oh well. play the cards i'm given 🤷

hiking the tobacco excise tax has got to be one of the worst policy failures in Australian history. Billions lost in taxes leaving a huge hole in the budget, instead funneled into organised crime families, smoking levels INCREASED, the police are being pulled this way and that trying to deal with this waste of time, it's led to a wave of fire bombings and shootings from competing crime families, and the big tobacco companies haven't even taken a hit in revenue.

this is a real shocker of a story, and you can tell that it's just the tip of an iceberg. I strongly encourage any Australian to read this article in full, because these people are far more connected to wealth and power than I think anyone believed. This is becoming a serious danger. you can bypass the paywall on removepaywall if you need to. There is a lot of money flowing into the pockets of avowed Nazis seeking to start a race war in Australia.

garaks-padded-bra (not) reported by dungeonsanddragonsfifthedition and pegglefan69 and at least one other person, and then banned based on the bug apparently (all GarakPB does is post about star trek, ive never seen them break site TOS at all)

bobacupcake (not) reported by snarp for saying "h-hello??"

pjackk (not) reported by orcboxer for saying "Bulgaria is Following in Greece's Footsteps. Here's How We Stop It." and then getting banned for it(???!!!)

no i dont think anyone on tumblr staff is doing this on purpose, there's no political or personal reason that would target this kind of thing at a star trek goof blog and a nice little illustration blog or a funny blog about medievalisms. i mean sure pjackk had enemies from killing all those dogs but this just looks like a really weird bug. much like pjackk

you can put any email into the reporting form as the reporting party, whether the email is registered to tumblr or not. the Name field doesnt do anything. i just tested it. it doesnt validate for tumblr username. the only information the tumblr report form requires is an email address. so now im wondering if anyone outside tumblr has gotten these emails, and if so who, and for which reports.

i just tested this by opening a private window, reporting one of the rape threat bots from my earlier post, and filling in an email that i have not registered to tumblr. interestingly, logged-in tumblr users can one-click report spam, logged-out users have to provide a text paywall paragraph even for spam reports. everyone has to pass the textwall to report stuff other than spam. but for some reason ZenDesk doesn't seem to care if someone is reporting a tumblr TOS violation as a tumblr user or not. which seems.............like a mistake, in terms of moderation handling. but maybe they have a "reported by logged in user" flag on their backend idk

this means mass reporting, botnets, scripts, and random reporting dont even need a working tumblr account to be logged in to be reporting from. anyone can navigate their simple macro script to the reporting form and run it all day and night, reporting nonsense by pulling URLs from someone's tumblr account. so if bad actors are actually exploiting this reporting form in this way, it would certainly explain why tumblr support is swamped in bullshit reports, and why they have recently started making people fill in up to two paragraphs of explanation about how exactly something breaks TOS (paragraphs which are also trivially easy to bypass, as all users of r9k discovered exactly five minutes after that board went up)

WHY WOULD SOMEONE DO THIS? idk, this is sort of the least mysterious part of the mystery and also the most impossible to answer. for a really popular account like pjackk, popular accounts make a lot of enemies even if they are well-liked, so that could have been personal. or it could have been because his username is just really visible and therefor easy for data validation crawlers to grab and put in a database of "known active tumblr users". garakPB and bobacupcake dont have any obvious enemies except maybe "bigots generally" and the "bigots generally" motivation could certainly be responsible for some of the banned trans woman waves also. but their reports/bands seem more like noise to me and not targeted harassment, just my own reckon. most of the traffic of the internet at this point is ads and crawlers and botnets and a lot of it is shit like this that doesnt really serve a clear purpose and isnt necessarily malicious (but could be). trying to nail down motivations is pointless because much of it is just noise, people testing scripts, people forgetting scripts are running, people selling scripts to other people, etc

