mostly-abandoned discourse blog

i made this one first and cant change it from my main. you want @mleemwyvern

[r0zeclawz]

wow tumblr you brought back a bunch of the blogs of the transfems you banned for no reason!! impressive work! now you just need to unban like, thousands more of those? come on keep at it you can do it and STOP looking at that "ban even more trannies" button i can tell youre thinking about it

[firawren]

Which of these would you rather see on your dash?

Hey @staff. This is a perfect example of why collapsed reblogs is such a bad idea. Seeing the full thread, you go like this: 😮 ooh, that's cool 😀 "they're free," hehe! 🤣 "16 cents," perfection!!

I have achieved joy, I feel positive feelings toward Tumblr, I want to engage, I want to stay, my eyeballs land on more ads, you make more money, everyone wins! 🎉

Seeing the collapsed thread, you go like this:

😮 ooh, that's cool 😐 "16 cents"? yes, that's literally what the pic shows, not sure why you felt the need to say that

There is no motivation for me to uncollapse the reblog chain—it looks like a boring conversation about the denominations of coins. And even if I do uncollapse it, you've ruined the joke by showing me the punchline before the setup. I am sad, Tumblr is boring, I go elsewhere to entertain myself, I see less ads, you make less money, everyone loses. 😥

Reblog chains are the best thing about Tumblr. They are your unique super power. They are the thing that makes people screenshot Tumblr and share it around. Why on earth would you kneecap them??

I don't know exactly how you plan to implement this. Give people the option to keep them collapsed if there truly are people who are annoyed by how long they can get (you already have a version of this feature), but don't collapse them for everyone or new users by default. Please. It will make Tumblr so much more boring.

[clowniconography]

i know we've been saying this about every new shitty update but i feel like removing reblog chains could really be the thing to kill this site. like that is literally the main thing that makes tumblr unique

[clowniconography]

truly the only reason you still see tumblr posts reposted constantly on other sites which claim tumblr to be "dead" is because of our unique form of collaborative posting. also you would not only be taking away what makes the site unique but also the main form of socialization between the users which yknow. some could say is the basis for your whole fucking social media website

[clowniconography]

why'd this get 100 notes in an hour on a wednesday morning damn 😭 we're real fucking annoyed about this huh

[relaxxattack]

“oh they’re not taking away chronological dashboard, well everything’s okay then” they also said in the post they’re making reblogs collapsed (like comments on twitter) so you won’t see the full conversation in a post. they also won’t get rid of tumblr live despite it being an annoying and cancerous data-miner that isn’t legal in much of the world. they won’t even let you opt out of tumblr live for more than seven days. they implemented a terrible photo viewer that mimics tiktok and makes it so you can’t zoom in on images. they took away the ability to view prev tags. they’re making it so you have to sign in with your email to view almost any thing on tumblr. they’ve already made it so you have to sign in to send asks, even on anon. they’re slowly phasing out custom blog themes.

the things that make tumblr at all usable and favored by us– the older web blog features, the anonymity– that is still being taken away. it HAS been being taken away for some time now. i am urging you people to reveiwbomb the tumblr app. force them to acknowledge that users do not like these changes.

[staff]

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[eriexplosion]

So the notes on this are pretty much a solid wall of "Do not touch my dash" and this is probably going to disappear into that but.

Do not touch my dashboard. No one has looked at their personally cultivated dash and gone "wow this is too relevant to me and my interests I sure hope someone will dump some unrelated garbage into it soon" - keep your algorithm on the for you page as a second optional dashboard and the primary view as a chronological feed of people we actively chose to follow.

It won't even address the issue that you claim to want to address. Algorithms routinely provide less visibility for new creators not more, popular creators inevitably rise to the top and new creators are smothered beneath them. If you want new creators to thrive, fix your infamously bad tagging and search systems so that properly tagged art is easy to find. A chronological feed of everything in a tag will always be more egalitarian than an algorithm.

[queenjulia24]

HOLD UP HOW WAS I NOT AWARE OF THIS

[lichpire]

was gonna leave my comment in the tags but tbh i’m silent enough about this as it is.

seeing stuff like this is so upsetting because these terms were well known and widespread in the ace community but because of exclusionists many people stopped using terms like this because they felt uncomfortable and unsafe.

i loved these terms when i was in highschool, i loved the feeling of community, but i lost that because i didn’t feel comfortable openly and proudly calling myself asexual.

they’ve hurt so many people and damaged our community badly and i will never forgive them for that. we deserve to use our own terminology and feel safe within our community.

[atasteforsuicidal]

sometimes i notice i haven’t seen “grace” (grey-ace) in a while and consequently wonder if i made it up.

