks of SCP Staff are filled with divided loyalties, and are as ruthless and infighting as animals, we might see a reliable trickle from this sponge. If, that is, Staff’s new weapons of suppression don’t Alderaan it off the face of the internet first…
Part II: Off-Site
The first major round of chat leaks in modern SCP history came through a little-known, less-visited, and spooky corner of the space; the SCP Foundation thread on KiwiFarms (KF). For years, critics here mocked and ridiculed the SCP, splitting their shots near-evenly between bullseye observations due to being unbiased, and outrageously uninformed takes due to being so far removed. Starting in 2019 though, once-participants and incognito members of the SCP Wiki became more apparent and vocal on the forums (now reflected affectionately in the thread’s title). Users like vdnb6 demonstrated a relative sophistication and awareness — in retrospect, the unmistakable familiarity of a participating member of the community, and possibly one from the annals of Staff itself — that brought an out-of-place legitimacy to the posts and information.
Due to the general strategy of Staff globbing sanitizer onto criticisms or potentially bad PR within their controlled spaces (and now without) — places like the site’s forums, the site chat, and the “unofficial” surrounding Discord servers — , dissidents and naysayers of the SCP community were driven towards and some funneled directly into the KF thread by a process of exclusion. Those who knew of these concerns resorted to KF in order to speak their minds without fear of disciplinary action or cross-platform retaliation (though dual citizens who made themselves known were commonly banned simply for being there, an unforgivable betrayal of a strange loyalty).
KF isn’t a pretty place by any means, but where else could a whistleblower go? It is a dirty place for dirty work, where dirty secrets go to die and be born as believable. A tactlessness in SCP Staff made it apparent that they too hawked the thread in an attempt to front-run potential drama; that is to say, these truths being brought out from under their rug. So, hey; who can be blamed when the place had a lot of Staff eyes on it? If you build it, they will come. Might as well play the game.
Competent posts and information coming out of the KF thread became more and more informed by individuals who were closer and closer to the Staff, and so closer and closer to carefully guarded secrets. The onslaught of routine chat logs, released with plenty of commentary, started around quarter two of 2020. After the dominoes were pushed by a staffer who had experienced the center of the underground grooming networks within both the community and staff structure first hand, private messages revealing the incompetence of the site’s Anti-Harassment team in scandalous, internal investigations, along with snippets of chat logs from the NSFW SCP chat #site12, were all leaked. These revealed a horde of questionable behavior; interactions between staff members (up to and including Admins) with their impressionable userbase, some awry cases involving known sex pests covered up for years. Collected chat logs from #site17 and #site19 also proved interesting and entertaining despite these being mundane and user-accessible chats.
Months later, the ante was upped when an ex-Admin and decade-tenured author defected, unleashing over a decade of private DMs and chat logs to a small batch of dedicated, amateur-archaeologist participants on that thread. These logs included Staff save-havens such as site67, site00 (chat op channel), and rogetbox. The logs total at 83,122 lines of private messages and 5,908,714 lines of chat.
