Kickstarter apologises for allowing and funding super rapey project

Earlier this week, Alexandra blogged about the super rapey “seduction guide” that Redditor and Honest to God Nice Guy (TM) Who Just Wants Those Uppity Bitches to Have Sex With Me Ken Hoinsky was funding through Kickstarter. His project, a book that instructed other Honest to God Nice Guys (TM) Who Just Want Those Uppity Bitches to Have Sex With Them in how to sexually assault women was, unfortunately, fully funded and then some.

Lots of people approached Kickstarter and asked them to withdraw the funding, which apparently cannot be done once the project’s deadline has passed, and castigated the company for allowing Hoinsky’s project in the first place. Kickstarter agreed that the project was “abhorrent” but refused to cancel the project before the deadline passed. Which was a mistake.

Today they issued an apology. A real apology: they said they made a mistake and explained why they took the (in)action they did, pledged money to an organization that fights sexual violence, and promised to change their policy to prevent this sort of thing happen again. Bravo, and I genuinely mean that. THAT is how you apologise for a mistake. None of the usual “sorry if you were offended,” “we don’t want to impinge on people’s rights (to say that rape is sexy)” bullshit.

Here’s the full text of their apology:

Dear everybody,

On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.

We were wrong.

Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:

• The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly. 
• Our processes, and everyday thinking, bias heavily toward creators. This is deeply ingrained. We feel a duty to our community — and our creators especially — to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project. This thinking made us miss the forest for the trees.

These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it.

Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.

Where does this leave us?

First, there is no taking back money from the project or canceling funding after the fact. When the project was funded the backers’ money went directly from them to the creator. We missed the window.

Second, the project page has been removed from Kickstarter. The project has no place on our site. For transparency’s sake, a record of the page is cached here.

Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.

Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.

We take our role as Kickstarter’s stewards very seriously. Kickstarter is one of the friendliest, most supportive places on the web and we’re committed to keeping it that way. We’re sorry for getting this so wrong.

Thank you,

Kickstarter

If you wish more companies behaved this way (I sure as hell do!) thank @Kickstarter on Twitter, or in the comments section on their apology. Let them know that you appreciate that they listened (even if they didn’t act in time) and that you want them to be accountable to the promises they’ve made in this apology. And also, way to go, feminist internet, for kicking up one hell of a fuss and making sure you were heard – and listened to.