Tumblr's Adult Content Policy

[unspeakablehorror]

I have a lot of thoughts on Tumblr's choice to change its TOS in such a draconian way. This is not even considering their ridiculous attempt to manage this all with a rudimentary AI they expect the users to do the job of teaching (for free while we're being used and abused by them as a product no less!).

Their new policy on 'Adult Content' is as follows:

"Adult Content. Don't upload images, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples — this includes content that is so photorealistic that it could be mistaken for featuring real-life humans (nice try, though). Certain types of artistic, educational, newsworthy, or political content featuring nudity are fine. Don’t upload any content, including images, videos, GIFs, or illustrations, that depicts sex acts. For more information about what this guideline prohibits and how to appeal decisions about adult content, check out our help desk."

This policy bans both sexual content and nudity that's not deemed sufficiently 'artistic' or 'educational' or 'newsworthy'. But how would anyone even make those kinds of determinations? Even if they weren't using an AI to determine this, do any of us trust Tumblr staff to make these kinds of determinations? I certainly don't.

Here's the thing--I generally prefer not to see nudity or images with sexual content. But there's nothing inherently bad or wrong about either. And if Tumblr itself actually cared about its users, they wouldn't have designed the site in a way that's, for example, constantly shoving content from users you don't follow in your face (and turning this on by default, and not giving a way to opt-out) and de-emphasizing the use of tags in their search and not having fine-grained privacy options. I think these are all examples of the way the Tumblr interface is itself designed to ignore consent.

I think it's a problem to buy into American social norms that vilify the body and human sexuality in the name of stopping child predators or other sexual abusers. I also think it is extremely important not to associate innocuous expressions of sexuality or even just neutral displays of the human body with such awful acts.

I think it's vital not to view false positives as anything but the miscarriage of justice that they are. They shouldn't somehow be considered more acceptable than false negatives. That's something that elementary schools often teach us, though, that punishing innocent people is acceptable in the name of making sure you administer punishment to all the bad ones. They might even add in a 'well, you've got to be guilty of something, so I'm still only punishing bad people anyway'. This I think is used to get us to accept the idea of unquestioning obedience to authority. I think this is one of the largest failings of justice and fairness that causes the most human suffering and pain.

I also dislike the way I've seen some discourse try to separate the treatment of sex workers from these larger issues as if this isn't a problem that pervades all aspects of society that harms all of us. I don't think ignoring the wider problems these sorts of policies pose others helps sex workers in any way. This isn't only an issue of economic importance, and protecting people from these types of policies shouldn't be viewed entirely in terms of a balance-sheet. Furthermore, this doesn't just harm sex workers in only an economic way, either. The entire reason why FOSTA/SESTA are so harmful to sex workers is the way they lump innocents and victims in with perpetrators of sexual crimes. And that's exactly what such policies (by implication) do (and they aren't even especially good at catching perpetrators). This affects their bodily autonomy as well as their ability to earn money, and even if the latter were not involved, the former would still be abhorrent.

All of this is connected. These things that harm sex workers are connected to the problem of 'abstinence-only sex education'. They're connected to vilifying the sexuality of LGBT people (including the treatment of HIV+ people), whether those people are sex workers or not. They're connected to how shame and lack of understanding of our own bodies can cause us to miss health problems that might otherwise be caught earlier--problems that could even be fatal. They're connected with viewing 'weird sex stuff' as automatically 'predatory sexual abuse' (again lumping innocents and victims in with the perpetrators of crimes). These things are all connected, and should be treated as such. They are not isolated issues, and understanding that not only can help solidarity, but I think it's the only thing that can ultimately address this problem.

Comments

[tobermoriansass]

This is a really really good articulation of the issues at play here and how this impacts all of us, especially this re-closeting of sex. I've seen some crowing about how it's going to force people to behave, coming from ostensible progressives, and idk where we lost the plot so badly that open and frank discussions of sex, even weird and kinky sex, became looked down on as anti-progressive.

It's all very depressing!

[unspeakablehorror]

I think for a lot of people it probably stems from a desire to have a way to identify all rapists and pedophiles, so I think the idea is to have these broad categories and easily identifiable markers of what indicates that. Unfortunately, not only does that fall far short of the goal of identifying all perpetrators, some of whom are exceptionally good at cultivating a 'wholesome' personality for whatever space they're in, but it categorizes a lot of perfectly innocent people, some who may even be victims of sexual abuse, as offenders. Which is the same issue that sex workers suffer from, with innocent people and victims of sex trafficking being criminalized along with the offenders, and with offenders, who are more unscrupulous and often have more resources than victims, having a much easier time evading the law. Maybe that parallel needs to be drawn more, for people on the left who already see that treating sex workers that way is not a viable solution to sex trafficking and exploitation, but who maybe don't see the problem with applying that sort of reasoning to everyone else.

[tobermoriansass]

Oof. See, I'm not sure that would work because the thing is, the left already had that conversation when porpentine put out Hot Allostatic Load (in part) https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/ and while people nodded sagely to its wisdom around its release, there's already a creeping backlash against porpentine (she's "creepy" or "manipulative" or people are glad they can "finally ignore her") and a lot of it has to do with the fact that she's out there creating "weird" and yeah, "kinky" stuff for herself.

It's not going to be long before the discourse twists to "maybe she was the real abuser all along". Which is a long way of saying, people have been told about how this contributes to creating false positives, but in the end I think fear dominates the landscape of our imagination far too much to actually abandon that model entirely, so the conversation flips around to "you protesting your innocence in the face of accusations must mean actually you have something to hide" (which is not helped, either, by the "progressive" men who HAVE perpetrated assault turning around and saying call-out culture is bad and we need to give people second chances, from a very very different perspective from queer and non-white folks who end up being the most false-flagged and also the most disposable victims in these kind of accusations about rape, abuse and pedophilia because they also have the least social capital to weather the changing tides of the discourse).

I'm not even sure that the people who are crowing, at present, about this are also paying lip service to "oh but it harms sex-workers BUT FUCK THOSE NASTY FOLKS OVER THERE", which seems to me that they don't understand how these issues are interrelated in an intimate way and that supporting sex-workers means, by definition, creating an open sex positive forum for discussion and not just some vague amorphous notion of Sex Worker Rights.

This isn't very positive, sorry. But it's just that I'm unconvinced that drawing these parallels work as long as people are dominated by a) fear (especially fear of "contamination") and b) social structures of power that encourage this kind of social capital and power acquisition.

[unspeakablehorror]

No, that's understandable. I don't think there's one infallible way to communicate these kinds of ideas, and it's very hard to talk about them to people who don't agree because of this contamination mindset.

I don't know who porpentine is, though I recall you mentioning her before. Unfortunately, I think it's not possible to find someone, regardless of personal history, who could avoid being labelled a predator by some of these people.

Sometimes it's simply impossible to convince some people that they're mistaken. And yeah, certainly that's not helped by people (often men) who use sex positivity as a smokescreen for rape and sexual abuse.

I've seen a number of posts expressing this specific kind of sentiment about sex workers being a special case but having these really conservative viewpoints on what the right way to have or think about sex is. There's surely a lot I haven't seen as well. I think it's probably possible to talk to some of them, though I wouldn't know if that is true for whatever particular people you have in mind. Also I can understand feeling disillusioned with the idea of persuading people of this kind of thing, and certainly I hesitate to talk directly to anyone who has expressed these kinds of sentiments, because I've seen the vicious kinds of things some people do. That applies to a lot of things, actually, but especially this topic in particular.