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@lara
So sorry to hear about the layoffs at Tumblr. I find it hard to believe that this place will survive without people like cyle advocating for it, but I remain hopeful.
To my ex-coleagues affected: take time to grieve. I know how it feels to not be able to say goodbye, but know that even though things feel dark right now, this is the beginning of something great for you.
Between Matt Mullenweg and Elon Musk, I think it’s safe to say that men are far too emotional to own websites
another day of being glad i don't work for automattic anymore
(this was meant for twitter but it's been banned in brazil, so here i am, at the scene of the crime)
to my fellow british friends: as the general election approaches, let's remember to vote tactically to remove the tories
i know labour is not much better right now, but we have the power to change that in future. let's kick the tories out first!
This site shows which way you should vote to stop the Tories from getting into power again
The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?
remember kids (and by kids i mean tech workers): things are getting worse, and will continue to get worse unless we do something about it
trans activist, model, and actress hunter schafer was amongst the 50 people arrested yesterday at an action held in new york city to disrupt president joe biden’s appearance on late night with seth meyer.
she was there in coalition with the organization jewish voices for peace.
A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:
We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally.
A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:
The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.
Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.
Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr.
Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.
When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.
Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:
Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.
Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.
Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.
We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.
We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.
We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.
— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.
workers are fucking powerful. i love you all.
thoughts on the most recent debacle?
For future context, this is the debacle we are talking about:
(censoring the usernames of the wonderful folks that gave me the context to avoid bringing them under the spotlight without their permission, if you folks want to appear in a non-censored image instead, tell me about it and I'll switch the screencap)
So, yeah, thoughts. Let me start saying, once again, that, for real, that staff isn't full of TERFs and nazis. Not even close: The current staff is more or less the same that was here when I was working on tumblr (well, 1/4th the size, but same people), and they are far from being terfs: They go from "I don't understand anything going on in tumblr" liberal-normie to "black-block tumblrina" queer leftists. But in my years 'inside' I haven't seen a single person discussing anything that could make me want to raise a red flag: On the contrary, every time there was any conversation about trans issues, it usually was about how to protect people (though now I think about it, the only person in high management that often talked about "protect queer kids" was fired a few months ago, thank you for your service, L, you were one of the good ones).
Hell, I don't even think Matt thinks about himself as a transphobe nor he's willingly pushing for censoring trans folks in here: You see, he's a humanist, the kind of person who "don't see color" / "don't see gender", etc, you know? A 'liberal' in the worst definition of the term.
What's going on, then? You see, who is Matt, how he things, affects deeply at how this platform is moderated. He is not moderating the site himself, but he's the source of how the moderation rules are defined and how they are interpreted.
I've tried to explain this in the past, but I think a lot of people in this hellsite don't really understand how moderation works and what to expect, and that makes them angry and sad when shit happens. In a nutshell: No one here is banned for being trans, or for what they say, they are banned for HOW they express themselves. Not _what_ they say, but _how_ they say it.
See the entire bunch of people being permabanned for telling the CEO to KYS. From their point of view, they are being banned for being critical of staff. But ... that's not right. They are being banned for their choice of words, not for what they are trying to communicate with them. They could have tell him to "politely go get lost in the antartica" instead and they would still be around. Literally. Because that's what moderation is about: It's about keeping a 'civil discussion' layer of paint over the site, not about preventing bullies from hurting people.
For Matt, and for how tumblr moderation is implemented in practice, there's no difference between a 16 years old kid saying "All CEOs should be guillotined" and an active nazi saying "all jews should be gassed". Actually, a nazi saying "I have concerns about how jews dominate our society and I think we should do something about it *wink* *wink*" would probably be a-ok while the jew kid commenting "fuck off KYS you nazi rat" could be permabanned for their comment.
Same thing happens with all the trans folk being banned so often. I don't think the problem is so much that you are being targeted for being trans, but what being someone who is transitioning their gender and feels like they have a community that understands what they are going through here means.