if your email address has ever been public anywhere, or ever on a have-i-been-pwned list, it could be used for spoofing reports. and if you run a report-spoofing script long enough pulling random posts, eventually tumblr support will either receive a report that can be interpreted as rulebreaking if they squint, or whatever automated behavior that may happen after X number of reports on a single blog is surpassed may kick in and cause some sort of autoban that then needs to be appealed by a human and then approved by a human to get past, which takes so long (due to the support backlog) that most banned accounts just assume they were banned 1. for actual TOS violation and have no appeal or 2. by a sinister behind the scenes conspiracy that they cant fight, and have no appeal or 3. that the support backlog is so long that appealing is going to take months or years so they might as well remake (which means they are ban evading, which means they are automatically violating TOS, which means if they get reported again for ban evading they will just keep getting banned even if the initial ban was a mistake)

i havent checked if tumblr "forgot my login" form can be crawled for validation easily or not but if it cant now, it probably used to be at some point, and if you have an old tumblr account and have ever received a "forgot your password?" email then yeah some database somewhere probably knows your email is registered to your tumblr account.

one thing to keep in mind when discussing this issue and speculating on reasons, actors, and motivations, is that the current tumblr support staff are not the people making decisions about how all this is being handled. the guy who owns and runs this website and personally makes most or all decisions about this kind of thing is having a normal one to put it lightly

"I guess I should just kill myself" BOOOOO cmon where's your fight

"what if [girl] was the rapist/abuser what then" classic double standard opening. but you're not getting anywhere with that. because people will just remind you that well, no. that isn't the situation at hand. You sound hysterical because you're trying to stretch your imagination beyond the margins of what others are prepared to reasonably entertain

"[long spiel about the wrongdoings of your ex]" this might work on a few gullible, bleeding heart types but it doesn't do anything because nobody knows your ex. I mean all we know is that she was a woman and you didn't like her and this particular post reminds you of her evils. This gets us nowhere because it's not new information and it's a transparent attempt to type other women into a bracket we aren't allowed, as the audience, to naturally conceive of in the first place. It relies on stereotyping all women to your ex, who we neither fucked nor knew ourselves anyway, docking you major sympathy points. Nobody can even picture her disgusting body that justifies such vitriol or anything because you've basically gatekept her by having your own private experience. And if you describe her disgusting body right now, people will think you're too emotional and judge you for banging her in the first place

"The woman posting this is fat/ugly/stupid/looks like [insert unflattering comparison here]" Getting better but watch out because some women take this shit real serious and will screenshot your post to send it to the gym you work at. And as a personal trainer it'll look double bad for you because you're not supposed to be naturally holding secret judgements in your heart on the appearance of others at all. Just think about this one before you post- it might look easier than the other ways to hate, but it can bite you in the ass later

"I'm gay so" <- this one is slightly new so it works but it's also unfortunately quite irrelevant and people will question your motivations for commenting. Why is your goal, as a gay man, to profess a lack of attraction to women or an outsider neutrality, in the face of a man hating post? The gay defense might've worked for Jeremy Fragrance but it won't work here my friend

"My dishwasher is malfunctioning" this one's decent but people will call you bald and ratio you. Even if you're not bald. And you might even begin to think you're bald because why would they say that unless you're bald. There is no known defense as of yet for the bald accusation. Or, alternatively, a conventionally attractive might just comment "ew" and you're done for. In the arms race that is gender warfare, again, this is decent, but it's no nuke

"[citing a false statistic that proves women are inferior]" interesting. It may well work if your goal is to ragebait. But the level of dedication you've got to put into pretending the professorial type is almost reminiscent of a 20s cabaret performance, and after a while people will see through this, or see that you're exerting great effort to keep up the veneer of neutrality. Still pretty fucking good idk will definitely get a few people riled up- even other men. They hate a nerd more than they hate women sometimes and it's good to separate your allies from the pussy worshippers

"because of this post I'm going to kill the next woman I see" NOWWW WE'RE TALKING. Okay Jack the Ripper, I see you! You're crazy, you're nuts, you've got nothing to lose! It successfully suggests all the man hating has made you insane and this is your last straw and it's basically everyone else's fault. Excellent. Innovative. Fucking A. They're gonna ban you though