[slenders1ckn3ss]

I remember ppl - even other ace ppl - saying the card suit thing was “cringey” and “straight ppl aren’t gonna take us seriously” (sounds familiar?) So i guess the community wound up abandoning it. We were also having severe issues at the time with aces being stereotyped as “childish/immature” for associating things like cake, dragons, and space with asexuality, plus in general as most aces just don’t “get” allosexual things in media and irl. We were starting to be viewed as ignorant, virginal, childish, losers, etc. I haven’t seen an ace-cake thing in a good while now.

This was the infancy of exclusionary influence on us. I didn’t realize it did more damage than just closeting us. Whole symbols and terms have been lost. Community has been lost.

[cobraonthecob]

I remember three-four years ago I got myself into the ace community on Insta, and I came across these terms. People in these circles would talk about cake, space, dragons, and the black ring on the middle finger. Then, a year or two later, ace content fizzled out (I thought it was Insta’s algorithm figuring out that I knew all this and didn’t bring me the old stuff) and young aces had no idea what any of these were - including the black ring. Finding out young aces had no idea what the black ring meant nearly snapped my heart in two - I proudly wore the black ring, I drew characters with it, and it was my quiet way of communicating to others what my sexuality was. I was baffled at the lack of knowledge - and it turns out that exclusionists got their hands into our community and snuffed us out. 

Anyways, we need to bring this back. I thought the card suite thing was cool, it taught people the different ways people can experience attraction, I loved making jokes about preferring cake, I loved wearing the black ring and talking about it with my fellow queer people at my highschool QSA club. 

[kriss-watches-stuff]

I’m sorry, people don’t know about the cake or ring anymore? I remember being welcomed with spams of cake gifs, photos, and MS Paint drawings. I also distinctly remember that the block solo ring in the midle was meant as reference to the Ace of Spades (black, solo, middle of card). Only thing I didn’t know was that other aces could represent a more refined nuance. Let’s see if we can get this all rolling again.

Welcome to anyone who is interested in helping with the culture revival.

[haunting-kind-of-high]

This is the exact reason I started my #ace positive and #aro positive tags. I remember learning about asexuality and thinking it was cool, but not for me (yet). I remember ace visibility day where people would post selfies with an ace card to signify their orientation like in the original post. I remember going through the tag and following every ace blog I could find, turning notifications on and scrolling through their blogs endlessly to learn more about it. I haven’t gotten a notification for any of those blogs in ages.

Going through all those blogs and seeing validation, learning more things about my newfound orientation was so incredibly as a questioning and unsure 15 year old. It’s devastating to me that this community has fallen quiet so much. So I started my tags, hoping to spread some more positivity and maybe inform people. This community is full of incredible people and the fact that so little of them remain, it heartbreaking.

Check out my tags if you ever need to. Maybe I’ll add more tags to my list to do whatever I can in support

[friendly-neighborhood-reblogs]

I remember seeing the start of ace exclusionary rhetoric only a few years ago… I can’t believe so much of the ace culture got lost to it so quickly.

Please, if you want to start exploring an identity for yourself (especially one exclusionists will try to tell you doesn’t “belong”), consider finding and talking to older people who’ve been in the community for a while - preferably IRL if that’s safe, or on dedicated community forums. 

Diversify your research and look outside of socmed, which can be a hive of exclusionist rhetoric and flat out misinformation.  Ask around about old publications or websites (the ace community has been developed and discussed in queer spaces for pretty much as long as those spaces have existed)!  Check out the sources in wikis!  Do your best to learn the history - because there is history.  Share what you learn with your peers!  Every queer identity has an older and richer culture than the exclus want you to think, and you all deserve to be a part of it.

[icannotgetoverbirds]

friendly reminder that this blog is a safe space for aspec people! unfriendly reminder that if you’re an exclusionist, Fuck You!

[somethingmissingthiswaycomes]

I should start using the ace of diamonds symbol.

[mollyjimbly]

🚨🚨🚨EARN IT ABOUT TO BE PASSED🚨🚨🚨

PLEASE SOMEONE ANYONE HELP US

WE WILL BE SPIED ON DUE TO NO ENCRYPTION

LGBTQ+ CONTENT WILL BE WIPED FROM THE INTERNET

SEX WORKERS WILL BE CRIMINALIZED

THIS BILL WILL KILL THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT

what to do?

