help, I dropped my marbles

A couple of weeks ago we announced an update to our Community Guidelines regarding adult content, and we’ve received a lot of questions and feedback from you. First and foremost, we are sorry that this has not been an easy transition and we know we can do a better job of explaining what we’re doing. We knew this wasn’t going to be an easy task and we appreciate your patience as we work through the challenges and limitations of correctly flagging tens of billions of GIFs, videos, and photos.

Today, December 17th, our policy begins to take effect. This means that we will start hiding – not deleting – posts that contain GIFs, videos, and photos from public view that are in violation of our policy. Again, this is a complex problem, and over the coming weeks we will gradually, and carefully, flag more adult content. (Yes, we will still make mistakes, but hopefully fewer and fewer.)

More importantly, we want to clarify the things that you, as a community, have asked about the most.

Tumblr will always be a place to explore your identity. Tumblr has always been home to marginalized communities and always will be. We fully recognize Tumblr’s special obligation to these communities and are committed to ensuring that our new policy on adult content does not silence the vital conversations that take place here every day. LGBTQ+ conversations, exploration of sexuality and gender, efforts to document the lives and challenges of those in the sex worker industry, and posts with pictures, videos, and GIFs of gender-confirmation surgery are all examples of content that is not only permitted on Tumblr but actively encouraged.

We also want to reiterate some important information from our Support post:

Your content will not be deleted. If your post(s) are flagged under the new policy, they will be hidden from public view and will only be visible to you. You can appeal these flags if you feel your content was erroneously marked as adult content. Upcoming feature changes will also make appeals more manageable for those of you with multiple flagged posts. Your blog won’t be deleted if you’ve posted adult content in the past, and there is nothing you need to do if you have interacted with adult content up until now–it will just be flagged and not publicly viewable. Don’t forget too that you can download your content. It’s yours after all, and we don’t take that lightly.

What is still permitted? We’ve heard a lot of concern about what the policy does not permit, but we want to make sure that you also know what is still permitted:

Written content such as erotica, nudity related to political or newsworthy speech, and nudity found in art, specifically sculptures and illustrations, is also stuff that can be freely posted on Tumblr. Although, photorealistic imagery or photography – images, videos, or GIFs – with real humans that include exposed genitals or female-presenting (yeah, we know you hate this term) nipples or depict sex acts is not allowed per our guidelines. 

Examples of exceptions that are still permitted but that you may need to appeal if they are misclassified are: exposed female-presenting nipples in connection with breastfeeding, birth or after-birth moments, and health-related situations, such as post-mastectomy or gender confirmation surgery.

The automated tools will improve. Having a post mistakenly flagged as adult totally sucks; we understand and agree that there have been too many wrongfully flagged posts since we announced the policy change. With tens of billions of GIFs, videos, and photos to review and millions of new posts every day, we really need your help to get it right.

The more you help by reporting content that’s not permitted and by appealing content that you believe was flagged incorrectly, the better our automated tools will get at classifying your posts correctly. The more content these tools review, the more they will learn the difference between what’s permitted and what’s not. Most importantly, your content won’t be deleted if erroneously flagged and all appeals will be sent to a real, live human who can make the appropriate call. 

We love Tumblr and the communities that call Tumblr home. You are Tumblr. This place has always been a reflection of the voices and communities that thrive here. As you’ve always done, help us continue to shape Tumblr into the community you want it to be.

Kindly shove your conciliatory, simpering bullshit back where it belongs.  Any goodwill between users and staff has long-since evaporated like sweat on a steaming hot female-presenting nipple. You have torched your own platform, and more than that--you move to the top of the list of corporate-owned media that is permanently alienating people from any of your services. 

You should feel humiliated and ashamed that your site is kicking sex workers and artists to the curb while embracing hate speech and white supremacists.  You should feel deeply worried for your jobs and future prospects as you not only cling to a sinking ship but poke more holes in the hull. 

I loved Tumblr for many things.  I loved it for showing me thriving communities that I could not find anywhere else.  I loved it for showing me diverse bodies and art and varying expressions of sexuality.  I loved it for letting me see sex workers live and thrive and create.  I loved it for helping me connect with other trans people and reframe my body, gender, and sexuality as positive and beautiful.  I loved Tumblr for these things, but it was never about the platform: it was about the people here.  Today, many of the people I respected most and stuck around for despite years of crumbling functionality have been censored. 

