An Open Letter to Tumblr about the Adult Content Ban and How it is Hurting Your Users:
Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more.
You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again.
We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue.
Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole. There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough.
You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:
Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind.
We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.
If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to.
You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.
If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise.
Sincerely,
The users of your website.
@staff @support
They flagged this post immediately and I’ve submitted it for review… this is… quite a week.
If you believe these words, reblog it, please. I want this to be right in their face because I couldn’t email them directly.
@staff. @support
The incompetence and hypocrisy of Tumblr is appalling
I do believe these words, BUT I am a bit surprised people seem to think they DON’T know they’re going to lose followers. I don’t know about you guys, but all my blogs are flagged explicit content. Have you all have done the same? That means they just need a count of all the blogs flagged explicit to know EXACTLY how many users they’re going to lose. They MUST know even better than WE do exactly how many users are going to be effected and booted. I find it difficult to believe a commercial company could be so incompetent as to have no clue the effect this would have on their platform. How many folks work at tumblr and not one of them could have figured out this might hurt their site? How many tumblr staff look at the porn ON THEIR OWN WEBSITE to get off? I doubt any staff member is clueless to this. This is the desired outcome. Yes, we may find it suicidal but it is the choice they have made. And frankly, fuck them.
The fact of the matter is, for whatever reason (Verizon, child porn, etc)… it has been made clear we are ALL no longer welcome. I loved my blog, i loved my community of kinksters. I loved helping people and helping them get off. I will miss it profoundly, but even if they did sincerely back off their promise, I’ve already seen 450 users delete their account and drop my follower count. I doubt *I* would trust Tumblr to continue allowing my blog to exist even if they claimed they would. The trust was broken with this announcement and to me? That says that even a recant would likely see a lot of users not want to bother with a fickle site.
It is a profoundly sad day in our household. But Tumblr is unfortunately over. I spent 8 years crafting this blog, growing with it, and developing a community and a voice and now it’s time to make the graceful exit and try to find another home because what less can we do?
I agree @breederofbetas. My followercount is dropping dramaticly too. Everything is marked explicit. Tumblr is history. I enjoyed creating postings about my new found lifestyle, share my hobby of hiking and photography and juicy / spicy shots with you. I moved - for now - too Twitter for as long as it lasts. It is a pity. Imo everything started when freedom of internet was at stame last year when that bill passed… we have to hope it won’t get worse.
