Let’s Talk Thesauri
So the latest of crackdowns on tumblr is unequal, clearly the iOS crowd is getting harder hit than anyone else. But there’s two points that are worth highlighting;
1. The BL tag is gone, not just on iOS, but gone
2. The list of terms being censored heavily hits the lgbtqia+ community, even if the terms aren’t specifically lgbtqia+ terms
Blocking language matters. From what I’ve tested, the thesaurus they’re using is partial at best (I can’t help but wonder whether that’s intentional to keep people around, or if it’s just incompetence and rushing). But this provides a moment of space to consider the language being blocked, and what terms can be used to get around it.
(To those laughing and saying “don’t pander to Apple users! Hell with them anyway!” OR “Lol why are you upset about bl being censored grow up.” Go away, this post isn’t for you. If I have to explain to you why censorship of some hurts all in the long run, then I think this might be a bit high level for you anyway. Come back when you understand queer history better.)
So for the moment, known blocks are mostly on things like boys love (specifically, the BL tag was nuked for all users, and Boys love/girls love appears to be blocked for iOS devices), as well as terms that are more activist oriented, usually around the trans community (terf, transmisogyny, etc.) So the censorship appears to be of 1. representation, and 2. hate that needs to be called out.
So, because this is 1. Only in the tags and 2. Piecemeal as all hell, I can only assume that they are trying to implement a thesaurus against specific banned terms. This is both very hard to do if you don’t have months to create a plan, and more importantly very specific. Which is why Boys Love is blocked and Boy Love is not.
While useful to be able to work around it for now, this isn’t a good thing long term. Thesauri are slow to be implemented, and gradual in how they develop. So while for the moment people are laughing at “girls” being censored, that’s only an issue because this site doesn’t have boolean searching. It has exact tag term search. Which is the only defense users have against censorship, unfortunately. The thesaurus will become more refined and practical as time goes on, that’s just how those work. More terms can be added to the thesaurus as tumblr decides is necessary.
They also may introduce booleans to their search process, making it possible for them to hit multiple things at once (e.g. *BL* OR Boy* Love), which would block all variations of Boy’s love, boy love, anything with bl in it, etc. I’m hoping they don’t do that. (Even if it WOULD fix the search system to be usable, there wouldn’t be anything left to search for after a while.)
So what can be done? Language usage is key to beating a thesaurus. Thesauri are expensive and complicated. I hate to say go back to the FF.net “lemon” days, but that’s essentially it. In group terms that don’t go mainstream have the best chance of getting past censorship. (Think “Friends of Dorothy”, a term that is long enough to be hard to censor, and innocuous enough to not be immediately noticed by tumblr staff.) The thesaurus will catch up eventually, but it’s not impossible to keep ahead of it. Just, a pain to try and do so. (Normally I would suggest using innocuous terms like lemon, but they banned “girls” so, they clearly don’t care about breaking the site usability in order to comply with apple’s nonsense.)
So, it’s not worth much but have a theory as to how this nonsense is going down. Thesauri are powerful tools. They’re also very expensive to maintain and hard to update, so go forth and fight against censorship by coming up with ever more interesting tags.