The next months saw numerous payloads dropped on the thread, each showing more clearly than the last the Staff’s insularity, incompetence, hypocrisy, and above all, dishonesty. The starkest reality, even when these offenses were delivered facetiously, was that regular users didn't get such an excuse to escape their bans. There were revelations:
The use of slurs and offensive jokes that would have the everyuser permabanned:
Staff saying “Kill yourself” in numerous contexts, and also making fun of a possible or at least claimed suicide attempt by a user, despite them universally decrying a -J article for joking about “kys” and suicide (and for banning people for typing “kys”):
the later-apologized-for attitude of “ban them all, ask questions later, let God sort them out” during the 2018 June Logo Fiasco was shared and ordered by numerous high-up individuals on staff:
their years-long awareness and close tab-keeping of the Kiwifarms thread:
coordinated and deliberate efforts to ban users for personal reasons that went beyond rule offenses and the site charter (user was not technically staff, but was let into staff spaces by Decibelle to pitch banning Metaphysician behind the books):
a staff-and-friends-dogpile and verbal bashing of a troubled and bullied user who would later take his own life (for unrelated reasons, but it’s a bad look given the second point in this bulleted list)
Staff’s severe insulting of and vitriol over their users:
Staff’s elitist insulting of their most involved and active users
the “anti-SCP manifesto” continually inspires them to increase their censorship:
the proud bragging of multiple high-ranking Staff over their doxing and IRL harassment of two children (for the crime of trolling the IRC)
the Staff-OK’d creation of an inverted Nazi-symbol chat room that participants were privy to the sensitive nature and potential controversy of while chatting in it
the repetitive and willful dismissal of overt problems until effective moderation is impossible and/or they become too problematic to ignore any longer (e.g. with the end result of the Town Halls)
a hyper-partisanship of Staff in their explicit consideration of like-minded political opinions when considering possible promotions, but also as an imposition on their general userbase
utilizing "official" channels of punishment to avenge personal insults to Staff members
... as well as a host of sexual inappropriateness bordering on the illegal:
Staff asking an underage user (16) to please share their ecchi art that was going around the social media of the community, and encouraging more of that art:
the IRL social coordination of said member (then 17) with a Staff member (22, both of age in Australia):
the erotic roleplaying and writing of erotic fictions for and with said underage member:
Staff refusing to ban popular authors for behavior others are banned for, this done strictly due to their varying degrees of popularity and the resulting PR strain:
the normalization by Staff of rabid sexuality, excused and promoted in inappropriate spaces:
And also etc insight into the Staff’s mindset regarding their (let’s keep this in perspective: very small) power and authority:
These Staff chat logs are to this day scattered throughout the KF thread posts and laid bare for anyone willing to witness them. These are also all archived numerous times over on services like the Wayback Machine and archive.today. The warehouse of decade-tall chat logs and PMs wait in a cold storage until current events (e.g. SCP-DISC-J) again make their secrets relevant.
To sum it up in too much of an oversimplification, the chat logs showed without a doubt that Staff applied one set of domineering rules and standards of behavior publicly and another privately, and relished in the power, a lack of transparency, and unaccountability cocooning it all. (Having read more leaked staff chat logs than anyone should, I can tell you that the avarice, hate, ugliness, harassment, maliciousness, vehemence, bigotry, tyranny, and sordid characters in the Staff Chats are as outrageous and on par with anything they have banned common users for, in some cases out-doing them.) There are two entirely different triggers on the behavioral, political, and disciplinary mechanics here; the trigger on the turret aimed at Staff itself is rusted stuck; the one aimed at the public is a hair-trigger on full-auto.
Similar to the tilted reputation SCP perpetuates for their creative writing competition — places like RPC Authority — SCP Staff aggressively smeared the SCP KiwiFarms thread’s informational value, and the participants therein as heretics; these assertions based more on KF’s reputation at large rather than the small and sometimes exclusively-attended corner of it that tirelessly covered SCP when no one else would… or really was allowed to.
Though a mischaracterization, this vilification tactic proved mostly successful, and the vast majority of the SCP community was unaware of the information in the thread, to the great relief of Staff. However, there were certain scandals that were too significant to suppress. That summer, the pressure from the worst of these revelations reached the marble tower of SCP Staff, causing key figures in the site’s hidden sexual edifice to crumble in dread and anticipation of marching torches & held pitchforks in the tower’s direction. But the most popular and senior of these figures was done in the controlled demolition of a voluntary step-down; a sham, a lie, a political charade, and one that Staff encouraged this individual to take as much for their own sake as for his. (To this day, Staff have not herded the self-honesty to admit this failure; not in that individual nor in themselves. They are nearly the only ones who remain fooled by now.)
At least this all was still outside their community; in the dark spaces regarded as the land outside the city, reserved for the nomadic lepers. However, the woes from chat leaks became worse and more far-reaching, as a nest of secrets always tends to. The next bombs, though relatively lighter in their explosive capacity, were dropped closer to the community itself. This time, the leaks would be at the disposal of someone who the community would have no choice but to hear shouting.
