OpenSea’s NFT platform is rich with racist content – Mother Jones
Mother Jones illustration; Sheldon Cooper/SOPA/Getty
When the NFT trade platform OpenSea agreed to meet with representatives from Color of Change, staff at the civil rights group assumed that meant the largest and most prominent business in the area would be receptive to proposals to make their operations more inclusive.
Prior to their first video conference in April, Color of Change had discovered, through a series of quick searches, that OpenSea was facilitating and profiting from the sale of a number of indefensible racist and anti-Semitic collections of NFTs. (Non-fungible tokens are commodities based on crypto-blockchains that usually mean ownership of digital art, videos or images.)
When asked about these tokens in a series of three meetings that stretched into September, OpenSea product and communications staff defended their presence as a matter of not stifling users’ expression and creativity. Attendees at the OpenSea meetings, according to Color of Change representatives, falsely claimed an inability to monitor their website, compared their platform to the Holocaust museum, and ultimately advocated abandoning NFTs that used the n-word, depicted black people as racist caricatures, and which contained anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi content.
OpenSea is far and away the most well-known and used NFT trading platform; it has accumulated over 1 million users, who have traded billions of dollars worth of NFTs. A 2022 survey found that a quarter of black Americans own crypto — only 15 percent of whites do — and Color of Change set up the meetings as part of an effort to make the space more welcoming to people of color.
OpenSea’s response follows a broader reluctance to tackle racial issues in Web 3, as the seemingly decentralized apps and communities surrounding crypto are collectively known. The heavily white, male community of Web 3 founders and developers who built a libertarian dream have sometimes been resistant to adapting to the reality of society’s persistent inequalities. In 2020, in the wake of demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced a controversial policy barring employees from discussing “causes or political candidates internally that are not related to work.” A year later, his company quietly withdrew language from its no-uses policy that explicitly barred users from using the crypto platform to “incite hatred” and “racial intolerance.”
Color of Change staff said the meetings took place with senior members and vice presidents from OpenSea’s product and communications team, including the chief product officer, chief communications officer and director of content and moderation. An OpenSea spokesperson declined to make any of their staff who attended the meetings available for an interview, disputing elements of Color of Change’s account. They also pointed to a company policy that prevents users from using OpenSea to “attack” protected groups and allows the company to remove or freeze tokens that include hate symbols or could cause harm in the “real world”.
Despite this policy, the platform is still full of NFTs containing racist depictions of black people, gossip and anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi sentiments. “If you go on OpenSea, you can search for ‘Hitler’, racial slurs, and see all kinds of racist and crude content,” said Kyle Bibby, a senior campaign director at the organization who was briefed on the meetings by colleagues. “It’s not an attempt by OpenSea to keep these things off the platform.”
Color of Change came to the meetings with screenshots of extremely racist NFTs being exchanged on the platform, and recommendations for how OpenSea could try to curb such content. In the spokesmen’s account of events, the first two meetings were largely unremarkable. At the third and final meeting, only Black Color of Change staff attended; a spokesperson for the organization said they noticed a “huge difference in how their team treated us” without a white colleague involved. In this meeting, according to two Color of Change employees who attended, the company tried to mislead the lawyers by saying that it was actually impossible for them to take enforcement action.
OpenSea argued that because NFTs are on the immutable Ethereum blockchain (true), that it would be impossible for the company to remove individual NFTs from their platform (false), and that removing NFTs from the platform would contrary to the “principles of blockchain,” according to Color of Change staff. (An OpenSea spokesperson disputed their account, saying company representatives were simply explaining how their platform works in relation to the blockchain.)
OpenSea has removed racist NFT collections in the past, such as “Floydies”, pixel cartoon depictions of George Floyd and Meta Slaves, which were simply portraits of black faces. Color of Change staff recall that they pressed the issue, and that OpenSea’s representatives moved to say that it was a matter of free speech that they did not want to interfere with. “They argued that they have a duty to keep these things on their platform because they positioned themselves as a museum,” said one of the Color of Change staff members present at the meeting. (In reality, most museums display only a fraction of their collections, picking and choosing what is appropriate for public display.) According to two Color of Change representatives present, an OpenSea staff member asked if it would be appropriate for Holocaust Museum to take down Nazi paraphernalia it displayed.
“It was an incredibly artificial and inaccurate analogy,” Bibby told me, his voice betraying his astonishment at an interaction that had been going on for months Earlier. “The Holocaust museum, they wouldn’t want to be a home of hate. It is carefully composed to explain the damage of Nazism.” Also, Bibby noted, the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum operates as a nonprofit organization and does not charge an admission fee in the service of educating visitors. OpenSea is an explicitly for-profit, venture-backed company that charges a fee of 2.5% on the billions of dollars in value that have been exchanged on the platform. (An OpenSea spokesperson said staff who attended the meeting did not recall mentioning the Holocaust museum.)
Among the NFT collections Color of Change found trading on OpenSea and the platform’s staff flag was one called “I Don’t Like N—-rs”, which featured a black man in a denim suit. Others include a collection called “Dirty N—-r” that offered an NFT called “The Face of American Crime,” which was a collage of black men’s mugshots.
Despite their protests in the meetings, OpenSea has since removed some of the collections brought to their attention by Color of Change. In a statement, an OpenSea spokesperson said the company was “grateful to Color of Change for their thoughtful feedback and ongoing dialogue” and that it “takes external and community feedback seriously.” The spokesman said the company had integrated and been informed of several of Color of Change’s proposals.
Bibby said seeing the worst of the NFTs reminded him of when he first started exploring AOL and Internet chat rooms. “I can remember when I first got a computer and I was excited to get online. After being on a bit, I found forums where people were saying anti-black things and anti-Semitic things, and it affected me,” said Bibby, a black man. “I know I’m not alone. It has a real effect on people, which is important for people to understand. We told OpenSea.”