CALL YOUR STATE REPS

Earn it Act Call Script

Scroll down for Call Script [phone] connects you to your congress representatives. You have 2 senators and 1 house member. Call 3 ti

SIGN PETITIONS

TELL CONGRESS TO STOP THE EARN IT ACT

Contact your lawmakers now to demand them to reject the dangerous EARN IT Act and protect your free speech and security online

The “Earn It” Act is Back, Seeking To Scan Us All

We all have the right to have private conversations. They’re vital for free and informed self-government. When we want to have private conve

DONATE

Donate to Stop Four Dangerous Bills

It's a hurricane of bad internet legislation. EARN IT, KOSA, STOP CSAM and RESTRICT all pretend that they'd help kids… but they would actual

JOIN DISCORD SERVER

Join the Stop Internet Censorship Discord Server!

Check out the Stop Internet Censorship community on Discord - hang out with 1,078 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

I AM BEGGING YOU PLEASE DO SOMETHING!

🚨🚨🚨🚨 URGENT 🚨🚨🚨🚨

[aquietwhyme]

This was Ordered Reported on May 4th to the floor of the Senate, meaning it cleared committee.

It is unconscionable that at a time when women, girls, trans folks, and other marginalized communities are being persecuted in GOP-led states for exercising bodily autonomy and their right to seek information and travel for Congress to enact a law that threatens the right to privacy and which weakens people's ability to use encryption to protect that privacy.

Far from protecting vulnerable children, this law will make it easier for unscrupulous police departments to implement dragnet searches to punish women who seek information on contraception, and will make it much harder for teens especially to access reproductive care without fear of retaliation, and will further have a chilling effect that will cause more suffering and death of the kind we are already seeing in the post-Roe environment.

It will also make it easier for the GOP to continue their anti-trans witch hunt, as basic sexual education material is already being characterized as a criminal act in states like Florida and Tennessee, and the loss of privacy protections will make it easier to prosecute people for these things.

As annoying and banal as interacting with your reps' staff can be (and make no mistake, is often is both), it CAN make a difference if enough people call in about the same issue. They do track that sort of thing, if only for their re-election campaigns, and on a bill like this which is primarily being pushed for the optics of DOING SOMETHING TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN, making enough noise can scare some of the more skittish congresscritters away from voting yes on this.

[ut-side-character-showdown]

This will be the only non-poll related post on this account, as this is a pressing global issue, and I have much more reach on this account than my main. Please, if you are in a position to help oppose this, do as much as you can.

If you cannot do anything directly, I ask that you spread this as far as you can, especially to those in the USA.

[relaxxattack]

discords new username update is literally just “what if we got rid of privacy & safety & the fun of name changes! cuz numbers are so hard :(” and it is making me physically violent

[fullhalalalchemist]

URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

What is the EARN IT Act?

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

It will make CSAM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

HOW TO FIGHT BACK

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

[phone] connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.

[deadliestpieceontheboard]

I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17

It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.

All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.

[bumblebeerror]

I’ve met new aces who know nothing about ace culture. We had rings, black for ace, white for aro. We had dragons and space and cake and all of it. All of it got mocked and erased and bullied so completely that it’s not on the site anymore. I still follow the aro/ace positivity tags and sometimes someone brings them up again and I flinch. I honest to god flinch.

Hell, I came out as aroace at the same time as that discourse - and AVEN got so thoroughly smeared that I’ve never gone looking for it. There’s culture I don’t know. It kills me.

[starlightnecromancer]

I used to run a blog for ace rep in books, I deleted it out of fear that I was going to get harassed.

When ace folk talk about being forced back into the closet we are not joking. Anyone on the ace spectrum were so violently harrassed that it was legitmately safer for them to not ID as ace publicly. Literally anything would get you death threats.

Anti-ace folks were in bed with terfs and I'm sorry if that upsets people but yall really gotta understand that literally every anti-ace talking point was the exact same that is given to bisexuals, pansexuals, and trans women.

They talked about how we were "stealing resources", about how we were "predators" because we "sexualized children" with our identities as being asexual, about how we are "invading LGBT spaces".

There were multiple anti-ace "memes" that were just straight up death threats. "Take the shot Jessica" followed up with "Target Sighted" is one that still haunts me to this day.

Some of the biggest "exclusionist" discourse blogs all ended up being white women, several of whom race faked. One even claimed to be a Half-black half-jewish intersex trans woman who would become half of whatever race she was arguing with. It took a massive amount of people all pouring evidence into what she was doing for her to finally get dropped because oh yea, maybe its a bad look to have the white christian perisex girl be the "face" after all of this.