See, I don't think trans accounts here gets banned more often than, let's say, sex workers accounts. Because for Matt / moderation policies, posting a pic of your body to show up how your transition is going to your friends is the same than posting a picture of your body to promote your onlyfans. The context, the intention, doesn't matter much to them, the action is what matters. And of course, for a lot of trans folks here, their body is a very important topic to talk about, to show, to be proud of ... but people like Matt don't really understand (or care) about the difference between that kind of self-expression and posting a thirst trap.
Once again, this is bullshit, and more on a place like tumblr where 90% of the people are here just because they think this is a safe haven where they can freely express themselves among people who understand them. But it is where all this shit comes from, if you ask me.
By the way, credit where its due:
> the only person in high management that often talked about "protect queer kids"
This was @lara, and as the head of Tumblr design, she was the only member of the high management team of Tumblr who repeatedly brought up the importance of tumblr as a safe space for queer people on internal conversations.
With hindsight, the fact of her being the only one in the executive team to actually talk about it is as loud as it could be.
thanks @jv for mentioning me.
i wasn't the only one in leadership who cared deeply about this, but in hindsight i think it's different when you are both queer and part of the tumblr community. i'm not sure if any others in leadership were in that position (at least not openly), and to be honest, i don't even know who's in leadership now, so i won't try to guess what the ratio is currently.
being fired from tumblr last november broke my heart, and i'm still dealing with the emotions of how/why it happened. but i won't focus this on me, because i'm super happy where i am now, and i'm free from this situation.
what i want to say is that i'm incredibly proud of the teams i worked with and led, and i'm equally proud of every single employee who contributed to the open latter posted in @staff today. that was SO BRAVE.
it makes me so fucking terrified that this place might go away, because there's nothing like it on ther internet, but i trust tumblr's lgbtq+ staff to give this platform its best chance at being a kind, genuine queer space every day.
if tumblr survives this, it's because of you. because you ARE this community.
As a trans person who pays the bills hawking my Patreon on this site, Photomatt's behavior has been disappointing to say the least. I hope staff can come to a more reasonable conclusion.
I think I speak for everyone when I say we would appreciate some insight and transparency into the content moderation systems.
Having a blog you've run for 7+ years nuked out of nowhere, with no communication, reason, or recourse beyond navigating a maze of broken automated systems, is pretty frustrating. I can't really blame users for saying some TOS-breaking shit, because sometimes it feels like the only way to communicate with staff here is publicly.
Matt for the love of God stop fucking posting and talk to your PR team.
matt is supposed to be on fucking sabbatical rn. the last time he refused to log off and caused problems swinging his dick around was on the wordpress.org twitter hawking a fundraiser for his birthday and claiming that as founder he didn't need to get permission fr marketing or otherwise worry about not offending people. this time he promised everyone at automattic he'd actually take a break (and become a chess grandmaster in 3 months, which, whatever, dumb techbro ego bs). instead he logged back in almost immediately, berated one of the apps teams publicly, refused to log off, then did a bunch of blog posts and interviews saying shit ranging from "Capitalism is, as Nicholas Stern says, the best way to take care of people we don’t know." through "essentially [queer or Black groups are] tribes or identities that separate us. And so part of me really identifies with Martin Luther King being, I want my children judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin."
i am, thank fucking everything, no longer working for him, and yet. i quit before leadership could force my lead to fire me. a disproportionate amount of queer people have been fired or forced to leave in the last year, bc he has personally been sending messages pressuring all leads to pick a "weak link" and going on about culture fit in ways that are fucking loaded. and then there's the exodus of ex-leads who have been saying clearly that they quit instead of being forced to fire people, and the whole team of quality engineers that was axed late last year (oh but it's not a layoff, they all magically had bad performance despite great individual performance reviews, one of them being on parental leave, and all of them being blindsided), and so on and so on...
