deleted a bunch of chronic pain and chronic illness posts from blogs they’ve left (like mine)
This isn’t just about ‘oh no you can’t look at people fucking anymore’ (even though lots of sex workers are losing their means of supporting themselves). This goes a lot further, with a lot more chilling effects.
The sexualizing of things like ‘top surgery’ or declaring all ‘trans’ tagged things to be … sexual… is really, REALLY fucked up. Never mind the fact that ‘chronic pain’ had NOTHING to do with sexiness, and we’ve been given no explanation as to why disabled people were considered acceptable collateral damage.
ALSO I had a post flagged earlier today for a cartoon picture of Mario in a bathing suit. Mario, from Super Mario Brothers.
Someone else reported a picture of a cartoon scorpion with a hard hat on being flagged as pornography. Tagging things as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ gets them flagged NSFW. (Hey, guess what I’d been tagging my t-shirts, because they’re pride stuff? Oh right. Queer. Gay. Pride.)
This is a fucking problem, let’s not blow it off.
I know some people are too young (or simply weren’t involved in fandom back then) to remember what went down with livejournal and a couple of other sites “back in the day”, but it all started out as “it’s okay, we’re just removing the nasty porn”, and then “okay well, just make sure you put your porn behind a cut, no, wait jk you need to host it externally, a link is fine, maybe” and pretty much devolved swiftly into “actually sweety, LGBT content is inherently NSFW by default because it might make the kiddies gay if we expose them to it, so y’all need to leave now byyyeeee”.
Like…that happened. And it took nearly a decade for the fandom spaces to recover and stabilize and to get to the point where LGBT content creators could host their content without being told “you’re not welcome here” and I’m just sitting here, watching as youtube demonetizes LGBT content creators, and Facebook flags up LGBT ads as “inappropriate” and now tumblr is going through the queer and gay tags and just mass blanketing it as inappropriate, while actual pornbots and nazis wind up in my recommended feed.
(As an interesting aside: isn’t it funny how all these sites attribute these things to an algorithm error? Itsn’t that funny.)
Like I am uncomfortable y’all. I am looking around at everything I’ve built and all the friends I’ve made and I know we’re all looking for the next safe space to jump to while hoping we don’t lose each other overnight like “the olden days” where you’d wake up and your fave blogger was just gone.
And usually it was because they’d drawn or written something as simple yet explicit as a kiss. It was just the wrong kind of kiss.
So yea, the sky is not falling, but the ice under our feet sure is making worrying sounds.
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.
THIIIIIIIIS ONE THOUSAND TIMES THIS
This is what’s going to happen with copyright pictures and content when article 13 passes in the EU
Lickmyanusualplacenta 