sorensfw:

There’s a lot of panic running around my dash today about various people’s blog’s getting arbitrarily deleted, and noone seems to know what’s happening (if, actually, anything).

There is most certainly something happening, and it’s this:

twitter.com

/bluechoochoo/status/1063836783257866240

Turn that mess into a URL and you can read about Apple suddenly dropping the tumblr app from the App Store. I’ve mangled the link, because (I hear) tumblr has also changed their search algorithm to deprioritize posts that contain links, and I want people to be able to search for this post.

The random blog deletions are almost certainly part of the same effort to appease Apple. People on my dash have reported being deleted without warning, having subsequent accounts similarly deleted, and then being reinstated after getting a sufficient amount of follower-rage via alternate accounts.

This, to me, looks like tumblr is running a script that scans their complete list of blogs to look for whatever Apple is complaining about (most likely pornbots, but maybe NSFW content in general, Apple is famously prudish and censorious), finds it by matching some set of parameters (most likely some combination of being marked as NSFW, posting mostly reblogs or original content that are primarily images or image+link posts, possibly with a machine-learning filter that looks for porn-ish content but I very doubt they spent the effort on that), and “taking care of it” (by uncerimoniously deleting the blog). They’ve tuned the parameters of the matching script to be very broad, and are relying on people to have enough connections to raise a stink they’ll notice if a real person gets caught by the script.

The parameters I just mentioned would tend to target visual-artist blogs as well as pornbots, leading to the apparent spate of artist-blogs getting deleted. The repeated deletions indicate that this wasn’t just a one-time run, and that whatever “flare up” (whether it’s criminal activity or moral guardian boredom) will be ongoing for a least a while now–WHICH MEANS IF YOU’RE A VISUAL ARTIST OR HAVE A BLOG THAT EVEN VAUGELY MATCHES THE PARAMETERS MENTIONED ABOVE, YOU SHOULD SET UP ALTERNATE SOCIAL MEDIA AND MAKE YOUR FOLLOWERS AWARE OF IT NOW. THIS ISN’T OVER AND THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE THE SCRPIT WILL FIND YOUR BLOG NEXT.

If you’re not ultra-popular in a way that your deletion would cause user-base unrest Tumblr’s holding-company can see on their bottom line, it’s very likely you’ll not be able to get reinstated.

Source: I’m a web developer, and I spent five years in Silicon Valley working for three different top-five social networks, and this is how somehting like getting kicked from the App Store would have been handled at all of them.

My alternate social media are Twitter (@Soren_Tycho) and Github (username sorentycho ). If I disappear here, look in one of those places for more information.

HT @bea-the-witch for the news links.

I wouldn’t normally ask such a thing, but please signal-boost this.