Everyone @ tumblr’s new policy: that wasn’t very cash money of you
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In the wake of kids claiming yet another site that was never intended for them by content they were never allowed to see, here’s a Carlin bit about “protecting children”
Well, Congratulations Tumblr…
…for turning your decision to blatantly censor User content into a complete clusterfuck. Taking a cue from another blogger and because I have not received one email regarding flagged posts, I took it upon myself to scroll through my blogroll searching for those flagged posts. Not only has this been a very time-consuming and tedious process, but it has proven to be extremely frustrating. You have not made this an easy process as it has taken me almost 6 hours now to scroll through a little over 2 years (16,000) worth of posts, and I’m still not done. There are people who have had blogs much longer than me and have 10x the number of posts I have, and I find it very hard to fathom that if they want to be proactive in appealing every post that you have flagged, they will literally have to spend days going through their blogrolls. Or if you are sending out 1 email per every flagged post, they could, without question, end up with hundreds of emails from Tumblr in their inboxes.
This is how YOU defined adult content in your announcement yesterday…”Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts”. As of today, here are examples of posts on my blog that that your “genius” algorithms have flagged as “inappropriate”:
- Pictures of fully clothed couples holding hands, hugging, kissing…absolutely zero “sex acts” taking place. - Really? You see more than that watching a television show.
- Pictures of women in dresses, clothing, lingerie…no genitals presented, no “female-presenting nipples” (which by the way, is overtly sexist) - How do those pictures fall under your new guidelines?
- Landscape pictures - Seriously? What? Are they too colorful? Do the mountains have too much of a resemblance to female breasts?
- Pictures of flowers - Seriously?? What? Too many petals?
- Pictures of animals - Seriously??? Are the elephant’s trunks too long? Are the dogs too furry?
- Interior Design pictures - Seriously???? I have no words.
You also keep screwing around with the appearance of blogs. Late yesterday afternoon, ¾ of my archive (along with many other bloggers’ archives) was missing from view. This morning it was showing only the posts that you flagged and I requested appeal on. About an hour later, everything was fully restored, albeit temporarily, and now, scrolling through the front page of my blog only shows every post that you have flagged and I have subsequently requested appeal on and there are hundreds of posts completely hidden once again from my archive.
There is now all of the extra work that is upon you to have human beings, as you stated, review all of these posts that appeals have been requested on. And if the number of my posts that you flagged are equal to or exceeded by other bloggers, it will literally take you months to go through all of them; you will be losing scores of users over the next 2 weeks as evidenced by the sheer number of people who negatively and angrily replied to your announcement yesterday; and most importantly, you will now be known as just another website, like Facebook or YouTube, who states that they have guidelines in place for what is deemed appropriate but who in reality just censors whatever they want to censor. Is all of this worth it just to get back on to the Apple app store? Anyone who has read the news over the last 24 hours can read between the lines and know that this is why you made the snap decision you did and are doing what you are. And everyone also knows that if you would have taken care of the crux of the problem…the porn bots, the pedophiles, the people promoting hate and violence, etc…as the Tumblr community has been begging you to do for a long time now, none of this would be happening.
There is no point in posting at the moment, as there is clearly NO definition of what will be flagged, and who will be able to see it other than people who follow you and see your posts in their dashboard. I will give it the 2 weeks, to see if you either come to your senses or work out these issues, but by then, if things are still the way they are today, I will choose to end my time here as well.
So once again, congratulations Tumblr, for creating a complete and very unnecessary clusterfuck! Every action has a consequence, so best of luck to you in dealing with the consequences YOU created with your actions.
pinkeye-private-i