The blanket application and treatment against nudity and adult content in relation to Tumblr’s recent being caught-out for its years of negligence over its rampant child pornography issue is a really disgusting and thoughtless action of association. So many users (including users who largely or exclusively post adult content) over so many years have sought administrative support in addressing the issue of child pornography on this site, only to be met with lack of real decisive and thoughtful action on the subject. Now that it has become a financial concern (due to its being removed from the app store), action arrives in the form of a tactless and inconsiderate purge of all adult content. This purge draws an unreasonable association between general nudity and child pornography through its blanket treatment. It makes the assumption that there is a clean and clear division in content and values between blogs that exclusively post pornographic content and those that abstain completely. Such a division is non-existent as many blogs observably and commonly have played with a curation that accommodates both adult content and non-adult content as well as everything that falls in between.
This ban, if it’s anything like the measures and procedures shared by Facebook and Instagram, will certainly be a strict and indiscriminate one as it relates to the moderation of nudity that may also appear in artistic and cultural artefacts, imagery and photography (and those images that drift between art, the candid and the everyday which include nudity, which, through their dissemination and transmission have become cultural and aesthetic artefacts), and it will not be surprising when masses of these artefacts, artworks, photographs and images are erased without any further consideration. This ban is a clumsy and heavy-handed panic of corporate and financial concern masquerading as a caring and progressive project of ethical betterment. The ban’s authors absolve themselves of responsibility by applying this blanket-treatment, while failing to take responsibility and be held accountable for their own years of negligence on the issue, for their wilful accommodation of the issue. Perhaps, in the years of the issue being addressed by its users (who have certainly shown greater and more sincere dedication to the upholding of a morally-guided online community), the issue could have been addressed more thoughtfully and a more sophisticated solution could have been designed by those corporate administrators who only noticed the grave importance of the issue when their wallets started burning.
the only thing tumblr has ever marked nsfw of mine is a picture of my dog running through a field at sunset. we wanted you to get rid of nazis and porn bots but you left both of those and took out the majority of your userbase it’s literally SO funny and i have never seen anything like this. this is so much bigger than livejournal and ffnet’s purges. this is a dead asset now, a literal albatross around yahoo and verizon’s necks except i’m pretty sure you can show a picture of a dead bird just fine on here as long as it’s not got boobs. sorry **female presenting nipples. i guess means softcore gay porn and bara is still fine? well, thank god.
they could have purged the child porn tags at any time since 2012, like we’ve been begging them to the entire time. purged the rape tags. purged the violence and animal abuse and bestiality tags. purged people who posted child abuse like i reported 80 times. purged people that made death threats like again, i reported 8 million times and only every got back an email that said “can you give us more information about why this is bad?”
a lot of us were raised on here and it was a pretty fascinating ride. i made the best friends i’ve ever had here and i know i’ll always have this blog in some capacity but man. this was the weirdest move they could have made and the least effective. goodnight sweet prince.
Real talk, though, because it needs to be said: as much as we all joke that porn was the only good thing this place had left, the reality is that it being the only place where one could regularly engage with and promote sexual content being gone is really not understanding at all what makes this place special. I mean we all joke about “horny on main” and all that, but the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression. For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs.
The problem with “family friendly” social media is that more often than not, the ones hit the most by the whole family friendly nonsense are marginalized groups that have no vehicles to express themselves. Stuff like YouTube consistently bans or flags simple content featuring something as innocuous as two men kissing as “adult” content and makes it hard for LGBTQ+ content creators to compete with their non-queer peers for a lot of those reasons.
The ultimate problem isn’t even that banning of NSFW content, it’s the general mess surrounding it and unintended consequences to these groups. For MONTHS Tumblr has had a huge problem with porn spam bots and outright child pornography, and for MONTHS the majority of the userbase has been in general consensus that both of these things needed to stop. Tumblr did NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. When Apple finally removed their app from the store, SPECIFICALLY because of the child pornography, Tumblr decided to do what any rich corporation owning a social media site with zero understanding of what makes it popular would do, and decided that the best course of action was to eat itself like an Ouroboros. Rather than admit that they have done an absolutely shit job at keeping pedophiles off this website and rather than hiring the necessary staff to carefully moderate content, they decided to loose a poorly programmed bot that literally deleted perfectly SFW blogs with thousands of followers, and rather than properly handling moderation, they decided that it was best to simply go the lazy route and block anything even remotely NSFW.
They run this site in the worst way possible, and I don’t understand how @support or @staff or their completely oblivious “CEO” plans to keep this sinking ship alive.