This is it.  I’ve been here since the beginning, and this is the thing that ends it.  The staff’s blatant disregard for its users’ actual requests regarding porn bots and white supremacists is telling.  So is the feeble lip service paid to the sex workers and queer folks who gave so much value to the platform. 

— if you don’t make much//any money, it’s also your last chance to apply for tax credits to cover your health insurance costs

— you NEED health insurance. you can’t predict what health issues you may have, and without insurance they will cost a FORTUNE — likely thousands or maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars

— if you don’t get health insurance, you may be fined by the government

— seriously. you’re not a superhero. protect yourself, your health and your money. Sign up.

http://web.archive.org/

What all ask boxes look like for me (submission boxes look exactly the same):

Left: what happens when I try to open dms (New Message does nothing); I can’t even read them. Right: when I try to go to someone’s dms from their blog.

Neither new things I post nor old things I post show up in the tags they’re in, even if they were before.

I can type things into replies, but it won’t actually post them.

All my likes, reblogs, and replies are hidden from the notes of EVERY post.

When I like or rb things it doesn’t show notes in someone’s activity / dash, except long-time followers (not sure about the exact cutoff/conditions).

If I reblogged and added something to this from a non-follower they wouldn’t even know. Check and see: my rb’s don’t even show up in the notes. So people couldn’t even find out I added something on by checking the notes either:

Not to mention: I’m hidden from all searches, can’t be @’d, past @’s of me are hidden from my notes, I don’t get notified when people reply to a post I replied to, my @’s don’t give notes, and every search on my blog is blanked. I can’t even ask/submit to myself even with anons, and lots more.

I’ve been seeing a post spreading around like wildfire encouraging people to post like hell on the day the recently-announced NSFW ban will go into effect.

FYI, this will achieve nothing because the recent changes are primarily caused by the recent republican-backed FOSTA-SESTA laws. This is a political issue so American users can only really do one thing: vote.

But FOSTA-SESTA creates an exception to Section 230 that means website publishers would be responsible if third parties are found to be posting ads for prostitution — including consensual sex work — on their platforms. The goal of this is supposed to be that policing online prostitution rings gets easier. What FOSTA-SESTA has actually done, however, is create confusion and immediate repercussions among a range of internet sites as they grapple with the ruling’s sweeping language.

In the immediate aftermath of SESTA’s passage on March 21, 2018, numerous websites took action to censor or ban parts of their platforms in response — not because those parts of the sites actually were promoting ads for prostitutes, but because policing them against the outside possibility that they might was just too hard.

All of this bodes poorly for the internet as a whole. After all, as many opponents of the bill have pointed out, the law doesn’t appear to do anything concrete to target illegal sex trafficking directly, and instead threatens to “increase violence against the most marginalized.” But it does make it a lot easier to censor free speech on small websites — as evidenced by the immediate ramifications the law has had across the internet.

Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-230-internet-freedom

There is another Twitter thread about this here. Most notably:

Facebook yesterday announced its policy on sexual solicitation. Which is ludicrously overzealous, bans the discussion of anything related to sex, including incredibly vague language like “I’m looking for a good time tonight”.  The reason they’re so overzealous isn’t because they’re screaming  “somebody think of the children” It’s because if they miss *one* ad, they can be sued. They know algorithms for this suck, so they’ve decided to overcompensate for that and effectively ban talking about sex.

Now, it’s not 100% because of these laws (trying to attract advertising money is obviously at play here) but they are the primary—and overlooked—cause.

It’s easy to think as politics as something that doesn’t affect your life, or only in very intangible, remote, hard-to-grasp ways, especially if you’re not a minority. 

Thread here. 

Read  Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights by Nadine Strossen

Excerpts:

“In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption… These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material”..

…. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores.  Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men…..

Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable. They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm. 

When I was 10, my mom made me wear a bra and it felt like a punishment for being different.

When I was 10, I took the bra off when changing for gymnastics and accidentally dropped it in the school hallway. A teacher picked it up and said, “Oh, this must belong to you” and handed it back to me in front of everyone. I quit gymnastics.

When I was 11, I thought maybe the boobs would be okay so long as they didn’t get any bigger than would fit in my hand, so I kept measuring it, but they did.

When I was 12, I started wearing two or three sports bras to smush them down, until one day a classmate said, “Are you wearing two bras?!” while laughing.

When I was 13, a boy told me he wanted to squeeze my boobs “until they popped.”

When I was 14, I got cast in a play as an older character and a classmate told me I got the role because I had boobs.

When I was 17, my mom told me to return a swimsuit because it would be too distracting for my boyfriend’s father.