honestly it fucking sucks bc for a long time i was able to say, despite matt personally being behind half the bad ideas that have plagued tumblr in the last few years, that i think automattic was still doing a better job than most other companies who could afford to take on a liability like tumblr would do. and i thought that about wordpress.com too, and kept recommending it bc automattic's ethics were at least marginally better than most companies in the same space not built on open source. there were people i knew who were working on the transmisogynist moderation issue, but [gestures] decisionmakers have decided they're selling tumblr data (including private data!) to midjourney instead of doing anything but doubling down i guess. now that matt's weighed in it's not gonna get better. the queer staff remaining have used what leverage they had in every way possible and stopped being listened to a long time ago. support staff are paid far too little for what they deal with. i get messages from my ex-colleagues regularly because they're all trying desperately to jump ship. anyway usually i think people are misguided in putting the blame for corporate decisions directly at the feet of the figurehead ceo but in this case he is genuinely detested and keeps personally making the worst decisions and doubling down on them
showing up to work like omfg i'm sooooo excited to give shareholders a profitable quarter
it feels so genuinely good to be working at a place where the only shareholders are the founders and the employees
if I had a nickel for every time the ceo of a company i worked for had a public meltdown related to transphobia, i'd have two nickels. which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
Hi! I just wanted to send you a quick note to say I hope you're doing well!
i am doing super well! 💗 thank you so much
you said something in your take on the latest debacle thats been rooting around my head like a feral hog. this is a total paraphrase but "moderation is not to prevent bullies from hurting people its to keep a nice paint coat of politeness" i'd like to see you elaborate on that tbh, as like, critique of existing systems of moderation and what could be done better. what you think moderation Should be
Let me answer with a real example that happened to me. Early 2023, someone on here sent me a DM to point me to an asshole who was spamming some popular anime fandom tag with TERF shit (basically, taking pictures of characters from that anime and making them into anti-trans memes, totally unrelated with the actual fandom, just pictures and basic shit like "trans women are men" in white all-caps text, etc). I wasn't a mod, so I couldn't do anything myself, but I could report it using the special staff fast-lane (basically, go to the mods team channel in slack, point them to what was going on).
A super nice rank-and-file person from the ToS team got the posts removed ASAP and all was good. Until a few hours later, when her boss got into the slack thread where we had been talking about those posts to tell her that it was a mistake to remove them, because they didn't go against the rules: the posts wasn't addressing anyone in particular (so no harassment rule violation) and legally wouldn't be considered hate speech (so no hate speech rule violation).
That's what I mean. The person on the team who removed the posts cared about preventing bullies from hurting people: She saw someone being a little shit to others in tumblr and said "not on my watch, you fucker".
On the other side, her boss cared about keeping the coat of politeness: Legally speaking, the TERF wasn't doing anything that could get them in problems, so for the boss, it wasn't anything tumblr mods should be involved with.
What I think moderation should be? I think moderation should be opinionated. I think people should be banned for the intend, not for the words. The context matters: A trans person punching up and wishing a comically cartoonish death to a billionaire is way less harmful than a random people posting casual transphobic content on unrelated tags. But to evaluate that, you need to have an opinionated moderation, not some rules trying to establish some level of 'fair-play' between equally-valid opinions.
honestly afaik I feel maybe the answer is that moderation is almost entirely impossible on large websites, and the only real answer is federation.
Like all moderation can do at most is enforce what's currently accepted as progressive. It's possible to change the definition of what progressive means but in the mean time it depends on what the people doing the moderation have been chosen for (is it ability to withstand looking at a lot of hate speech? is it on their morals? who has written the guidance?)
For a while the running theme on tumblr was that it was chastisingly ableist to call things stupid. Would it have been good if moderation was at the level where people were banned for saying something like "my dog is stupid"?
Additionally bigots such as terfs and other transphobes know how to game the systems, their tactics boil down to stuff like:
harass someone or use just below the line dog whistles until someone responds and tells them kys or otherwise something which is vaguelly reportable, and then spread it in a group chat or boost it to their followers so that all of them report it. (perhaps with guidance)
You can get some below the line stuff banned if you go to the hate speech -> hate speech dehumanising people reporting route sometimes, but you do need to explain why it's against the rules
Moderation is usually a very low paid and shitty job, not only are people usually seeing a lot of awful stuff (at the moment people have been posting a lot of videos of dying palestinians, I don't report them but I wouldn't be surprised if the moderators end up seeing a lot of them) and there's also a lot of general hate speech around.
I think a federated system might the only real option around long term moderation, or some sort of moderation transparency where people can agree with how things have been moderated or not? (though this might also be open to a sort of botting/zerging by bigots)
This way people could take their blog and move when there's a lack of/biased/zealous moderation they disagree with. The only problem is there's no real way to implement this at the moment? Not in a tumblr sort of eco system?
yeah, one of the reasons i'm extremely invested in federated social media as the way past web 2.0 is because i am extremely aware (as someone who's done a bunch of professional social moderation for IRL groups) that social moderation only works if it's opinionated, and that simultaneously, trying to enforce an opinionated set of comportment/etiquette/interaction rules on a website with millions of users worldwide is guaranteed to be imperfect, and not only imperfect, but imperfect in ways that are genuinely bigoted and/or dangerous.
genuinely, "you're banned because the way you interact pisses the mod team off" is what social moderation boils down to. there's no way to legislate your way out of that. current attempts to legislate that away on sites like tumblr just result in bigots rules-lawyering their way past the rules--like, the whole "pee your pants" thing from 2017 was blatantly a way to game the moderation system and suicide bait without being banned for suicide baiting, because they weren't literally saying the words "kill yourself." and it mostly worked, because moderators for a millions-of-users website literally cannot be up-to-date on the social norms and implications and in-jokes on every single niche subculture on their site!
and that's not even getting into, like, genuine cultural and linguistic differences and most socmed sites headquartered in the US designing their moderation with the presumption that their users are usamerican.
i think if you're looking to large socmed sites like tumblr and twitter and tiktok and facebook to clean up their moderation problems individually, you're identifying the wrong problem and therefore looking to the wrong place for solutions. like, the problem isn't just that all these socmed companies are run by bigots who want to run bigoted websites, the problem is that mass socmed moderation exists at all to begin with. it's unsalvageable, it's a horrifically abusive and underpaid job that doesn't even do what it's lauded as doing to begin with, and it never will, there isn't a solution to "trying to enforce one singular belief system and interaction style on millions of users worldwide will never work in a just and fair way." the solution is "stop trying to do that;" the solution is "users should have the power to make and enforce their own social norms, and you should be able to kick TERFs out of your social space for literally no crime other than being annoying, even if they haven't violated a single rule."
like, i realize i'm on here saying this on My Tumblr Soapbox ("you claim to criticize society and yet you participate in it, aren't you typing this on your smartphone, checkmate athetits" hardy har har), but very genuinely, i think that when mass socmed dies it'll be a net good for the world, and shifting to federated communities is a positive that can only improve the implementation of online social moderation.
ao3 seems to have managed a pretty pared-down, non-"opinionated" set of moderation norms without devolving into an orgy of radfem hate in which all trans ppl feel constantly acutely uncomfy
idk, i cant be the only one to hear about a forum that openly embraces the principle of "just chuck out the downpunchers and creeps and annoying bigots" and have a shiver run down my spine, no?
Oh but that's very much a opinionated way to deal with moderation
(Before I go into sharing my thoughts, I wanted to +1 that Ao3's moderation is very much opinionated. The opinion is "don't like, don't read", but good luck trying to harrass someone in there.)
Here are my thoughts as someone who has worked in tech for a while and was part of many teams discussing moderation and safety:
How moderation works
(This will be a simplified explanation, the subject is more complex than that.)
