Zoom in on her face in the third gif. She means this. You are completely irreplaceable.
This went deep man. Look at her face. I would love to know where this came from, what she was talking about. And it’s true. So true. Completely irreplaceable. You are you and there is no better you
Reblogging because I needed to see this message tonight, and something tells me someone else does too.
Reblogging as I think every one of my followers are special and impossible to replace.
Remember that.
You are all special and important, and Ellen is a gift.
I’m so pathetic I’m almost 40 and I still have this desperate need to be liked it’s so childish and ugly.
Man bullying really stays with you forever, you never outgrow it.
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.
I actually feel sorry for the likely unpaid intern sitting at tumblr HQ dealing with all our bullshit and snark while those actually in charge watch the world burn from a safe distance and blame it on us damn kids not buying more products. Because ultimately this is what this about. Verizon needs to make money from Tumblr, and Verizon can’t make money cause Apple says “no adult content” and Apple has a stranglehold on the app market.
The fact that a lot of us use tumblr to host our own services and products as independent creators, often as our only source of income, is irrelevant to them. The fact that to many of us this is our community is meaningless to them. We’re acceptable collateral damage to furthering corporate greed and that’s the fucking tea on that.
Also to the hypothetical unpaid intern: leave, sweety. You can do better, and you’re worth so much more.
Firebird Scratches 