Part III: Site Staff
It took more than half a year, but chat leaks became more of an intra-community affair to the SCP Wiki in the wake of what scandals broke the surface of Staff’s propagandistic, informational quarantine. An event can serve as a landmark: the Cerastes scandal (also here and here), where among other accusations (found to be entirely personal, fueled by pettiness, and poorly fabricated... the ripples of which continue to this day), an unknown and non-credentialed user was apparently present in a Staff chat for some amount of time. The reaction of Staff, who had so far attempted to downplay the potential for scandal in their private spaces as eager conspiracy theorizing, inadvertently revealed how sensitive the Staff truly felt their chat material was to uninvited, unregistered eyes:
In an unfortunate reflexivity that would come to define the Staff’s collective composure time and time again, the reaction here was worse than the problem, the ensuing informational breach more self-made than exogenous, and the telling message more surely delivered by their frenetic and unaware signaling. The backlash from this event and others around the time (the banning of Etoisle) helped boil user frustration as well as this sort of Staff panic, spilling over like a foam pushed upwards.
This led Staff to the reactionary, rushed, and disastrous Town Halls; an emergency PR maneuver they had initially posited a year prior in the midst of the site’s greatest sex scandal (uncovered by leaks from KF no less), but that they had let fall by the wayside, as it seemed they would get through the scandal relatively unscathed after spewing promises and policy changes (some of which were never followed through on). After these Town Halls, over 15 policy changes (and counting) were enacted as a result in an attempt to mollify the users. The heat was so high, and the efforts of Staff during the Town Halls so unskilled, it took 3 months for them to reply to the hardest-hitting of the criticisms:
To give credit where it is due, the Staff Chat Recaps have been released as promised. The two so far have been very interesting and informative. It would seem that the Staff had turned over a new leaf, but looks can be deceiving. This was a superficial and artificial change, one that was to last only as long as the heat did.
As if a self-fulfilling prophecy of Staff’s paranoia and a pataphysical fate haunting them in the form of Cerastes’ ghost, more leaks of inner Staff spaces soon came, casting the efficacy and lessons of the Town Halls — if indeed there were any to speak of—into severe doubt. Leaks next accompanied the failed promotion of a disastrously unpopular Staffer to Administrator:
...and again regarding ongoing Rule Zero violations in Staff chat spaces that were still not being addressed without the eye of an external pressure:
This became febrile when a particular user, a milquetoast politician and prosaic orator who was once staff but kicked off for incompetence, self-assumed the mantle of Staff provocateur and engaged in a string of leaks and intimidating rhetoric. The effect of this was exponential; this individual has arguably the largest audience and loudest microphone in the space.
Chat logs shared by this individual repeated mild observations & revelations made clear by the exhaustive KF logs. However, the mushroom cloud couldn’t be upstaged by smoke & mirrors this time. A false narrative about an out-group’s lack of credibility wasn’t going to work anymore.
That politician speak... 🤢 [source]
In response to these, Staff engaged their usual enmity for the democritized information, as if the incumbent clergy who count on an illiterate congregation to abuse their advantage:
[source]
Now enter the meaningful contributions of SCP Staff Leaks Twitter. On its first day active, this new Leaks Twitter account amassed nearly 100 subscribers, and sits at around an impressive 150 at the time of writing. A set of three leaks was released on the day of its creation.
(Dr.Cimmerian was once banned for upvote war-dialing; he solicited upvotes for a contest entry from 650 site users. While disgraceful and its own commentary on the disease of clout-chasing currently still raging bacteremic at SCP, one has to be impressed with the hand-crafted care and time this must have taken. Anyway, he was banned from participating in contests forever, right or wrong.)
