freedom-of-fanfic:

shipping-isnt-morality:

freedom-of-fanfic:

thispostisflaggedforremoval:

freedom-of-fanfic:

this won’t be official policy or anything but it will probably be the aggregate effect, yes.

why does this happen, you ask?

because the site rules are enforced by humans, and humans … are not very good at being 100% fair or unbiased. (at least, not when we’re acting in large numbers. any one person could be good at it, but the likelihood that most of a group is good at fairness drops as the group gets bigger.)

thus, 

Even when we’re trying to be unbiased:

• material that’s potentially in violation of the tumblr TOS featuring subjects that are not ‘default’ (NOT straight, cis, perisex, white, able-bodied, healthy, etc) have a greater chance of being noticed and reported. it’s more ‘visible’ because of a combined effect of ‘this might be a violation’ and the brain’s increased awareness when something is ‘out of the ordinary’. if straight-cis-white is ‘ordinary’: things that aren’t straight-cis-white grab our attention, and are that much more likely to be scrutinized for violations of the TOS. (see: fandom’s tendency to go after media that isn’t mediocre whitebread content for failing to be ‘good enough’.)

this is severely compounded by:

•  a lack of internal awareness of privilege/bias/etc amongst those who hold the majority opinion. (it’s the majority opinion because the majority holds that opinion.) if the majority is biased against something, that thing is more likely to get reported as a problem by people who don’t even acknowledge that they’re biased against it.

not to mention:

• people who will participate in deliberately biased & malicious reporting. there’s plenty of people who are openly racist, openly homophobes, openly transphobes, etc. you think they won’t take special time to go after TOS violations from content that they openly loathe? because they do – and they will continue to do so.

why this happens in America/on American platforms in particular:

• at the admin level: in America, the higher up the management ladder you go, the more likely the people making the decisions are straight white cis guys who do not have a strong awareness of their own privilege and/or bias against people who don’t share their privilege.  These are the people who will be responsible for writing & enforcing the rules for nsfw content at Oath and/or Tumblr. they are likely to be unconsciously biased towards content that they personally like and against content they personally don’t like, so in aggregate, their decisions will be more likely to favor straight white cis guy tastes & enjoyments.
• at the cultural level: America is obsessive about keeping sexual content from ‘the children’ than violent content, because our cultural values are very much rooted in puritanial Christian morality. We also still have a lot of racism, homophobia, queerphobia, transphobia, sexism, etc. baked directly into our culture. so if something can be concievably argued as a threat to preserving the innocence/sexual ignorance of a puritanical, white Christian kid, then it has much higher potential to be flagged as n sfw. (of course, this means LGBTQ+ content (romantic or otherwise) and non-white content is more likely to be tagged as in violation of the TOS.)

tl;dr: even if every single person moderating tumblr was acting with the best intentions, trying to be 100% fair and reporting/acting without bias, the drift will be towards creating a sexually chaste, LGBTQ+-unfriendly, white-centric, and cis-bodied/perisex only space as everything else gets reported more often as a problem and purged off the site.

that’s why censorship enforces baked-in privilege in brief, folx.

Sorry to bother you, but, this post has been incorrectly flagged as explicit content by tumblr. I’m reblogging it here in hopes that you (the OP) will see this note and file an appeal.

I would file an appeal myself, but apparently ONLY the OP can.

Wow, look at that!

• No images to be misinterpreted by a bot
• Nothing sexually explicit at all – not even mentions of sexually explicit content.
• One mention of n sfw (even censored as here)
• But I did mention lgbtq+ content 🤔
• And talk about how Tumblr’s new policy will absolutely be enforced in racist and queerphobic ways

Wild

Not to contest your point, but posts on all my accounts are getting flagged for the word “sex” and all variations of it, including “sexual” and “sexuality”.

Probably the bot wasn’t designed by people specifically targeting queer blogs (‘queer’ is still searchable). And yet the effect is the same: discussing sexual orientation or sexuality gets you flagged as inappropriate, regardless of context.

15 seconds of thought (and, like, any knowledge of past A.I. filtration fiascos) would tell you that flagging “sexual” is absurdly overbroad and most of the false flags will be sexual minorities. They’ll restore the ones that are contested, but the vast majority won’t be contested. The communities will just leave; that wasn’t the goal, but it’s not an outcome that they’re putting any effort towards preventing, either. It’s not that tumblr’s part of some grand conspiracy against the queer community (I know that’s not what you’re saying, I’m just heading that argument off at the pass), it’s that on balance the queer community isn’t worth millions of advertiser dollars to tumblr/yahoo/Verizon. If overbroad filters hurt queer forums but appease Apple and Google, tumblr’s going to have overbroad filters.

It doesn’t have to be malicious, and I don’t think it is. Being apathetic is more than enough.

tbh, I don’t think this contests my point. it’s pretty closely related/contributes another data point, actually.

when i wrote the OP post, the announcement of the policy change had gone out mere hours before. we were seeing all sorts of ridiculous things flagged, so it was hard to see that mentions of ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexual’ were specific words that would get auto-flagged. 

what we know is: societally, LGBT+/queer content is still almost always viewed as inherently, automatically of a ‘higher rating’ than het content. it is almost always swept into n sfw to protect the innocent eyes of queerphobic Christian babes who might be corrupted if they know there’s more options than ‘straight’.

the people who programmed the bot that’s flagging tumblr content for removal was programmed by human beings. 

if it’s a neural net: humans are the ones that pick the data set it learns from. in other words: human beings are the ones that chose what the bot will flag. and by choosing to flag ‘sexual’ at a broad level, the programmers have programmed the bot to act on the existing queerphobic bias of modern American culture.

whether on purpose or on accident – whether maliciously or with the best of intentions – when action is taken at a large scale, we see just how bad humans are at being genuinely equal, fair, and just in their treatment of marginalized and/or minority populations.

until being LGBT+/queer is considered as natural as being straight and/or cis, we’ll continue to get the shaft whenever n sfw content is banned.