I know there’s a lot of tension after Tumblr’s new policy annouced for December 17th, but reblog this if you aren’t leaving Tumblr so that other blogs can know they aren’t going to be completely alone!
As you are probably all aware by now Tumblr will not allow any nudity anymore after 17 december and though there is no porn on my blog anywhere, I just noticed that the movie poster of ‘Checking Out’ that I posted recently, which has Jeff Daniels on the cover in his boxershorts, is now flagged.
Tons of 80′s action movies had shirtless guys on the cover, that was just a popular thing back then. There’s nothing sexual about it. Lots of my other posts, like for instance a photo from Heather Locklear in a typical 80′s aerobic outfit and even a gif I made from the movie Troll are now flagged. Seriously? This is absolutely ridiculous!
I currently have 57.244 followers and generally get between 10 and 20 new followers each day, but in the last 2 days I actually lost 44, which is the most ever and are obviously just people ending their accounts because of this new rule, not because they don’t like my blog anymore. So it even affects non-sexual blogs. And that’s not all, my front page is a mess. Suddenly Tumblr puts posters I posted years ago at the top of my page. Why? No idea!
I have run this blog for almost 5 years now come january and have done so with all the fond memories and love I have for my childhood and that amazing decade. Eventhough I rarely receive a message, I do get a lot of reblogs and I love reading all your comments of the memories you have of certain films, toys, cartoons or video games from the 80′s that I post. That’s what kept me going, but if I just keep losing posts and followers from now on that doesn’t really stimulate me to keep going.
Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more.
You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again.
We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue.
Multiple other social networking websites, such as WordPress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole. There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough.
You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:
Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind.
We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems – particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile – only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography – but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.
If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to.
You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.
If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise.
Yes indeed no nudity but you can find all the discriminatory and hate speech you want!
But wait, the icing on the cake…
…really? Do i need even say anything.
since this place is going down the shitter, why not reblog this?
Here’s an extra layer of gross
I may be wearing a tin foil hat, but I think they purposely want to do stuff like pit BLM against White Supremacists. They see it as an opportunity to make money.
No the only reason Tumblr is doing this is because Apple took the app off the store and they were massively losing out. If they cared about child pornography they would have acted. They aren’t trying to take down extremism, they aren’t doing more than the bare minimum to deal with mental health, because there’s no financial penalty to allowing those things. They’re acting on this in a rash and unprofessional manner- not going through proper testing protocols- because they’re desperate to recover their income. That’s why they’re doing this. And as I said yesterday, it’s like saying that we should stop child abuse by not having any more children. Flagging innocuous pictures of frogs and sewing patterns (all true things that have been tagged) is not an effective way to tackle child exploitation on this website
Same thing for me too. Last night it started with my reblogs not showing up on my blog. Now nothing new will show up on my blog, even an ask I answered.
So far, I’ve found one of my posts and one of my drafts have been flagged as explicit. The post is photos of the grandkids with Tim, the draft is just Mia with Mike, Tim and Anne. This. Is. Ridiculous. And I’ve just been scrolling through my blog then, and the new photos that were released for Charles 70th – which also features him holding Louis and his grandchildren sitting with him and Camilla – has been flagged as explicit too?
get your shit together tumblr
I think the worst thing is that they don’t even tell you they’ve flagged it. They just flag it to prepare for deleting it. If you don’t see in your feed that a post has been flagged, you have no way to notify them that it needs review.
If you’re someone affected by the platform’s definition of what they’re going to be banning, I strongly suggest you back up your Tumblr blog. RIGHT NOW. Info on how to do that is here.
I can’t think why my own Tumblr would be affected, but I’ll be backing things up too… because in situations like this one might expect the algorithm to get a little out of hand and make mistakes that one might or might not be able to recover from. (See this article.)
For safety’s sake – because I’d very much dislike losing the content I’ve shared with other people here – I’l be embodying my Tumblr content in a new WordPress blog over the coming days. I’ll share the address here when it’s ready, for those who might be interested.
But in the meantime, seriously: friends and cousins, back yourselves up.
Basically it’s a big red bar across the top of the post. But it only seems to appear when you go to reblog something so I can’t know if any of my posts are flagged unless I reblog them or someone tells me…
Having gone through this so far, I had a post of mine become flagged, and there was an option to have it reviewed. I selected the option to have it reviewed, and then the flag was removed a couple hours later.
I imagine there is going to be a lot of this going on the next two weeks as tumblr sorts this out.
So reblogging a post from the PBS Newshour on service animals is "sensitive”? Okay…
House of Brat 