When I was 21, I got properly fitted for a bra and everyone felt the need to tell me how much better my boobs looked.

When I was 26, I got pregnant and my immediate fear was that my boobs would get bigger.

When I was 28, I got shamed for trying to feed my screaming baby in public without a cover.

When I was 28, people asked me “why are you bothering to use a breastfeeding cover?”

When I was 30, people gave me weird looks that I wasn’t yelling at my kid for putting their hand on my boob.

When I was 31, I avoided going to the beach or pool because I didn’t want to have to deal with boobs in a swimsuit.

When I was 32, I got asked, again, “why don’t you get a breast reduction?”

When I was 33, I watched a 5yo girl get shamed for running around in sweltering heat without a shirt on and had to reprimand a bunch of tween boys who thought it was okay to shame her for doing something they do all the time.

When I was 34, my kid kept patting my breast and saying “Mommy’s squishy breast!!” They will never see me express any shame about tits, because I want them to have a different mindset than I had. Yes, boobs are nice! They’re squishy! They’re fun! That’s the end of that.

I’m 35 and no longer give a fuck. I don’t care anymore. As a teenager my tits were covered in stretch marks. They’ve been engorged with milk. My nipple changed shape with pregnancy. Give it another couple decades and my breasts will probably be all wrinkly. It’s sexual when I’m using it sexually. I don’t fucking care, and I won’t be ashamed anymore. 

Every time a policy or cultural hangup treats people with breasts differently, it fucks us over. 

Tumblr’s new policy makes an active choice to participate in this culture of shame. By classifying “female-presenting nipples” as explicit material, Tumblr has taken a stance that any chest or breast that differs from a male default is worthy of shame and unavoidably sexual. The idea that breasts are shameful and unavoidably sexual is exactly what fucked me up for so much of my life.

Lee says:

Adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and @staff says that includes photos that show “real-life human genitals” or “female-presenting nipples”. 

Moving past the nonsense idea that there’s such a thing as a “female-presenting nipple” in the first place, @staff says they will still allow pictures of said “exposed female-presenting nipples in connection with […] health-related situations, such as post-mastectomy or gender confirmation surgery.” 

However, it seems likely the ban will be enforced haphazardly so a lot of informational content will be deemed “adult content” and deleted, so transition blogs where people document their bodies and medical transitions will certainly be affected by this.

This means visual resources on surgery results and hormone changes, among other things, will be deleted:

The ban on pictures of “real-life human genitals” will likely include…

post-op pictures of lower surgery (phalloplasty, metoidioplasty and vaginoplasty)

pre-op to post-op lower surgery comparison pictures

informational pictures showing clitoral growth on testosterone

pictures of packers (they aren’t exactly real-life genitals, but some pictures of them on our blog have already been marked for deletion)

The “female-presenting nipples” ban will most likely include…

Pre-op to post-op transmasc top surgery comparison pictures

Post-op transfeminine breast augmentation pictures

informational pictures showing breast growth on estrogen

pictures of breast forms

Note- we won’t be deleting our blog, and our resources will continue to be available minus said pictorial links.

Not all nudity is pornography (although how this negatively impacts vulnerable sex workers is another topic)- these pictures can be undeniably “not safe for work” but they are still primarily informational and not sexual. It’s both disappointing and frustrating to find that these resources will be deleted.

I personally have found looking through pictures that people have posted of post-lower surgery results very helpful to see in the research phase of my decision about lower surgery, and I’ve posted pictures of my pre-top surgery chest on Tumblr to compare with my post-op chest (like demonstrating what areola resizing (nsfw link) looks like for example), and Tumblr has already flagged those pics.

With Tumblr’s current attempt to limit adult content, it seems like most of TTSG’s new posts are not being seen. Unfortunately, this is an issue that @support and @staff will have to solve, as it is out of our hands. We are not sure if our posts are intentionally being limited, or if it is a bug, but we will keep this blog up and running to the best of our abilities.

We encourage you to look through our resource pages, as asks are not always being seen. You may also have more luck sending an ask off-anon that we can reply to anonymously.

We’re sorry for this response delay, and we hope this message is able to reach you. We will keep you updated as much as possible, but we are also in the dark about how this update is affecting our blog.

Your RPs will not be fine. Your art will not be fine. Your g-rated queer content will not be fine. Not here, anyway.

Seriously. The people backing up their blogs and preparing to jump ship aren’t doing it out of panic; it’s weary recognition. We’ve been here before.