awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
that’s not the whole flag, now is it
In case anyone's wondering why this post is flagged as mature, it's specifically because—
the reblog above mine got flagged.
None of @manuciruja's two inital additions were rated as mature (and still aren't at the time of writing), but if the reblog chain you see includes the one above, with the screenshot of a Philly Pride flag animation with the likes sitting at 11.9k, the entire post will be flagged as mature, including subsequent reblogs!
Really curious with what prompted the system to home in on this innocuous image specifically, but if you wanted an example for just how ridiculously unreliable the automatic moderation on Tumblr is, I find this one to be a top contender.
When I go to give a post a like with the #trans tag while on mobile now, all colors of the Progress flag are shown: the rainbow colors swirl around the heart first, the other colors (BIPOC, trans, intersex) swirl around the heart a second time.
Here's a screencap of how it appears for me:
Despite being a little late to the party, I was early enough to check where the mature flag originated from, before smadsel deleted their reblogs from their own blog. Not tagging them on purpose, since they probably don't want to be notified about anything surrounding this post any longer, which I understand with how fast the post gained traction, and with how unforeseen this whole debacle is, so let's respect that!
I still was late enough to be able to either deny or confirm how the like animations were handled prior to this post (e.g. only the Philly Pride flag having been used, cycling through multiple flags randomly, picking flags depending on a post's tags, differences between mobile and desktop, etc.), so I can only describe things the way I can see them right now, though plenty of people's testimonies are hinting towards a hotfix on behalf of Tumblr's staff for the animation to now include the entire color range of the Progress flag.
Okay, follow-up!
Did some digging (if you could even call it that, because I found this embarassingly quickly), and, as others had reported, there were multiple possible flag animations for the like button. Which flag would show up depended on the tags used in the liked post!
The Philadelphia Pride flag was probably used when liking posts with the #pride month tag, and while that's a great step up from just the rainbow from the Gay Pride flag, the decision to not include the Trans and Intersex Pride flags' colors stands out in juxtaposition with the increasing visibility of just these demographics in recent years.
I'm willing to bet Tumblr staff saw this post, and ditched the idea of tag-dependent animations in response, having the Progress flag colors play for all posts with queer tags. What I don't know if there was a priority for which flag would play for posts that have multiple queer tags, or if one valid flag was chosen at random.
Huge thanks to @sufferingfrommoodpoisoning for including GIFs of the removed animations in this linked post!
(Found by looking up "like button" in the earch bar. As I said, embarassingly easy...)
With that out of the way,
my goal with these additions was to find answers, present them, and to, ultimately, direct people's attention back towards the point of the original post. This whole thing is the symptom of a greater ongoing problem within Tumblr.
The blogs of trans users are still being mass-reported and auto-deleted, with @staff still not willing to do much of anything to improve matters, as we've seen. If anything regarding the site, let's keep that in mind and act accordingly moving forward!
(That, and what kind of person Tumblr's CEO, Matt Mullenweg, is.)
CORRECTION: There still seem to be multiple flags on desktop, the Progress flag replacing the Philly one, whereas there's only the Progress flag on the mobile app.