What Leaks #1 and #2 show is that the SCP Staff have not, and likely are not, capable of changing their ways. Old habits seem to die hard. How else could it be when the people making the promises to change give themselves the task of policing their own actions, essentially on the honor system (or a lack of it)? Their act brings to mind a bobblehead, shaking in all directions when some pokes them, to tone down back to a blank smile.
Because of the Twitter leaks, we know the details of this Rule Zero infraction when we wouldn’t have otherwise. We also know that such violations on staff’s part don’t mean anything still, because — as we can see — no one is reprimanded, not given an official warning, as are specified in the purely political bones thrown to their outraged citizenry. Instead, a non-Staff user who expressed valid criticism and irritation on the on-site discussion got written up for comparatively less venomous, but much more honest and productive speech.
But while these leaks are welcome and informative, they were played amateurishly by the Leak Twitter team, who fired their weaponry too eagerly, too drunken with the potential of power, and the temptation of warmongering. This is because this discussion on Cimmerian may not have made its way to the 2021 September Staff Chat Recaps without these leaks, which were released 9 days after. We see what the recap team does with the coverage:
Because the leak came out prior to this Recap, there is no way to know of this level of transparency would have made it to the public reports on their own honesty. Would they have mentioned it? If they did, would we even get as much as is here? It’s a given that the team was aware of the Staff Chat Leak tweets and understood that the cat was in some ways already out of the bag (… maybe it was a half-cat). We can see that they don’t want to express the specifics of the Rule Zero violation, which is arguably the only important part; not the knowledge that Staffers still have as much indemnity as they always have; something perfectly available to critical thought and naked intuition. The Rule Zero violation here is painted as something not worth knowing the pivotal details of, and worth passing over with respect to any disciplinary action.
The better strategy on the part of the Twitter account would have been to hold the leak until Staff reported on the event, so that any lie by omission could be caught red-handed, and the floor show of integrity by the Staff and whole effort of the Recap in the process shown to be a deep charade. This was a fumbled play and missed opportunity on the Twitter’s part. They should never interrupt their enemy while they are in the middle of making a mistake.
But thankfully there is still more value and telling information in the first round of leaks than that.
Part IV: Chat Staff
You may be surprised to learn that the body of SCP Staff is partially cleaved into two, the duties and privileges of which do not always overlap; these are Site Staff and Chat Staff. To demonstrate, the Chat Staff aren’t currently mentioned on the SCP Wiki’s Meet the Staff page; not even the owner and high-ranking ones. A listing of this second Staff is tucked away in a quaternary tab on the Chat Guide.
We’ve seen what the leaks say about the Site Staff; what if anything do the leaks say about the Chat Staff?
Let’s reintroduce the idea of SkipIRC, written about elsewhere on this magazine. At its most basic, it is the chat platform that Staff use as an official part of the SCP Wiki (although curiously, and a discussion for another time, no longer used for Disc discussions). At its most heinous, it is the tool of privacy violation that Staff have that can extract sensitive, potentially identifying data from its users without their knowledge or consent. Certainly not with their express permission.
Recently and oddly, the ownership of this tool was unceremoniously and in a cavalier fashion passed from its original designer to a list of other staff, who if anyone is familiar with the recent dramas at SCP, might read as a Who’s-Who of Least-Trusted Staff Members. (This new ownership has, at the time of writing, not been reflected on the official list of Chat Staff.) After the intervention of the Town Halls and all the delicate courtship invested into it by Staff (or so it would seem), and the apologies for not taking user opinion of power-wielders into account after the failed Adminship of a disliked Staffer, here a new regime of authoritarianism is flipped on like a switch into existence. Staff may have learned alright, but it might have been to simply not give the users a chance to know of the promotion of an unsavory bunch. This promotion was one into a separate but similar sphere, the Chat Staff equivalent of Admin powers.