Ace people were routinely told that their sexual assaults didn't happen. People routinely told us that we can't have words to describe our oppression because it "groups gay people with straights". Ace people were routinely told that because we aren't sent to conversion therapy that we weren't "actually LGBT", and the people who did let it clear that they were sent to conversion therapy because they're asexual? "Oh that didn't happen." "Actually that was homophobia, not aphobia"

The "exclusionists" likewise, would REFUSE to not tie anything into conversion therapy. They'd literally use conversion therapy doctrine to dictate if you're gay enough.

The Acecourse was also around the time "queer is a slur" really started to gain traction, and guess what the exclusionists were doing? They were calling aces and our allies "Radikweers" without a fucking hint of irony while screaming about how queer is a slur and you need to tag everything with Q Slur

There was a DEDICATED sect of "exclusionists" who were lesbians obsessed with the idea of making the existence of asexual women a lesbophoic problem. I'm not even fucking joking. Same group of people would then claim that if you didn't have sex with them then you're abusive because you're "Witholding sex, which is an emotional need".

Exclusionists were by and large, white gays that were pissed off that they couldn't do assimilation and respectability politics because the rest of us were too weird rocked the boats too much to be able to slot neatly into the whole 2 kids white picket fence.

[bumblebeerror]

^nailed it. “Piss your pants” replaced “kys” and “up the road not cross the street” but we all knew what it meant. Most of the people targeted were like me - 18 and under who dared to like being aroace, ace, or aro. Almost all of us weren’t even “straight” (as in heterosexual or heteromantic). All trying to defend ourselves and our orientations while being attacked by people who proudly called us “kweer”s and “mogai trash” and told us to die. Told us we should be put in concentration camps, once. That we weren’t hurt or struggling or erased, we were just white kids trying to be different and quirky.

Edit: by the by, the reason they changed to piss your pants was because we were mass reporting their blogs for harassment for telling aces and aros to kill themselves. They changed it to piss your pants specifically because you can’t really report that to tumblr and expect a takedown. But again. We knew what it meant.

[agentduckorico]

You'd go into the ace positivity tags and you'd see shit like "Trump ace moodboard uwu" from exclusionists. You'd see it regularly with all kinds of filth like him: Trump, Thatcher, fucking Hitler.

You'd have blogs PROUDLY TOUTING their aphobia. Blogs had titles like "aphobicrosequartz" (who was a fucking mess and a half), You'd have big name blogs reblogging from known aphobes, and when people asked "hey, are you aphobic/an exclusionist," they'd be like "uwu I don't want to get involved in discourse" and like, the post below that ask is a reblog openly making fun of aces.

You know how "lgbtpn" was briefly a thing? Yeah, that's because aphobes used it to explicitly exclude aces, while trying to appease people and include pans and nbs.

There was graphic porn and gore regularly in ace related tags from aphobes. That's how fucking bad it was. Even now I don't venture into the asexual tag. It really was horrific, how aspecs were treated. And a lot of aphobes never stopped, they just became quiet about it and started saying "I don't wanna get involved in discourse" while they openly rb from aphobes and never reblog anything written ace stuff, even in multi sexuality queer posts.

[basic-bamboo]

Yeah the whole "i don't want to get involved in discourse" while having urls that are (if you know what to look for) explicitly aphobic and continuing to reblog aphobic jokes and from other aphobes

It really sucks to follow someone new and scout their blog for any hint of where they stand, how they feel about you, and often there isn't any hint, so you think it's safe and for a while it is! And then you get one of those jokes or shitty moodboards and realize what they think about you

[nothorses]

I've talked about this here before, but a group of fairly big-name aphobes on here straight up made a discord server for the explicit and exclusive purpose of infiltrating the largest ace/aro server at the time, sexually harassing members in DMs, stirring up drama to get original staff taken off the team so they could make their way in, and had dozens and dozens of fake accounts just to continue harassment as undetected as possible.

Imagine: instead of one person being a dick in non-rule-breaking ways enough times that admins catch on and boot them, it's like a solid 15% of your userbase each doing one shitty thing at a time, apologizing and promising never to do it again, and then the next person picks up the exact same behavior. like fucking keep-away, except you just think everyone is an asshole who hates you and that's normal now.

oh- and then we found out from one of them that they were pressuring minors in their group into talking about their kinks with the adults, who were also going into detail about their kinks with the minors, all of this set up so it'd be all the adults in a chat with one minor at a time in order to keep them isolated from any potential support.

we had to close the server, comb through all 500+ users by hand for suspicious activity, we banned everyone who even just, like, hadn't said more than a few things since joining, and then kept it closed for 3 months until things cooled down enough that we could start letting people in again- if they had someone already in the server to vouch for them. the largest space for aro & ace people on discord at the time became an exclusive, private space because these people tracked us down from tumblr and bullied and harassed us so horribly, obsessively, and completely that we couldn't safely accept any new users.

all of this while they continued to insist we were pedophiles and abusers etc.

it was bad, actually.

[out-there-on-the-maroon]

Remember when people suddenly turned against Thomas Sanders, previously a tumblr darling? Yeah, he posted something in support of ace people. Real fast, people were accusing him of being a pedophile and all kinds of garbage. Literally because he had the audacity to make some casual supportive comment about asexuals. 

[mcytblrsexymen]

ROUND FOUR:

1.

GoodTimesWithScar

Technoblade

Voting ended onFeb 10, 2023

GOODTIMESWITHSCAR (1)

nominated from Hermitcraft, Last Life, Create Mod Server, Third Life, Double Life, Among Us, The Crafting Dead, MCC

vs

TECHNOBLADE (16)

nominated from DSMP, SMPEarth, Cyberknife, 100 Mcyt VS Natural Disasters, Minecraft Mondays, Sir Billiam, Potato Wars, Hypixel Mayor, Sky Block, TFTSMP, MCC

[deadliestpieceontheboard]

I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17

It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.

All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.

[bumblebeerror]

I’ve met new aces who know nothing about ace culture. We had rings, black for ace, white for aro. We had dragons and space and cake and all of it. All of it got mocked and erased and bullied so completely that it’s not on the site anymore. I still follow the aro/ace positivity tags and sometimes someone brings them up again and I flinch. I honest to god flinch.

Hell, I came out as aroace at the same time as that discourse - and AVEN got so thoroughly smeared that I’ve never gone looking for it. There’s culture I don’t know. It kills me.

[starlightnecromancer]

I used to run a blog for ace rep in books, I deleted it out of fear that I was going to get harassed.

When ace folk talk about being forced back into the closet we are not joking. Anyone on the ace spectrum were so violently harrassed that it was legitmately safer for them to not ID as ace publicly. Literally anything would get you death threats.

Anti-ace folks were in bed with terfs and I'm sorry if that upsets people but yall really gotta understand that literally every anti-ace talking point was the exact same that is given to bisexuals, pansexuals, and trans women.

They talked about how we were "stealing resources", about how we were "predators" because we "sexualized children" with our identities as being asexual, about how we are "invading LGBT spaces".

There were multiple anti-ace "memes" that were just straight up death threats. "Take the shot Jessica" followed up with "Target Sighted" is one that still haunts me to this day.

Some of the biggest "exclusionist" discourse blogs all ended up being white women, several of whom race faked. One even claimed to be a Half-black half-jewish intersex trans woman who would become half of whatever race she was arguing with. It took a massive amount of people all pouring evidence into what she was doing for her to finally get dropped because oh yea, maybe its a bad look to have the white christian perisex girl be the "face" after all of this.

Ace people were routinely told that their sexual assaults didn't happen. People routinely told us that we can't have words to describe our oppression because it "groups gay people with straights". Ace people were routinely told that because we aren't sent to conversion therapy that we weren't "actually LGBT", and the people who did let it clear that they were sent to conversion therapy because they're asexual? "Oh that didn't happen." "Actually that was homophobia, not aphobia"

The "exclusionists" likewise, would REFUSE to not tie anything into conversion therapy. They'd literally use conversion therapy doctrine to dictate if you're gay enough.

The Acecourse was also around the time "queer is a slur" really started to gain traction, and guess what the exclusionists were doing? They were calling aces and our allies "Radikweers" without a fucking hint of irony while screaming about how queer is a slur and you need to tag everything with Q Slur

There was a DEDICATED sect of "exclusionists" who were lesbians obsessed with the idea of making the existence of asexual women a lesbophoic problem. I'm not even fucking joking. Same group of people would then claim that if you didn't have sex with them then you're abusive because you're "Witholding sex, which is an emotional need".

Exclusionists were by and large, white gays that were pissed off that they couldn't do assimilation and respectability politics because the rest of us were too weird rocked the boats too much to be able to slot neatly into the whole 2 kids white picket fence.

[bumblebeerror]

^nailed it. “Piss your pants” replaced “kys” and “up the road not cross the street” but we all knew what it meant. Most of the people targeted were like me - 18 and under who dared to like being aroace, ace, or aro. Almost all of us weren’t even “straight” (as in heterosexual or heteromantic). All trying to defend ourselves and our orientations while being attacked by people who proudly called us “kweer”s and “mogai trash” and told us to die. Told us we should be put in concentration camps, once. That we weren’t hurt or struggling or erased, we were just white kids trying to be different and quirky.

Edit: by the by, the reason they changed to piss your pants was because we were mass reporting their blogs for harassment for telling aces and aros to kill themselves. They changed it to piss your pants specifically because you can’t really report that to tumblr and expect a takedown. But again. We knew what it meant.

[agentduckorico]

You'd go into the ace positivity tags and you'd see shit like "Trump ace moodboard uwu" from exclusionists. You'd see it regularly with all kinds of filth like him: Trump, Thatcher, fucking Hitler.

You'd have blogs PROUDLY TOUTING their aphobia. Blogs had titles like "aphobicrosequartz" (who was a fucking mess and a half), You'd have big name blogs reblogging from known aphobes, and when people asked "hey, are you aphobic/an exclusionist," they'd be like "uwu I don't want to get involved in discourse" and like, the post below that ask is a reblog openly making fun of aces.

You know how "lgbtpn" was briefly a thing? Yeah, that's because aphobes used it to explicitly exclude aces, while trying to appease people and include pans and nbs.

There was graphic porn and gore regularly in ace related tags from aphobes. That's how fucking bad it was. Even now I don't venture into the asexual tag. It really was horrific, how aspecs were treated. And a lot of aphobes never stopped, they just became quiet about it and started saying "I don't wanna get involved in discourse" while they openly rb from aphobes and never reblog anything written ace stuff, even in multi sexuality queer posts.

[basic-bamboo]

Yeah the whole "i don't want to get involved in discourse" while having urls that are (if you know what to look for) explicitly aphobic and continuing to reblog aphobic jokes and from other aphobes

It really sucks to follow someone new and scout their blog for any hint of where they stand, how they feel about you, and often there isn't any hint, so you think it's safe and for a while it is! And then you get one of those jokes or shitty moodboards and realize what they think about you

[lvk4-blr]

i was lucky in that i had mostly found my "bubble" of people by then who were by and large decent folk and inclusionist, and since the tags i frequented were largely highly obscure fandom ones i managed to steer clear of the worst of it

you know what i do remember clear as day however?

the day thomas sanders publicly answered an anon that basically demanded he denounce aces after he reblogged a general queer positivity post that happened to include aces

he stated that he believed aces are in fact lgbtq and should be treated as such

i remember how relieved i was that he spoke up in our defense. of course when you look at how diverse his friend group is sexuality and gender wise i never expected him to be an exclusionist, but for a creator (and one that was reasonably big and quite popular among the queer community!) to publicly validate aces felt HUGE.

i remember watching in real time as he was FLOODED with hatred. within hours people were making call out posts, claiming he was all sorts of horrible things. literally accusing him of being a pedophile for occasionally posting (properly tagged) shirtless pictures, working with the theater department of his old high school, and reblogging fanart of himself shirtless from an underaged fan -- which he also removed the moment it was brought to his attention the artist was a minor

let me tell you I spend the rest of that evening crying badly enough i threw up not once but three times

even big name thomas, who isn't even ace himself and who basically just said he didn't want us harassed and attacked and driven out of queer spaces, wasn't safe

hell, his popularity hasn't really recovered to this day. previously loved, praised content became "cringe" and worthy of derision. ENJOYING this content became, and frequently still is, something worth mocking

and that was a popular content creator. his mere support of ace people was enough for exclusionists to not only drop him but also to harass him and tear his reputation to shreds by accusing him of the vilest things

in the face of that level of hatred and willingness to harm, what protection did my friends, did i, did the ace community in general have?

[silvermoon424]

Honestly as much as I love Tumblr now, I’ll never forgive this site for the “ace discourse” era that nobody has ever fucking apologized for. Irreparable damage was done to aro/ace people and our communities and now that shit is being recycled on TikTok. And then aphobes have the gall to say “well it’s not like you guys have ever faced any hardship in your lives” as if they still don’t bully and discriminate against aro/ace people to this day.

Go rot.

[monsterkissed]

love love love that the people who engaged in this are rebranding it as a silly toothless phase rather than accept even the faintest smidgeon of responsibility like

lol remember when it was acceptable to tell people they were lying about being correctively raped, and that even if they weren't lying it was appropriation? reblog if you're part of the ageing tumblr userbase!

omg and when we'd talk about how conversion therapy was fine if it happened to asexuals bc something something antidepressants and lmao is it really ""oppression"" if you can't go to your doctor without them repeatedly trying to alter your sexuality? so cringe

who was around for the onceler fandom and responding to people opening up about coming out to their parents and facing utter rejection or outright abuse with "ew gross what kind of freak would tell their own parents about something as disgusting as their sex life??" anyway what is with all these puriteens yelling at pride marches nowadays?

good times, glad we've all neatly compartmentalised that into harmless memeposting so we can all pretend to be very surprised that in 2023 people think it's appropriate to emotionally bludgeon a trans hacktivist over an orientation they don't understand and therefore think is worthy of bottomless abuse

[swampgallows]

"tbh we might have clowned on [aros & aces] a lil too harshly" bigotry. the term you're looking for is bigotry. denying communities their vocabulary and ability to safely exist because you think you're the personal arbiter of which identities are "valid" is bigotry. minimizing and infantilizing and harassing entire groups of people based on their orientation is bigotry. aphobia isn't some forgettable phase of being cringe as a teenager, it's bigotry that inflicted long term damage to these communities.

[swampgallows]

These notes are heartbreaking. There are hundreds of aspec people describing in detail how they went back in the closet or lived in denial or in fear because of the malice, harassment, and ignorance toward aromantic and asexual people. Aspec positivity tags used to be full of porn and gore. This included pictures of the corpse of a teen girl who came out as asexual the day before she was brutally murdered—and Internet strangers responded by debating her orientation.

Aphobes tried to argue that only lesbians could experience corrective rape, or that it was somehow appropriating a term exclusive to South Africa, or that an asexual person willing to have sex could not be correctively raped. They insisted any evidence of oppression was either misdirected or fabricated. Being an entry in the DSM until 2013 and developing medication specifically for treating the condition didn’t count. 

They told us all of our words were either stolen or stupid: allistic people tried to say that “aspec” was specifically about people on the autism spectrum; “zucchini”, squash, and other innocuous aspec terms and motifs (black rings, playing card suits, cake, space, dragons, etc.) got ridiculed to death; QPRs as a concept are derided as “just friends” and irrelevant to anyone but aspecs, who themselves are deemed irrelevant. In fact, the “clowning” quote in the OP was in the notes on a post of mine about the importance of recognizing queerplatonic relationships. 

Aphobes insisted that aspecs couldn’t speak other languages, that it’s a “white people thing”, that teenagers are just trying to feel special, that it’s a side effect of SSRIs, that we’re “basically straight” (straight-passing, i.e. erased). Anything to deny us our existence. Anything to minimize us, to keep us invisible and silent, to blame us for intracommunity issues, to invalidate us. 

I got attention for getting angry in 2018, and I’m still angry now. This has been happening on tumblr for over a decade. It’s been known for a long time (and even admitted by terfs themselves) that aro/ace exclusion and trans exclusion go hand in hand and contribute to terf rhetoric. When you hurt us, you are hurting your own community. Arguing that aspecs do not belong is not “discourse”. It is bigotry.

[starrykat-z]

I know i dont usually do this but..

BOOST BOOST BOOST OUR GAY ASSES GETTING BANNED IF THIS IS PASSED

EARN IT ACT IS BACK AND IT WANTS TO FUCKING KILL US AGAIN

If you don’t know what this is:

The earn it act basically wants to ban a bunch of topics from the internet. If it’s passed there will be NO PRIVACY AT ALL.

THIS BILL WILL ALLOW THE GOVERNMENT TO SCAN ALL OF YOUR MESSAGES AND SEIZE OR DELETE IT WITHOUT WARNING. ON ANY PLATFORM.

This. NOW THIS. IS A VOILATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT. A BIG ONE TOO.

The person who originally created the bill is trying to push it as quickly as possible to prevent media attention. DONT GIVE IT TO THEM. BOOST AS MUCH AS YOU CAN. TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, YOUTUBE, IT DOESNT MATTER. DO WHAT YOU CAN BECAUSE I FOR ONE WOULD LIKE TO KEEP MESSAGES PRIVATE.

According to the nextgov article (Pasted from Nextgov.com) (Please note last paragraph is most important therefore it is in bigger letters:

The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies, or EARN IT Act, was reintroduced into the U.S. Senate on Monday, reopening the potential for Congress to impose stricter penalties related to online content featuring child sex abuse material.

A key pillar of the proposed legislation is augmenting the provisions outlined in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from being liable for third party content hosted on their domains.

Should the EARN IT Act pass, it would limit the blanket protections established in Section 230 given to web hosts such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, leaving them vulnerable to potential prosecution.

“There are tens of millions of photos and videos circulating throughout the internet, showing the most heinous acts of sexual abuse and torture of children,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, one of the bill’s sponsors. “The EARN IT Act removes Section 230 blanket liability protection from service providers in the area of child sexual abuse material on their sites. The days of children being exploited on the internet and their families being unable to do anything about it are coming to an end.”

