As A Final Fuck You To Free Speech On Tumblr, Verizon Blocked Archivists

from the seriously-guys? dept

By now, of course, you're aware that the Verizon-owned Tumblr (which was bought by Yahoo, which was bought by Verizon and merged into "Oath" with AOL and other no longer relevant properties) has suddenly decided that nothing sexy is allowed on its servers. This took many by surprise because apparently a huge percentage of Tumblr was used by people to post somewhat racy content. Knowing that a bunch of content was about to disappear, the famed Archive Team sprung into action -- as they've done many times in the past. They set out to archive as much of the content on Tumblr that was set to be disappeared down the memory hole as possible... and it turns out that Verizon decided as a final "fuck you" to cut them off. Jason Scott, the mastermind behind the Archive Team announced over the weekend that Verizon appeared to be blocking their IPs:

GOOD MORNING INTERNET This morning, Tumblr mass IP-banned entire swaths of @archiveteam volunteers and warrior instances. Some of our folks will do some work to see if they can get a little more out, but Tumblr has spoken: Get the hell off our lawn, we got some deletin' to do. pic.twitter.com/CrDCaSoPuR — Jason Scott (@textfiles) December 15, 2018

On Sunday, Scott announced that the Archive Team has figured out a way to get past the blocks:

why look at that the archiving of tumblr restarted how did that happen must be a bug surely a crack team of activist archivists didn't see an ip block as a small setback and then turned everything up to 11 pic.twitter.com/5H7GoJon70 — Jason Scott (@textfiles) December 16, 2018

Still, this is a pretty fucked up thing for Verizon to do. It's one thing to decide to completely change the kind of content you host. That's their call. But, at the very least, allow the people who focus on archiving the internet for historical purposes the chance to actually do what they do best. Blocking the Archive Team is a truly obnoxious move, cementing Verizon's reputation as really not caring one bit about the damage the company does.

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Filed Under: archive team, archives, blocking, tumblr

Companies: tumblr, verizon