Horizon Collective

UK legislation: Online Safety Act 2023

Brazil legislation: Digital Statute For Children And Adolescents

Apple App Store Age Verification

These are not tumblr specific policies. Tumblr is implementing age verification in response to legislative moves that were made months ago.

Tumblr is a failing social media site that has escaped death multiple times already; they do not have the social cachet to defy state regulatory agencies. We know they won't say no to Apple, either--the porn ban on tumblr was in response to Apple's crackdown on explicit content.

If you did not know this was happening, you were behind the curve. That is fine. You're caught up now. The next step is to link up with people in your country who are working to preserve privacy, to roll back these laws where they exist, and to prevent their passage where they do not. In the US the organization you want is Stop KOSA--in the EU you can start with Fight Chat Control.

Got the link via @finalducc

UK legislation: Online Safety Act 2023

Brazil legislation: Digital Statute For Children And Adolescents

Apple App Store Age Verification

These are not tumblr specific policies. Tumblr is implementing age verification in response to legislative moves that were made months ago.

Tumblr is a failing social media site that has escaped death multiple times already; they do not have the social cachet to defy state regulatory agencies. We know they won't say no to Apple, either--the porn ban on tumblr was in response to Apple's crackdown on explicit content.

If you did not know this was happening, you were behind the curve. That is fine. You're caught up now. The next step is to link up with people in your country who are working to preserve privacy, to roll back these laws where they exist, and to prevent their passage where they do not. In the US the organization you want is Stop KOSA--in the EU you can start with Fight Chat Control.

The existence of the Catholic Church in Lancer is evidenced by this passage from page 121 of No Room For A Wallflower Act 1:

Catholicism is such a prevalent world religion that it would almost certainly have had many adherents on all of the Ten, which meant that everywhere the Ten went, so too did Catholicism. The Ten left starting around 6000bu, and instantaneous FTL communication didn't appear until around 3200u, which means that for over 9000 years - longer than the current human historical record! - Catholic dioceses on old Earth colonies could not have maintained full communion.

There was also no contact between Earth and any of its colonies by any means (FTL or not) from 6000bu to at least 1400u, and realistically several centuries after that. 1400u is when Union on Cradle first turned its long-range communication systems back on and experienced the Third Trauma; they didn't start to send regular messages to surviving colonies until significantly after that - first contact with the Karrakin Trade Baronies didn't happen until 2800u, more than 800 years into the First Expansion Period.

This puts the earliest that the Catholic church on Cradle could possibly have had any contact with orphaned dioceses at around 8000 years. This exceeds the current lifespan of the Catholic church by more than four times.

It is reasonable to assume that in the absence of any possible contact with the Holy See on Earth, Catholic dioceses on the colony worlds would have to establish their own central authority - essentially, a series of definitionally non-competing antipopes. The realities of time, distance and differing environments would cause dogma in each separate diocese to drift.

We've already seen this happen on Earth: Irish Catholicism is notably different in character to American Catholicism, and both of those groups can pick up a phone and talk to the Pope! Meanwhile, some of the Ten went to planets hundreds of light-years away - even if you could send a question to the Holy See, by the time you got a response back, assuming your civilization endured, the cultural conditions that provoked your question would most likely be historical curiosities discussed by your distant descendants.

So imagine the nightmarish complications around 3200u onwards, during the Second Expansion Period, which is when FTL communication and travel became commonplace in the Lancer universe. This is a reasonable point to posit that the "Catholic Union" mentioned in Wallflower came into being.

Let me set the scene: the Cradle Papacy proposes, now that FTL communication is possible, to reunify the Catholic Church and return the faithful across every human world to full communion with the Holy See (SecComm was ascendant back then; this feels like the sort of One Humanity shit they'd pull). With Union's newly-built OmniNet, the Cradle Pope reaches out to the archdioceses of Karrakis, Carina, Tau Ceti, Rigel Kentaurus, Spinward Ultima…

Cradle Pope: "Blessings upon you all, from the Church of Peter the Apostle, First Bishop of Rome, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

Karrakis Pope: "Oh, hey! Which one of the Passions are you Bonded to?"

Sparri Pope: "Blessings upon you in the name of Saint Anaru, who vanquished the Beasts of God and ate their eggs."

Constellar Pope: "I have a brain implant that constantly updates the Liturgy for me!"

Bishop-Regent of Ras Shamra: "Blessings upon you in the name of Malcolm XVII, Prophet and Final Pope, who harrowed the Nightlands."

Cradle Pope: "…"

Cradle Pope: "Guys what the fuck"

The Catholic Union in 5016u must be an absolutely batshit compromise between a multitude of utterly incompatible regional dogmas that exists broadly so that these separate churches can exercise collective political authority.

The de-emphasis of Jesus Christ.

As humanity becomes a galactic society and the Crucifixion gets further and further away from us in both time and space, the idea that One Time, One Dude on One Planet died for our eternal salvation becomes increasingly unsustainable as a belief system. What would the Virgin Birth mean to someone 500 light years from Bethlehem? What would the Betrayal in Gethsemane or the Passion at Golgotha mean to a person who could never see Jerusalem? Why did the Saviour manifest only once, on one planet, millennia before we mastered space travel?

A few weeks ago, a small but higher-than-normal number of accounts were mistakenly suspended. The suspensions were quickly reversed, but our response wasn't good enough, and we want to say more.

We're sorry it took us this long to address this. Trust and safety issues are difficult to discuss publicly, and we can’t share details about specific individuals or how our systems work without exposing Tumblr to bad actors. But caution led us to say too little, too late.

We’ve heard from members of the trans community on Tumblr that they were disproportionately impacted, and that deserves a direct response. According to 3rd party researchers, Tumblr’s userbase has the highest proportion of LGBTQIA+ folks on social media, so it makes sense that when something goes wrong, those communities might feel that disproportionate impact.

One thing we want to emphasize is that we do not moderate people's identities. We moderate behavior. We know that identity shows up across a Tumblr profile in many ways, from followed topics to the flags people put in their bios, and more. However, these signals play no role in how our moderation systems make decisions. We monitor those systems for evidence of bias and take corrective action when we find it.

We understand that the communications sent to affected users, and our broader silence to the community, didn't meet the standard people expect from us. That feedback is fair, and we apologize. We've updated the messaging sent to people impacted by these incidents. We are also overhauling our process with a goal of responding to mistaken suspension appeals within 24 hours, and have instituted an ongoing internal review of how suspensions and appeals are handled.

Going forward, we're committed to finding a better balance: being more transparent with our community about issues that matter, even when we can't share everything.

Tumblr belongs to everyone. We take that seriously, and we intend to earn back your trust. We are not afraid to have tough discussions with you or make updates based on your feedback, though on occasion, it might take some time.

To the people whose accounts were affected, and to the members of our trans community who felt targeted: we are truly sorry.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/cchr/about/report-discrimination.page

the corporate address for Tumblr, Inc is: