Why Tumblr’s NFSW-ban is a cautionary tale for why we need Net Neutrality
Well, here are the salient points, and you’ll have to forgive the America-centric lens despite the wildly international community that’s on Tumblr. The ~reason~ that Tumblr went into panic mode re: nudity and adult content was because Apple pulled the Tumblr app from the store due to child pornography on the website. Or at least, that’s what they’re telling you - the single largest paragraph in the Staff update re: this change was on child pornography, how abhorrent it is, what all they’re doing to combat it, etc. But that’s honestly bullshit. That’s not why they’re /really/ doing it, though it’s certainly a flashpoint. 1. They’re rolling it out /now/ because Apple removed their app from the store. Which is on brand for apple. They have a history of removing “adult content” from their products. Here are some posts on Apple and it’s so-called “Walled Garden.” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/24/apple-explicit-app-catego_n_475231.html https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78k8yb/reddit-ios-apps-disappear-nsfw-content https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mjxg/apple-tumblr-porn-nsfw-adult-content-banned Which is fine, if Apple wants to purge adult products from their content (ie things they own and moderate, such as a social media network), that’s their prerogative. But what Apple is ALSO doing is policing what kind of content developers and companies are allowed to have on their own websites that might be accessed by users of Apple technology, which is in exact opposition to principles of net neutrality. Apple preventing users from seeing certain content on their iphones or imac computers, or the safari browser, and preventing them from accessing certain apps/websites that don’t meet their approval, is part of a technology monopoly that controls how certain aspects of the internet are going to develop. IE, Tumblr purging its nudity content to get back on the Apple apps store, because they want to make money. There was a lawsuit over this in 2014, which resurfaced in 2017. Here’s the court case on Apple Inc vs. Pepper, if you wanna read more on it: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/apple-v-pepper/ But the big issue here is, when Apple begins to create a monopoly, net neutrality laws are part of what helps combat this. And if there are no net neutrality laws in place, it’s an awful lot harder to deal with corporations like Apple throttling ~sensitive content.~ A heading under which Apple has notoriously included stuff like LGBTQ+ content (see: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/08/31/apple-censors-pride-watch-face-in-russia/), which is obvious unethical on a number of levels. 2. They had been planning on doing this for a while. You may have seen the vox interview article re: this, but I’ll post it below: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/4/18126112/tumblr-porn-ban-verizon-ad-goals-sex-work-fandom The NSFW ban had been underworks for 6 months already. Six months! They were planning on doing this with or without the CP issues that got them kicked off the Apple app store. And here’s the thing. Tumblr was bought by Yahoo in 2013, with the intent of making $ through advertising, a goal which was not met. Marissa Mayer was at the helm of this project, and reportedly she was mocked and belittled for a lot of the ideas she had re: Tumblr, and insiders have reported that in general Yahoo really failed to do anything with Tumblr because they didn’t understand how it worked and really didn’t care to learn. Here, we have a case of a MAJOR communications company purchasing an internet social media platform, and basically stagnating it. Every report that we’ve had about Tumblr post Yahoo purchase is that they’ve been hemorrhaging staff - esp senior staff - because they won’t do anything with them, or they’ve actively pushed them out of leadership roles to push their company agendas onto the already existing culture of Tumblr. Basically, they’ve been strangling Tumblr as a website. We joke about @staff being terrible with coding, but from 2014-2018, pretty much all of the dysfunction we’re seeing is in tandem with the Yahoo takeover. Here’s an article that describes some of these problems, though it’s by no means comprehensive: https://digiday.com/marketing/tumblr-is-neglected-by-marketers/ Even with all that, Yahoo did somehow manage to mostly leave Tumblr alone, and relatively functional. Yahoo actually wrote Tumblr down for something like half the value that it was worth, counting it as a loss. The real issue is that Verizon acquired Yahoo in June of 2017, about a year and a half ago. Like Yahoo, Verizon laid off tons of people involved with the programming and management of the website. Then in early 2018 they implemented to “Safe Search” filtering of ~sensitive content~ which was something users could opt out of it they chose. Which, most of us did. It seemed silly at the time, but in hindsight it was very obviously a test run of this current plan to implement the NSFW ban. For the purpose of Verizon and Tumblr under Verizon, “sensitive content” was defined as “anything that might not be suitable for some members of the Tumblr community” such as “nudity, //////including/////// in an artistic, educational, or photojournalistic context. INCLUDING. For all that Tumblr @staff’s “A better, more positive Tumblr” said that the ban wouldn’t include, say, expression of political nudity or artistic nudity, it’s quite clear from the TOS that this is something they’re slanting against, and I really don’t think it’s purely from the ~bad algorithms~ that posts with topics dealing with sexuality, nudity, LGBTQ+, trans issues, disability issues, body positivity, and etc are being targeted. It’s not a coincidence that the NSFW ban included the language of “female presenting nipples” - as if women’s bodies are inherently sexual in nature. And it’s sure as hell not a coincidence that Verizon was one of the telecommunications and media corporations that was actively lobbying against net neutrality along with Comcast. Verizon wants to control what kind of content you see, and wants to charge you for the kinds of content you can see. Verizon is a company that has admitted to actively throttling the content of its competitors. And the fundamental issue here is that, with a large corporation that doesn’t care about its userbase, it’s trying to streamline a website like Tumblr into being something that it wants, instead of trying to work with the website culture that’s already in place. Where Yahoo was at a standstill, Verizon is actively dismantling parts of what make Tumblr so successful and tight-knit as a social media and blogging platform - particularly with content that might otherwise be deemed as “inappropriate” / “sensitive content” in other places like Facebook - talking about trans issues, talking about sexuality, etc. And the fact that this is actively harming sex workers and targeting quote unquote the female form suggests that they want to throttle freedom of expression. So when we talk about fandom leaving FF.N, and LiveJournal, and the kinds of fandom history that younger folks have maybe even only vaguely heard of (the infamous “What’s a lemon?” question comes immediately to mind) we’re talking about how a major mainstream corporation is looking at how to turn its userbase (which is just numbers to them!) into a profitable scheme, and it’s always going to be an upward ladder that harms the communities down below. Those of us that are looking at the situation and going “Why don’t they do x, y, z? And make it actually functional?” are underestimating in a big way the fact that they want to spend as little money on this project as possible while still trying and double their userbase and profits. The fact that they mentioned BLM as a marketable niche suggests the fundamentally misunderstand why these movements exist in the first place, and the fact that BLM was mentioned in tandem with Game of Thrones fans and Manchester United Fans means that all they’re seeing is demographics and theoretically untapped markets. Making the website more palatable to quote unquote the mainstream is an attempt to bring in more advertisers, which is why they were more than happy to put together the NSFW ban. The NSFW ban is also probably a response of SESTA, which caused a lot of website platforms to double down on their TOS without actually doing anything meaningful to help combat sex trafficking and child pornography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_Act With that said - they’re also probably not unhappy to have a left-leaning, pro-net neutrality website like Tumblr die, which is honestly what it’s heading toward. Tumblr spent over a decade building the communities that it has, and a lot of people use it as an alternative to “mainstream media” and as a way to get a lot of information on politics and current events, as well as on obscure topics. It’s been a way to connect social justice activists, queer people who often didn’t have anywhere else to connect with other queer people in a way that wasn’t inherently sexualized (looking at grindr, fetlife, etc), academics, and more. The amount of information dissemination on Tumblr is truly incredible, and, if you’ll excuse the tin hat for a moment, it’s the antithesis of how the media currently functions – with about just 15 billionaires controlling most of America’s media corporations. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/#41268a10660a A similar thing actually happened with Polyvore, which was owned by Oath, which was [hold your breath, wait for it] owned by Verizon. https://www.racked.com/2018/4/6/17207450/polyvore-ssense-shutdown-mood-boards-collage I don’t trust Verizon to do right by the userbase. They’ll do whatever they can to make it profitable and fit their company vision. And if you want a reminder of how utterly evil Verizon is, just refresh yourself on the fact that they were manipulating firefighter cell plans to make $ on them while they were actively in the process of combatting California wildfires. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttled-fire-departments-unlimited-data-during-calif-wildfire/ And to cap it off, it’s 100% not a coincidence that some of the posts that were initially getting throttled on Tumblr were Tumblr/Staff critical posts. Not even on bit. Companies, particularly large companies with huge financial resources, actively scrub their internet presences so that only positive things come up.