Moderation is the closest word in the tech world for "police". Much like the police, both automated and human moderators reinforce an existing set of policies that they didn't define, and much like the police, their job is not to protect people, but to protect private property (in this case, to protect companies from liability).
That does not mean companies don't care! Some do.
Those policies are written by specific people with knowledge on what needs protection, and that's usually the bare minimum of what moderation needs to help contain.
Usually those companies are based in the United States, and their policies reflect US laws. As they expand to other countries, they adjust their policies in those countries as needed, so they're allowed to operate.
The problem with growth
Defining policies becomes a much bigger problem when companies grow and become global spaces. That means companies are not only dealing with their own biases and internal ideological conflicts, but they're also dealing with different governments' policies and mandates.
A great example of that is censorship of content in China, or when Twitter employees in India got death threats from local government for refusing to change policy to favour a dictatorial government.
This idea of unlimited growth that became normal in tech tends to act as an imperialist force by reinforcing American policies, which as we know is geared towards corruption, individual liberty, and neoliberal capitalism. Their growth doesn't make them experts in dozens of different cultures and political beliefs, and usually they are not really trying to learn beyond what they are legally obligated to do.
But again, some companies do care more than others.
So what happens when you put literally the entire world in one place? Well, you're going to have all kinds of people: oppressors and oppressed. But how do you decide who deserves to be in a space like that? And who gets to define what's allowed?
The negative feedback loop problem
In a society that is broken, with social and economic inequality, with a select few at the top becoming richer as we all starve, do you expect the police to stop crime? Can they contain unlawful individuals? Can they protect us?
It's the exact same for moderation in tech spaces.
Donella Meadows wrote in "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System":
“Reducing the gain around a positive loop — slowing the growth — is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening negative loops, and much preferable to letting the positive loop run.”
If you imagine the growth in users and interactions as positive loops in the systems that make up tech products, moderation (and any other safety measures, like government regulation) is a negative loop trying to contain that positive loop.
Whilst investing in negative loops is paramount (because an unchecked positive loop leads to chaos), it can't be effective in changing the system. Because the speed of growth (relative to moderation) is exponentially faster. Regulation is a more sustainable negative loop, but how can you regulate something that is global in an effective manner?
Donella talks about self-organizing to change the goals of a system, then changing paradigms (and transcending them) as the most effective leverage points you have to truly change a system.
What can we do?
So maybe it's about changing who owns tech spaces. What would happen if we all owned it instead of corporations? And what would the goals of those tech spaces be? Would we be better at protecting people?
It's even more important to experiment and imagine different systems and structures (for instance: federated, not-for-profit social spaces), and be pragmatic about making them a reality, than it is to try to contain the positive loops of the current system.
If we want to protect trans people (or anyone else vulnerable in a system), we need to shatter the current paradigms into a million little pieces. Moderation will never stop hate and harrassment (maybe the most chaotic positive loop of the internet age), and in fact it will only make it worse (much like the police!).
It will turn us into beings that believe we can solve human problems with digital vigilance, based on policies that we didn't vote for, and that can be turned against us in the blink of an eye.
Anyway, read Mark Fisher!
i wasn't planning on coming back here, but i needed to say this:
thank god i was "fired" (taken care of by the sweet love of capitalism)
dodged a bullet there 😅
I need a break from this place (maybe forever).
My fandom account will be active until the day this place no longer exists, so I'll still be here lurking somewhere. I just don't want to look at this account anymore, and the memories that come with it.
If you know me, please feel free to reach out on Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, email, my phone number, etc. I'm around.
Forever your friend 💗
oi lara! só queria dizer que sinto muito pelo seu emprego e pelo tumblr em geral. eu tô aqui faz tipo 12 anos e esse site significa MUITO pra mim de verdade, então só imagino como eu me sentiria se trabalhasse aqui tb. se morar no rio hmu for a drink hahaha 🧡🧡🧡
obrigada 💗
moro no rio sim!
never thought a piece of ui would make me emotional 💗
