leproblematique:

lordhellebore:

Tbh. I can’t help but find this whole tumblr “safe mode” thing where now anyone under 18 can’t see posts by blogs flagged as NSFW anymore - completely regardless of the content - deeply ironic. Isn’t this what a particularly vocal subset of young users wanted? I’m looking at the anti corner. “There is no reason why any adult should interact with anyone below 18!” they yelled. Well. Now users under 18 are upset because they can’t access a lot of content anymore, including LGBTQA posts/resources, and you bet there are antis among them, shocked at how much content is suddenly verboten to them, shocked that so many blogs they liked and whose content they didn’t find “problematic” are now denied to them. The phrase BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR comes to mind. This is what you constantly asked for. Censorship. And did you really believe it would come in just the shape you wanted? The naivety of that idea has always been pathetic, and now … yeah. Good luck with that.



(That said, the schadenfreude is pretty stale, because I’m actually not for this kind of thing at all, regardless of who’s at the receiving end. I hope there’ll be a reasonable solution.)

I’m in two minds about this whole thing, honestly.

One the one hand, it is a welcome bit of change, even if it seems to not have been put into practice as well as it could have been (and even there, I’m waiting for the dust to settle and for people to actually corroborate accusations like ‘Tumblr is hiding posts with the word ‘gay’ in them from minors!’ as posts like this one allege, when my understanding is that the filtering is solely based on NSFW flags on blogs, rather than on keywords. If Tumblr’s taught me anything, it’s to not immediately trust an accusation, particularly if it looks knee-jerky in nature).

There are ridiculously many people on here who have so far shown an utter unwillingness to curate the content they see, whether this meant constantly going into tags where they shouldn’t be going if the content is that genuinely damaging to them or to blogs with explicit content that they have no business dealing with if they’re under 18, for the legal well-being of all parties involved. With the result that they potentially keep re-traumatizing themselves and then spew a metric ton of vitriol on users simply minding their own business, as we’ve seen over and over again. I was waiting for some sort of crackdown where curation would be taken out of their hands, if they’ve proven over and over again that they can’t be trusted to do it for themselves and demanded that others cater to them.

And, as you said, wasn’t this what they kept asking for? Until I get some confirmation that filtering is also done based on keywords, not just on NSFW flags on blogs, I wouldn’t necessarily call this censorship. A lot of Tumblr users have shown, through their behavior, why a more robust NSFW filter / more robust controls on who can actually see and access one’s own blog is absolutely necessary, to cut down on the rampant harassment and the entitled attitude of ‘the online spaces I frequent must never contain content I hate / find distressing and if such content does exist there, it must be eliminated.’

I say I’m of two minds because the greatest problem I can see now, with the system in its current form, is that blogs which don’t actually contain explicit material are now under the filter, because they flagged themselves by mistake some time ago. This is something that Tumblr does need to provide a fix for, preferably by making it easier to turn the flag off if it’s been switched on. My suspicion when it comes to the LGBTQIAP+ resource blogs now under the filter is that they flagged themselves as NSFW some time ago ‘just to be safe’, not knowing if they would or would not be posting explicit material such as tips on intercourse between same-sex partners (very frequent on a lot of queer resource sites and very needed, since sex-ed IRL tends to be a disaster, on average, never mind actual access to information on intercourse that isn’t cis man/cis woman).

A very long-winded way of saying that, for now, my attitude is ‘wait and see.’ I might just make a new account with an under-eighteen age as a test, to see if there’s actually any truth that queer content not flagged as NSFW also gets hidden.