korrasera:

staff:

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

Okay, this is going to be a first for me. Let’s look at how much bullshit @staff is spewing here and see what we can learn from it.

Huh, would you look at that. I’m debunking The Man for the first time. I have the feeling I just earned an achievement…

Anyways, at face value this post isn’t super threatening or manipulative, not compared to the kind of unhinged bullshittery that you see authoritarians engage in. But this still isn’t a good announcement, with some really significant biases buried under a facade of being a warm and open letter to the entire userbase.

I want to look at some of the points that they’re making in the context of this post, to illustrate the real problems with communication that I see here. We all know what’s been going on and how @staff has been failing to do their duty, and now tumblr CEO Jeff D'Onofrio is here to try to spackle over it with some pleasant words.

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First, consider the position they’re taking. The thrust of this article is that they’re working to improve tumblr, to make it better and safer and more welcoming. Were this an argument, that would be their assertion, that the upcoming site wide NSFW content ban is them working to improve the site, not harm it. In this case, since they aren’t arguing with anyone, it’s just presented in a way that encourages you to just read it as assumed. Well, that’s the first thing you should question. Are they actually trying to improve anything?

Next, by presenting themselves as the curators of culture and by implying that this change was months in coming, they’re trying to sell the idea that this policy change is a well reasoned idea that’s been implemented after much thought. That doesn’t hold any water at all, unfortunately, because tumblr has consistently refused to engage with the userbase on significant issues, up to and including the latest debacle that started with the app getting pulled from app stores.

The phrase that bugs me the most is the ‘continued, humble aspiration’ because that’s a complete and total lie, fabricated specifically because a CEO isn’t really in a position to admit that this is the result of not only colossal fuckups on the part of tumblr staff but that their solution is probably the biggest fuckup they could engage in because of how obviously destructive it will be to the userbase, not to mention the way it’ll target those of us who are marginalized while ignoring all of the nazis and porn bots.

They also have the gall to say that this is something they spent considerable time weighing, when it’s obvious that wasn’t the case. This is the result of a series of panicked board meetings that have occurred since the app got yanked and my best guess is that we’re seeing the end result of some sort of political maneuvering. I would bet that someone high up in the food chain just said ‘make it happen’ and now we’re getting this shoved down our throats.

If they wanted to create the most welcoming environment possible for the tumblr community, they wouldn’t have threatened such a large portion of their userbase, from fandoms to LGBTQ+ communities to sex workers of all kinds. They didn’t solicit anyone’s feedback or even listen when people pointed out the things that were broken, but they somehow feel justified in telling people that other sites host adult content and that everyone who needs that would be better off leaving.

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I’ll admit, this isn’t exactly a satisfying debunk. I’m speaking to the illusions that they’re trying to cast in front of our eyes to distract us from the truth and that’s always going to be hard to pin down. You’ve got to look at what they’re saying versus what they’re doing and then it becomes clear that they’re just smearing some gentle words over a very violent situation. They’re panicked and they’re going to make us suffer for it and they’d really like us to not complain while they eviscerate this site. That’s what it comes down to.

And one final point:

Tumblr is not a curator of culture, nor do staff actually accept any responsibility for the impact that tumblr blogs will have on the world.

They provide this platform a service to the userbase and it is our content that creates the culture here.

It is our content that goes out and affects the world. Tumblr’s responsibility is to keep the site running, keep it safe from predators and hatemongers, and to build the tools we need to easily share our content. In exchange, we give them our presence here on this site, supporting their need to generate ad revenue. You pay to use tumblr, you just pay with your eyeballs and social presence instead of actual money.

The problem is, tumblr has consistently failed to live up to their side of this bargain. At some point they stopped fixing the bugs that really make our lives hard, stopped listening to the userbase, even stopped trying to keep the site actually safe for people.

The reason that the app got pulled was because someone high up thought that they should shave down the moderation team to as small as it could be and still notionally pretend to take action against the most egregious offenders and that bit them in the ass when the automated systems failed and they didn’t have enough actual human beings with actual real-life training to make up for the gap.

We all know what’s going to happen. The purge will come and most of the porn bots will still be around. Lord knows all of the nazis will be around, which just proves how much bullshit the tumblr ‘new community guidelines’ were when they claimed that @staff was going to take a stand against hate speech.

Sex worker content will be gone. You’ll see massive gaps in the LGBTQ+ community as they once again flag our very existence as NSFW. I’m sure that there are a ton of fanworks that will just up and vanish and will never be restored. The queue to restore improperly deleted content will back up into such a massive pile that it’ll be years sorting it all out and they’ll never actually scale up their ability to differentiate the kind of NSFW they want to get rid of from the normal content produced by marginalized folk that’ll get caught up in the storm, so any pleas that they’re going to make mistakes while they get underway is a hollow comfort.

It’s possible that tumblr could come back from this if they reverse this decision and actually undertake a plan to introduce real moderation tools to the site, both for users and staff, but I think the chances of that happening are basically nil.

(via waltzing-with-my-inner-geek)