Included in this new Chat Staff regime, is an IP-hungry technical staffer who helped refine the manner in which SkipIRC rips IP addresses from chat users, and whose immediate and last appearance prior to this promotion was a decisive resignation (due to the increased accountability of Staff’s private chat spaces, the Recaps). Also included in the bunch was an Admin who behaved as if they were a ten-year-old, arguing over toys on the playground that weren’t really anybody’s, and who escaped impending punishment by going into self-exile, and who is inexplicably back with no awaiting punishment as was intended, not even when the topic is revisited officially (and a year later, unobserved by leading voices in the community… we may also see just how the short attention spans of the average SCP Wiki member can be exploited for political padding.)
Also included — you can’t make this stuff up — was the same individual whose character inspired the Staff Chat Recaps to be demanded by the users; the first and unfortunately expected misstep after Staff renewed their vows for decency in their "private" chats. Yet another is the same who the userbase recently rose up in a collective protest to prevent the promotion of, after a tone-deaf and shamefully forgiven Staff incorrectly thought he would be a good Admin candidate; a shout so loud that the entire promotion protocol was revised.
Here is a true shadow seat of power. It is one thing to have the ability to dox at will the mass of casual and largely uninformed users who show up in the SkipIRC. It’s another thing entirely to wield that option for any and all who participate in Staff Chat, and particularly those; political enemies, ideological stand-outs, or competing Staff members who are simply disliked. It also acts as a back door to technically retain a staff member whose public stock has been sunk, but who can still prove useful (e.g. DrMagnus).
In a manner echoing those of past unpopular and near-despised figures who have access to user IP addresses via the IRC, these new Chat Staff members have used the sensitive information for retaliations far beyond the scope of the SCP Wiki, with several users being reported to their ISP in encouragement of their total removal from internet access. (This done over a perception of differing political views and sensitivities.)
The concern one might properly have for such a power in the hands of an irresponsible few increases in proportion with how much someone is involved in the community, the staff, its public image of political belief-mandates, and the forlorn act of writing for what should be a writing site. It is the threat of fascism stretched silent and looming. It is not far away. It is regarded as normal, as heroic.
And hence, we see in the September Staff Chat Recap just how unwilling and resistant the SCP Staff are to even come onto the IRC these days:
The responsibility of moderating the IRC, and even the mere attendance on it by Staff, is bobbed around like a hot potato. No one wants to do it. “Why can’t we just hang out here over on Discord?” The fact that IP and email addresses are not shared on Discord with a select few in-community and untrustworthy ruling class members has nothing to do with this. Honk honk.
You might imagine then how the small percent of informed general users felt at the news, those being users who have less privilege and less judicial leverage than Staff do, and who were just promised attentiveness to the boil of poor communication upon the face of Staff-user relations. One only needs to see how the SCP’s own members reacted to the news to understand how much of a slap (to the face-boil) this was:
This is just the initial tear through the paper tiger; I encourage you to read the rest.
So now we approach Leak #3 in this first batch of leaks from the SCP Chat Leaks Twitter. We see a unique, behind-the-scenes viewport into the events leading up to a sudden, rightfully upsetting, and highly questionable transfer of some levers of power in the SCP (Site) Staff.
In Leak #3, the fiasco is admitted to be a sticky spaghetti bowl of mistakes. It has not yet been made public; careful deliberations must take place first, for it is a massive error, so much so that it took suggestion and debate to even OK the motion to casually make the mistakes public knowledge. We can now see from both sides now, the O5 and on-site announcements, played down and attempted as nonchalantly as a teen telling their parents that they were “just” suspended from school that day.
This, 3rd leak is a very important find. (And it would be more so if Staff didn’t inanely repeat these same arguments on the public mainsite form about this topic, here.) It tells us more than just that our most elementary ability to suspect and see through staffspeak (without the benefit of leaks) is accurate enough. It tells us that Staff are not just casually dismissive of their promises, but that they are dangerously and manically so.
