1. @staff made a post pretty much saying “Your stuff isn’t getting deleted, just hidden from everyone but you” and “Yeah we know you hate the term “female presenting nipples” but we ain’t gonna stop saying it”
2. If a blog has a pixelated icon that means they got hit by the ban, you cannot view that blog outside the sidebar. You cannot even view their archive. Allegedly if you follow the advice in this post it’ll be fixed but only if it was an accidental flag (aka a real sfw blog)
3. The post Staff made including examples of what was ok to post. It got flagged.
4. Yes, the bots are still here. Yes they are still stealing posts and putting porn links on them. Yes there are still ads with stuff more sexual than they allow in posts. Yes innocent things are still getting flagged.
5. So yes, the site is still here and staff are still morons.
@staff all you had to do was get rid of the damn child pornography. THAT IS LITERALLY ALL WE FUCKING WANTED
Here’s a copypaste from another thing I wrote earlier today:
There’s a strong and dangerous Libertarian ideology that runs deep in Silicon Valley that directly and indirectly supports actions that quite tellingly never affect CIS white hetero men, but have profoundly dangerous and harmful consequences for literally every other group of people.
Through actions like Tumblr’s upcoming ban that will (through post flagging) disproportionately affect LGBTQ people, like Jack Dorsey’s refusal to address the hate and white supremacy on Twitter, like Facebook’s decision to use right-wing anti-Semitic dogwhistles to deflect attention from its systemic privacy violations, like Reddit’s embrace of right-wing and white nationalist users, it is impossible to deny that the decision makers in the board rooms at the biggest social media platforms are at the very least sympathetic to the voices and ideas of white supremacists and misogynists, and at worst in total agreement with their positions. Every choice these people make moves what should be fringe voices and ideas further and further into the mainstream, while they marginalize and punish nonviolent voices that call for justice and equality.
Social media is broken and it’s the fault of the failed leaders at the main social media platforms, who will be remembered with disdain and contempt by history.
TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.
My three word Oath? I’m with stupid
It goes without saying that this piece about my employer is my work alone, doesn’t reflect management’s views, and is done under the auspices of TechCrunch’s independent editorial voice. No usage of internal information is assumed or implied.
This is a piece about TechCrunch’s parent company, formerly known as “Oath:” (okay just Oath, but who am I to flout a mandatory colon?) and now ReBranded™ as Verizon Media Group / Oath (See what they did there? They literally slashed Oath. Poetic).
Oath is essentially the creature of Frankenstein, a corporate alchemy experiment to fuse the properties of the companies formerly known as AOL and Yahoo into the larger behemoth known as Verizon. You can feel the terrible synergy emanating from the multiple firewalls it takes to get to our corporate resources.
Oath has a problem:* it needs to grow for Wall Street to be happy and for Verizon not to neuter it, but it has an incredible penchant for making product decisions that turn users off. Oath’s year over year revenues last quarter were down 6.9%, driven by extreme competition from digital ad leaders Google and Facebook.
The solution apparently? Give away page views. If that logic makes sense, well then, maybe you should fill out a job application.
All was well and good — well, at least quiet — in the Tumblr world until Apple pulled the plug on Tumblr’s app in the App Store a few weeks ago over claims of child porn. Now let’s be absolutely clear: child porn is abhorrent, and filtering it out of online photo sharing sites is a prime directive (and legally mandated).
But Oath has decided to do something equally obnoxious: it intends to ban anything that might be considered “adult content” starting December 17th, just in time for the holidays when purity around family gatherings is key.
In Tumblr’s policy, “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.” You’ll notice the written legerdemain — “primarily” doesn’t exclude the wider world of adult-oriented content that almost invariably is going to be subsumed under this policy.
I get the pressure from Apple. I get the safety of saying “just ban all the images” à la Renaissance pope. I get the business decision of trying to maintain Tumblr’s clean image. These points are all reasonable, but they all are just useless without Tumblr’s core and long-time users.
What flummoxes me from a product perspective is that it’s not as if banning all adult content is the singular solution to the problem. There is an entire spectrum of product, policy, legal, and product cultural ingredients that could be drawn upon. There could be more age verification, better separation of “safe for children” and “meant for adults content,” and more focus on messaging to users that moderation was meant to help the product and focus audiences rather than to puritanically filter.
Or you can just kill the photos, the somehow still loyal core user base, a safe space for expression via nudity and sexuality and, well, traffic along with it. And then you look at -6.9% growth and think: huh, I wonder if there is a connection….
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
