Shut down due to shapes.inc
protest from February 26th-27th.
This blackout protest is a reaction to the ads by a company named shapes.inc, to bring attention to the manipulative and toxic nature of their ads and content. Shape.inc is a character AI chatbot platform where one can create AI characters to chat with and add them to group chats with your friends. The danger this site and company bring is in their ads. Typically they contain images such as the following:
This is only one of their ads, and they all encourage similar behavior as displayed here. These ads encourage you to take your friends OCs, without permission, and recreate them in the app, and even further, encourage you to recreate your mutuals and other REAL PEOPLE as an AI to talk to them when the real people are unavailable. These ads also prey on mentally ill and lonely people, most often teenagers and minors. This is disgusting, predatory, invasive, and it is often making things worse for those people targeted by these ads, by giving them an escape that doesn't actually exist, and making their issues of loneliness even worse. I, for one, would not want to be recreated, and inevitably horribly misrepresented, as an AI, nor would I want my OCs, my creations, the closest things to children that I have, taken without my permission and turned into who knows what.
You can support the effort to remove these predatory ads from this site by joining in the protest. It lasts from February 26th, 12:00 AM, to February 28th, 12:00. Two full days going completely radio silent on Tumblr, no commenting, no liking, not even opening the app at all, to protest to the company against manipulative cartels only interested in their money and not the wellbeing of the mentally unwell. If you cannot join, at least reblog this post, and spread the word of this event.
Thank you, I love all of you, my moots and anyone else who happens to see this. I will return in two days time. Missing you will be torture. <3