It is apparent from this chatlog that Staff is fully aware of the sensitive information of users they are handling, and that they are doing so without permission. Worse than that, it shows the moral ability of one of the Staffers involved in this shadow cabal (ChaoSera) to be nonexistent on the subject; where some attentiveness should most be. There is a basic consideration — a fundamental human respect — that’s captured and discarded a thousand times in the words “no impact”. In the clicks of typing that sentence, a stadium of uncomfortable and protesting individuals are crushed. “I think you are misunderstanding the concern,” (CaptainKirby) is right. “Silly” is not.
An unfortunate typo (gee0765) makes it seem as though these people would dox and harm even their good friends! Accidental hilarity and slip of the mask in an otherwise very dark picture. It is a bigger deal than even those arguing the relatively virtuous side of it are willing to say.
Worst of all, when faced with (1) the philosophical ethics, (2) the prospect of smoothing the procedural mistake over with the public, and (3) the valid discomfort of the everyuser, an ex-Admin who is also part of the empowered group here suggests that those on the receiving end of an official handwave might actually be stupid enough to be reassured by the observation that the people who are pointing the guns at the back of their heads are long-time mercenaries with good trigger discipline. The amount of neuropathy required to numb the sympathy for those who are more helpless in such a precarious stranglehold is not becoming of a healthy morality, nor anyone who should be trusted with this sort of power, certainly not a leader. The last, underlined sentence reads like a total delusion.
What’s also attempted — here in the lacking comment of “TheOne” (right side of Leak#3) and by the empowered staff elsewhere —is the cabal’s self-absolution from wrongdoing by pointing to worse instances of privacy invasion. But worse yet, they in fact point to less egregious examples, ones that aren’t at all comparable; ones that aren’t doxing like this is. “It’s not like WikiDot doesn’t have everyone’s email and IP address anyway,” is thought to be a good reason to quell any alarm.
But, that typical Staff paradox of attempted self-defense doing its opposite, the alarming distinction rings louder; SCP Staff don’t have claim to those things because WikiDot does, and any user of WikiDot has by definition knowingly and willfully given an email address to Wikidot. In SkipIRC, by contrast, it is taken without knowledge or permission. Also alarmingly distinct is that WikiDot is by now an abandoned, and largely automated system as is that certainly has no personal interest in the dynamics of these community individuals.
This link shared here (“shady Internet ads”) goes to a circa 2003 webpage that talks down people from being duped by Internet 1.0, Windows 95-era virus bait. The comparison is laughable because this method being used in SkipIRC is much more sophisticated and in line with the unwarranted surveillance & mass ignorance perpetuated by design for the Internet 2.0. The link’s text reads “By itself, it’s not really enough information for a malicious hacker to perform some exploits on your system.” We break down elsewhere on the magazine how SkipIRC doesn’t just have your IP Address alone. To answer the last, hideously unintelligent question; because you would be policing yourself and no one would be the wiser. The last line’s attempted credentials are not working in the direction this individual thinks they are.
As if being conducted by irony itself, the SkipIRC transfer announcement on O5 and the mainsite forums came the very same day that Staff finally replied to the main criticisms of the Town Hall forums, wherein they made large and sweeping assurances of higher transparency, communication, and accountability. The same day, and in the Town Hall response, a Staff member apparently representing the Staff body, wrote:
“Finally, we admit that the “bad faith” argument holds no ground and should not have been brought up during initial townhall discussions. Upon reflection, we recognize and agree that basing policy decisions and interactions with the community at large with a hypothetical malicious entity is fruitless and contributes to unnecessary paranoia.” —[ source]
And yet, in the #3 leaked chat log from the Staff Chat Leak Twitter, a more-empowered Chat Staff member is seen inflating just such a hypothetical malicious entity (“recurring trolls”) to justify the moral ambiguity of the decision to violate hundreds or thousands of people’s privacy without knowledge or consent; what would be against the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines of numerous other platforms (ones that, as we’ll see, Staff don’t mind leveraging like a weapon against people with their information). It seems as though the volume of dishonesty of SCP Staff is constant, and is merely displaced to a less apparent and less forward-facing room when threatened; like a turtle into its shell.
