This Tumblr is shutting down in protest of the adult content ban.
Hey. About a year ago I started Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Mastodon pages for Mermaid Heavy Industries, my game studio. I use these to post weird fun images that come up during game development— each post I make is mirrored across all four services. The Tumblr page hasn’t been the most popular one, but I’ve liked being on Tumblr because it’s a much better format for presenting images than those other three pages.
A couple weeks ago Tumblr suddenly announced an effectively total ban on depictions of nudity on their website, hand-drawn or otherwise. There are a few explanations floating around as to why they are doing what they are doing, but the important thing is that whatever their reason is, it is not a good one. The ban is supposed to go into effect today, but we have for the last two weeks seen what it will look like in action because they started flagging content already. Apparently what it will look like is that they are running yahoo’s highly inaccurate open_nsfw tool on all content, flagging anything that triggers for deletion, and expecting posters to manually appeal any false positives. On the first day of the policy, a post on this blog was flagged for deletion. The post depicted blurred rotating cubes. The post was flagged retroactively, so I would not have realized my content was targeted if I had not combed through every Tumblr post I had ever made.
I believe that what Tumblr is doing is wrong and harmful. I think that adult content is a valid, healthy form of expression, and that Tumblr in particular is doing incredible harm by banning it because of the extent to which in the past they invited such content in. I believe this policy will disproportionately harm queer people, both because queer content is coded as "adult" in many people’s minds, and since I believe semi-automated moderation systems— where rather than moderators engaging with a community, assembly lines review reports and appeals— inherently tend to fall harder on queer people, since your average moderator charged with processing posts quickly and making many gut decisions will probably feel a gut affinity with straight content but get a weird feeling they can’t understand with queer content.
And I am discontinuing my Tumblr site because of the adult content ban. I do not want to support a site that is acting in this way by giving them my content to publish, and moreover, I think it’s possible that they will not exist much longer while making it clear that your content can be deleted for containing cubes. I may resume this blog if Tumblr changes policies again or if Tumblr somehow makes it another year or whatever without shutting down. I don’t know. In the meantime, I will continue posting the same content at Twitter, Mastodon, and Facebook. If you liked my images, please follow me at one of those sites (and there might be a no-cash-accepted Patreon soon).
In other news, progress on the game is going very well, and I hope I will have something exciting to announce soon— just not on this site.
- andi mcc