In addition to reducing liability protections against host sites, the EARN IT Act would also establish the National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention, which would advise online service providers on how to prevent online child abuse and exploitation.

Initially introduced in the 2019-2020 Congress by both Graham and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn, the bill brings a slew of bipartisan cosponsors, including Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; Maggie Hassan, D-NH; Rob Portman, R-Ohio; and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Many of these lawmakers view the EARN IT Act as an important restriction on the power and immunity of Big Tech companies.

“There’s no reason Big Tech should be given special immunity from laws against child pornography,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. “This commonsense bill was approved unanimously in committee last Congress. Big Tech needs to be held responsible for their role in distributing child pornography.”

The bill is not without controversy, however. Critics have said that as part of its crackdown on child abuse content, it may incentivize web hosts to relax their end-to-end encryption standards to better access users’ private messages.

“The EARN IT Act also takes aim at end-to-end encryption, which is one of the most important technologies keeping people safe from violence and abuse,” digital rights group Fight for the Future said in a statement on Tuesday. “Strong encrypted messaging also protects our hospitals, schools, airports and water treatment facilities. Disincentivizing popular services from offering strong encryption to users will put lives in danger for absolutely no benefit.”

Back in 2020, when the bill was first introduced, over 20 other nonprofits and advocacy groups cosigned a letter addressed to Graham and Feinstein warning of threats posed to vulnerable demographics should encrypted messages be weakened.

“In addition to censorship concerns, the EARN IT Act also threatens to disincentivize platforms from providing strong encryption, which is an essential service to the LGBTQ community, who rely on encryption to access a support network; seek resources to combat discrimination and abuse; and find doctors and treatment to assist with transition and other health concerns,” the letter reads.

-

Ok look, I fully understand wanting to ban child porn, it’s bad and it should be stopped, but this bill is threaten queer communites, and knowing the fanbase of tumblr (Very gay) this is really bad for us. If it passes, we could be in serious trouble.

PLEASE BOOST THIS!! REBLOG! REPOST! WHATEVER YOU CAN! LOOK FOR PETITIONS ONLINE, TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY, ANYTHING HELPS.

And if you still need more proof, just look up “Earn it Act” online and you should see several news articles regarding it.

[aldebaranlover]

OH MY FUCKING GOD

[bogsheep]

hey if you wanna be an ally to aromantic people listen up: you need to start looking for subtle arophobia in posts. Because it feels like aro people are the only ones to notice when a post is targeting aro people without saying it.

Like, a post about how "love is everything and if you read that as "romantic love is everything" you're stupid and missing the point"? That's generally targeting the discussion around loveless aros and how many aromantics are uncomfortable with the usage of the word "love". The post isn't gonna directly target aros (because aros are chronically invisible and seen as childish and not real), but aros who see that are going to know that the op of that post doesn't respect aromantics and doesn't like us discussing our own experiences, and thinks our opinions and terms are stupid and immature.

Like, I've seen so. many. posts. clearly referencing aromantic community discussions that get passed around eagerly by people, because nobody fucking talks about aromantics in the queer community. Nobody outside of our community cares about red flags or amatonormativity, or, i don't know, taking our feelings on the word "love" seriously and not mocking us for our terms.

Like, I am begging you at this point. Please start listening to aromantics. Listen to our conversations and our theories on amatonormativity. Our community is valuable and our experiences matter just as much as every other queer persons.

[bff0f7]

so can we start hunting down white liberals now or what

[adamtheredbeard]

The full picture is even more heart breaking after you open the uncropped version. Just a heads-up, it's rough

“The Roman Catholic Parish in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan was just grafitted.”

[afronerdism]

Nah let’s post it. Let’s feel it. Don’t look away.

[doobiebenson]

[butch-bakugo]

I notice alot of my followers on here skipping these posts just to mess with my lgbt ones, suspiciously the white popular ones.

Heres a not so friendly reminder, as an lgbt metis person, i dont give a single fuck what your blog is themed or if this is too painful for you to look at. Reblog this post. Reblog this post with the sources of the 751 children who were found.

Your compliance and silence as well as the compliance and silence of your ancestors is what allowed these schools to open and kill first nations children. The children of MY people.

Dont follow me if you cant reblog this post or the one with sources to your political blog or your most popular blog. Add trigger warnings if you must but if your political blog is only focused on the harms you personally face like being lgbt then you need to see some bigger pictures and stop being afraid of angering your racist mutural or actually saying some shit about racism. If you can reblog some antifa graphics or add blm to your bio to be a surface level ally, you can reblog some sources on the genocide first nations people faced and still face today.

They were CHILDREN.

They were murdered in cold blood.