These are the sorts of careless decisions that lead SCP Staff continuously into a mine-field of pressure-triggered shrapnel; they go frolicking into it with the briefest of thoughts and fastest, clumsiest of steps. The deep, generational, societal, and profoundly moral conundrum here is reduced to “because trolls” in the most uninspired conclusion I’ve seen in some time, despite it being promised against, simultaneously, in more public parts of the user-facing site. The “honesty” is being fed to the public in the form of Staffspeak, and is simply exchanged into the other hand, which rests behind the Staff’s back.
The moral and lesson here is: as long as there are secrets, they will be leaked. The SCP Staff has long known what the non-Band-aid treatment is; to actually correct their characters so that their culture can improve. The true answer is to not allow yourself the type of character that says things worthy of being leaked. But that, it seems, is too much to bother with.
Part V: Conquest & Colonization of Reputation Cross-Platform
This article was near its completion and in the polishing phase of editing when a new crease in the history of Staff chat leaks made itself abruptly known. On October 18, 2021, the content of this blog, which had published chat logs evincing some of the points and revelations bullet listed earlier in this article, was flagged. That blog was suspended for less than a day, and the offending material had to be modified before it would be allowed to be re-published
A message from the Medium Corruption Protection & Perpetuation Team. Suddenly, the entirety of historical triumph and significance from the likes of Edward Snowden, or WikiLeaks is reduced to a vague loyalty to secrecy and to the exploitation of the uninformed.
This was a tactic not yet observed from Staff, but one that had actually already taken place 4 months earlier.
In the transition from KF to the inner-community, efforts to demonstrate the hypocritical and secreted nature of Staff's dealings were taken to a project called The Containment Fiction Wiki, whose goal is to document all of containment fiction, good and bad. Soon after its creation, it received some negative attention from SCP-faithful:
It was very quickly on the radar of SCP Staff, who feared for their reputations. It wasn't long until a member of Staff -- as high-ranking as you can get actually -- joined the Confic Wiki in a perplexing fashion. One day after they were uploaded, .pdfs of staff chat from the years 2017, 2018, and 2019 were removed from the site.
The .pdfs were attempted to be re-uploaded, and again, they were removed, but this time with an explanation:
The implication here is that someone sent a complaint to the staff of this website in order to encourage an administrator to remove the content, the same tactic used with Medium. This again took place less than one day after the re-upload.
This persistent attempt to rid the internet and general knowledge of Staff skeletons was itself enough to suggest how damning they may be. It was as loud of a statement as the logs themselves. Each reach into the spaces outside their jurisdiction signals an increasing paranoia and desperation; as if they are no longer content to simply whitewash in large swaths of misinformation that all out-group-based information is suspect, being outside of the site’s ethical enchantment.
The SCP Staff is no longer content to maintain their informational gulag to their own borders and spaces, and now but exact an imperialism of censorship; deeply opposed to criticism, a colonialist campaign of great effort is to now sanitize their reputation and deeds across all corners of the internet, whether within their purview or not. Fusing the worse aspects of the Community Outreach and Licensing Teams, their new task force would see any and all truth regarding their duplicity flagged and censored under the pretense of a violation of privacy, or overly-coddling Terms of Service.
While this war tactic was clever and an effective short-term play, and the attack a quick jab in the mouth, its effects will not be as lasting or impressive. The attack has further publicized that blog and this publication beyond what it would have gotten were it not for their overreach. The act of claiming the leak of pseudonymous discussion constituted a fugitive abuse of Medium’s spirit of their content guidelines, and stands starkly in a numbed insincerity to the fact that Staff have been shown to dismiss the acquisition of hundreds of people’s IP and email addresses without their consent as perfectly acceptable… a fact elucidated most clearly by chat leaks no less.
