As someone who’s asexual and runs a 100% SFW blog, let me be honest with you for a second over Tumblr’s “brilliant” idea to use bots and AI to filter all NSFW content (and upload filters in general).
Just scrolling through my dashboard, I’ve seen several posts making fun of the whole situation as if December 17th (which is also my mom’s birthday, BTW) is the end of the world, and I get it. Even as an asexual man who often finds sexual situations repulsive, I think Tumblr’s blanket ban on ALL NSFW content is absurd. It’s not gonna work. You would not believe how many posts I’ve seen that were hidden from within safe mode and are completely innocent and SFW. Even after complaining about a House of Anubis-themed post that was hidden by safe mode on my House of Anubis side blog being, someone reblogged it from me and said my complaints were also hidden by safe mode.
Now, imagine if instead of being hidden and being able to see and rate as “non-offensive” with the click of a button, the post wasn’t allowed on Tumblr AT ALL. This just seems like a band-aid over a broken bone type of attempt to Tumblr’s latest attempt to please Apple’s censors. Especially when you consider at the same time, I’ve stumbled across actual NSFW content that wasn’t even caught by Safe Mode. You really think the porn bots won’t survive the bot-on-bot warfare and die a quick death when you flip the switch on December 17th? Think again!
This is true for upload filters of any sort and look no further than YouTube’s joke of an attempt, from the Adpocolypse “not suitable for all advertisers” filter to Content ID. The former messed with many YouTubers’ livelihoods. One YouTuber I watch had to move their weekly live stream to Twitch because of the Adpocolypse. And for the latter, Content ID is a joke. No, seriously. It’s a gigantic, stupid, half-baked attempt of a joke. If someone is determined to upload a movie to their YouTube channel and run ads on it, they just add a filter, run sped up, pitch shift the audio, mirror the footage, put it in the corner and fill the screen with a looped royalty-free video, and voila! It’s up to enjoy, free from Content ID’s clutches. No one DARES do something like that for video essays, movie reviews, memes, fanvids, and other small clip usages that falls under fair use. But THEY’RE the ones who are caught in the clutches of Content ID. People who pirate content wholesale cheat the system, while those who actually are creative and make transformative usage of copyrighted material don’t and they’re the ones who are punished, essentially being declared guilty until proven innocent by their accuser. Sounds fair, right?
And you want to know what the scary part is? I predict that unless something is done, bots and AI interfaces will act as the uploader police, filtering out content that it deems against the rules or otherwise illegal, not just here, but on EVERY site. But history has shown that right now, as it currently stands, it’s very ineffective. They’re even starting to be considered mandatory by certain proposed laws (I'm looking at you, European Union for your Article 13 copyright legislation)! And speaking of Article 13, imagine if a filter as sensitive and effective with regards to copyrighted content as this NSFW filter on Tumblr is with porn bots, and apply that same filter to all sites on the Internet. THAT IS WHAT THE EU IS LOOKING AT IMPLEMENTING IF ARTICLE 13 GOES THROUGH, not to mention that those sites will be held liable for copyright-infringing content uploaded by their users instead of the users themselves. This is just the beginning of upload filters mass censoring of content unless we do something to stop it. After all, what will happen to this site when all we’re left with is endless text posts like this one and selfies against a plain white background?
I get it: Every site can’t police every single post that is ever posted to their platform by a human in real time, whether it’s for something illegal like child pornography or copyright infringement, or for a site policy (however misguided it is). But do you really want to leave your site in the hands of bots that can’t distinguish between a copyrighted song pitch shifted up one or two semitones and the original song as-is, or whether that nude person is an actual human or a work of art? And at the end of the day, is it even worth it? Is it worth your site users from leaving en masse (in the case of the December 17th thing on Tumblr)? Is it worth having the internet no longer be free and open just so record labels and movie studios (who break records every year) can make more money (in the case of Article 13)?
For Article 13, contact your MEP if you live in the EU. If you don’t live in the EU, spread the word. For Tumblr, find some way to protest if it’s an issue that matters to you. That’s just my rant on the issue. But above all, if you live in the EU, contact your MEP about the dangers of Article 13.
