Tumblr Censorship, the Continued Series

[unspeakablehorror]

I'm sorry to see Tumblr getting progressively worse with censorship, but this is why I left the site years ago and won't be posting there again.  It's never going to get better, but I've also come to realize that that will also never spur a mass exudos to less restrictive social media, because less restrictive social media is also less commercialized, with the accompanying lesser financial resources and differring focus.

I think platforms like Dreamwidth and Pillowfort are better for my purposes, because I can't abide such random and arbitrary censorship, but I also admit the Dreamwidth interface can be awkward to use, even if I appreciate its power, and Dreamwidth is not great for artists, even if it could be usable for that purpose by someone sufficiently determined to do so.  Pillowfort is much more intuitive for someone used to Tumblr, but I understand that many artists find the max file upload size rather restrictive.  Both platforms also lack the giant city feel of a large social media platform, and I can understand how that could be offputting to people as well.  Even I find that aspect frustrating at times. 

But I find the direction Tumblr and other large social media sites have decided to go in much more concerning.  I think the thing is, this keeps happening because these companies realize people will complain, but, well, it will never matter to their bottom line.  Apps are more important than civil rights to their popularity.  Because apps aid commercialization.  And commercialization will ensure large resources are available for development and storage, thus ensuring large quantities of people on the platform, and this social capital, ie. the commercialization of social bonds themselves, will ensure the chokehold of these platforms and corporations like Apple.  It doesn't even matter that I've never bought an Apple phone or computer, my life has been indelibly altered by the choices that reprehensible company has made.  And the same is true of anyone who uses social media affected by their draconian rules, which for many places on the internet, are in actuality laws.

Comments

[tobermoriansass]

I hate all of this so much :(

re. PF there was also in part a large number of people unhappy with the tumblr porn ban who were unhappy with the way PF dealt with underage with a retrospective ban on material after someone had posted loli (i think? or shota, not sure) and got banned for it, resulting in an outcry. I found their NSFW policy very vague given the current fandom atmosphere and people who might have been willing to give it a shot haven't revisited it because of this in part.

[unspeakablehorror]

Yeah, the social media situation in general is pretty dreadful.:( I think what's happened on Tumblr is reflective of the larger social media environment. Facebook and Twitter have also been pretty draconian in their censorship. The FOSTA and SESTA stuff, Apple's 'walled garden' extending beyond their walls, and social media being beholden to admakers are all, I think, big parts of this mess.

That was a legitimately bad call by Pillowfort, and I can understand people not wanting to use the site due to the choice to ban someone for a Terms Of Service change that hadn't even been added to the TOS yet. I just don't think Tumblr or any of the other large social media sites have better policies or even better enforcement of their policies. Pillowfort, as flawed as it is, is the closest there is to a Tumblr the way Tumblr used to be, that doesn't ban displaying portions of basic human anatomy, that doesn't autoban content with a half-baked AI in such comically incompetent ways that such posts are frequently reblogged as jokes, and that doesn't abruptly ban tags like 'my art' or 'me' for entirely inexplicable reasons.

Maybe Pillowfort will get worse, will eventually go down the same path Tumblr has. Or maybe it'll disappear. Who knows? My continued use of the platform is entirely dependent on what choices they make. But I don't have the option to return to a Tumblr before the ads, or before the porn ban. Since most the people who objected to Pillowfort returned to Tumblr or went off to Twitter or Facebook rather than taking up somewhere with better policies like Dreamwidth, the only conclusion I can draw is that the larger populations and larger resources of those sites are the actual draw. Because I don't think their content policies are better.

I didn't delete my Tumblr account or stop interacting with people on it for exactly those two reasons. It's just, I value the people who are still on the platform and what they have to say, but I don't value the corporate executives who are slowly trying to strangle out anything subversive from the site. I mourn the loss of what Tumblr used to be, but what it is now is no longer usable to me.

[tobermoriansass]

Yeah honestly the most upsetting thing is seeing how so much of this legislation is being shoved under anti-trafficking, which is a movement absolutely infiltrated by a certain type of evangelical christian - so its kind of this backdoor route to getting their 1980s censorship in but get people on their side by using the very serious and emotive issue of trafficking (which makes legitimate anti-trafficking work that much more difficult!)

I don't know if you've seen that post about Apple's review process for apps but there's been some suggestion that the process for twitter and FB is more streamlined so it also seems like a complex mix of failure of resource allocation and straight up discrimination on the basis of perceived clout of platforms. Just gruesomely capitalistic on every level.

IA that Pillowfort has a better content policy now for sure and defs better than most social media platforms. I think its more that they made that mistake in the early days when they could have achieved some critical mass during that period when people wanted to leap from tumblr to something else, I guess? So some of the people who could have directed people there went to twitter instead - and twitter was already gaining traction as a platform for doing public fandom not least because its nsfw policy seems to basically not be enforced at all.

I wish Dreamwidth had better support for images and like, the lowkey fandom engagement you get on tumblr with just reblogging images or lurking because the team has more experience than Pillowfort on the whole and have made some solid choices in re. how it operates and functions as and its overall policies. On the whole I think if you want to have a fannish social media platform at this point it'd have to be nonprofit owned and run like AO3.

[unspeakablehorror]

Yeah, the people making anti-trafficking laws seem to pretty clearly prioritize passing legislation that makes it more difficult to prevent that problem, not less.

I did see a post about the Apple approval process stuff. It doesn't surprise me that there's that kind of corporate politics going on at all.

And yeah, a lot of people went to Twitter. Having seen a number of Twitter to Mastodon waves due to Twitter's censorship, they seem to have their own problems, though (even if those lean less heavily towards nsfw content than Tumblr's does). But yeah, I think the people running Pillowfort are really new to running a social media site. I definitely get the impression that inexperience (along with limited resources) is a large part of what's caused a lot of the issues they've faced.

I definitely wish Dreamwidth had some enhanced abilities as far as the interface goes, such as more intuitive image handling and more easily finding conversations you're interested in. I agree that the Dreamwidth team has much more experience (which I can only imagine was enhanced by their previous experience working at Livejournal). Definitely there could be some pros to a nonprofit model to social media, though I also do think that would require a different approach than the one taken by AO3, since I think managing a nonprofit archive has some different considerations than nonprofit social media would.

There actually is nonprofit social media today, on Mastodon, but the similarity of the interface to Twitter unfortunately makes it unsuitable for my purposes. And they accomplish that in a different fashion than AO3 does, which takes a more centralized approach.