Furthermore, this propelled the hypocrisy and the points being made in that blog post to new and clearer-than-ever heights, as the things stated by Medium as wrong and against their Content Guidelines are exactly those things which Staff do and rely upon to conduct their routine, and daily disciplinary measures. How much consent do banned victims of their injustice give to have chat logs posted on O5? What sort of leaks and shared private messages do they obtain and submit for evidence in their on- and off-site “investigations” for harassment cases? It seems that letter from Medium might have more recoil to the thinking individual than is superficially apparent.
It also should be noted that the screen caps shared in that blog post, now elsewhere on the internet and archived numerous times in its original capacity to inform, are technically not unwillingly-shared leaks. The ones from Twitter are second-hand leaks and case law firmly establishes this as un-litigable. Our leaks are from an individual who was present in the spaces for over a decade and who did not sign any non-disclosure agreement regarding the flow of information out of those sessions, which are legally defined as public as it is. These chats are no more private than a laptop filled with politically incriminating files dropped off at a hardware repair store, a signature on the dotted line.
This loud war act did not help make any case for Staff, who are fairly obviously nervous and probably more than a little bitter at the leaks exposing their true selves. What then was the long-horizon purpose or goal of the desperate assault? If for lasting effect and a culling of their increasingly poor reputation, then where are those things now, just a few days later? We find neither. It seems instead to have been a very short-sighted reflex of a diseased neural tissue; a sort of Tourette Syndrome that can’t help but shout embarrassing and incriminating things in the thick of public sight.
As everything has an equal and opposite reaction, this maneuver was responded to; the information that was lost in one place, showed up in another, and another.
Part VI: Conclusion
You wouldn't see these sorts of snippets posted to the fun-loving O5 thread dedicated to glimpses into staff chat.
Staff’s continually battered reputation is self-inflicted. The group will go at almost any length to modify the reception of their cloistered behavior, not giving any credence or wisdom to the idea that simply changing that behavior would rid chat leaks their teeth, and be the fix out of a bulk purchase of Band-Aids and last-minute trips to the PR ER.
Their fidelitous erosion of their own credibility and legitimacy is also giving good opportunity for political opportunists to advance, and declare their own arm of a sort of a cross-platform, informational war over the incumbents under the guise of concern trolling. While this Staff Chat Leak Twitter is almost assuredly in line with such a duplicitous attempt to simply exchange the issues at hand into another set of them — there not truly being much of an ethical gulf between the two political groups vying for control of SCP, both crowing about justice out of one side of the mouth and drooling sticky puddles of hypocrisy in their salivation for power and self-exemption out the other — , it has to be, against the backdrop of SCP Staff's utter refusal to own up to their words, seen as somewhat promising. If only next in light of the recent developments where we see platforms weaponized by SCP.
Some critics of the Twitter are correct to identify that this effort may erode the current Staff, but it won’t do much to solve the ailments that diseased them; that those championing the power grab are perhaps good at identifying the symptoms, but bad at identifying the disease. Furthermore, if a political group bound by complicit secrecy lives by the leak, they will die by it as well; politicians can always be trusted to throw one another under the bus. This political group has in their covert operations already pitted themselves in the disadvantage that now threatens to unwind all of Staff, and be their exit from the historical stage. There will not be enough revolution in the destruction of the structure to prevent it from being rebuilt anew by different hands.
Still, you can’t be picky about who you find in the foxhole with you. If their weapons are firing in the same direction as mine, I can overlook a lot in the transitory activity of our incidental agreement. A broken clock is right twice a day.
No new posts have been made to the Staff Chat Leaks Twitter since the day it was formed. The silence is intriguing. Is this all that the Staff Chat Leaks Twitter has to post? Has the SCP Staff fired their new weapon upon it, or at least aimed at it in a silent, threatening signaling? Only time will tell. You all will have to submit tips to our own hotline; admin@conficmagazine.com, because Confic Magazine on Twitter was shamefully banned from seeing the feed (unless we simply go into Private mode on a browser of course… meaningful bans from there aren’t conducive to a leak channel hoping to disseminate info widely). This happened shortly after subscribing:
Sad! We elders can’t get no respect from the youngins who are rehashing our strategies!