@miss-ingno / miss-ingno.tumblr.com
when people on twitter or tiktok say "yeah tumblr is bad, its always been bad and gross and problematic" do they know its always been completely self-curated too or are we gonna leave that part out
tumblr is one of the last social medias that remembers the old saying "dont feed the trolls" while everyone else is lining up to give trolls a 5 course meal
Today I'm going to take a moment to talk about a major cultural difference between Tumbr and Dreamwidth, and that is Audience.
On Tumblr, when you post something and tag it, you post with the assumption that anyone, anywhere can and might stumble across it at any time; you have to be mentally and emotionally prepared for the interactions you will face. Since many of the people who will potentially see your post are people who don't know you, and who you don't know, one of the things you have to be prepared for is Bad Faith Interactions: Where a person reads what you have written and comes to the worst possible conclusion about both the writing and about you, and is prepared to take their conclusion directly to the source. Since Tumblr is a content aggregation site, if something you write takes off, the odds that it will reach people who will misinterpret what you wrote and are willing to fight over it are higher than they are on other blogging platforms.
On Dreamwidth, you have one primary audience you post for, and many optional secondary audiences you can post for.
When you are posting on your own journal, the majority of people who read what you post are your own followers, rather than any random internet user who happens to also be logged into the site. Sure, someone may stumble across your post on the Latest Things Page, but they're much less likely to do so than your average Tumblr user browsing through tags, or even their own Dash. Your followers are your primary audience. For the most part, they already have an idea of who you are, and are much more willing to read positively into things you write than your random internet stranger.
Furthermore, because you are more likely to have an established relationship with them, you are more likely to be able to clarify what you wrote without things escalating out of your control.
Finally, due to how Dreamwidth works as a social journaling site, you have more control over the interactions you have on your own space: You can disallow comments on your posts, freeze conversations that are going nowhere or crossing your boundaries, block people, make your posts private or visible only to selected people, or delete your posts entirely, comments and all. People who saw it may have taken screenshots of your post, but other than that, the odds of coming across a post that you regret, have learned better from, and apologized for years ago are practically nil compared to on Tumblr.
That's primary audience interactions. Secondary audiences are those who follow communities you may post to.
A community on Dreamwidth is comparable to Tumblr accounts whose content is primarily made up of submissions (or, in some cases, official content). This means anything you post there will likely be exposed to a wider audience, or at least a different audience, than only your personal followers. They are less likely to have only positive associations with you, if only because they are overall less likely to have interactions with you specifically. That said, there are still several differences between Tumblr and your average Dreamwidth community.
First, in addition to membership rules and posting guidelines (both of which can be extremely lax or very strict), there are moderators whose job it is to enforce those rules and guidelines. While communities exist with bad or ineffective moderation, they don't always last long or grow very big, and groups can and do splinter away from them to form their own communities. A moderator can do all of the things you do in your own journal (freezing conversations, locking posts, deleting posts, and banning members temporarily or permanently) with the authority granted to them by the community itself. Moderators are how communities regulate their content, memberships, and interactions.
Second, the poster retains most of the control of anything they post. A moderator can go over their heads if something drastic is happening, or if they judge that a post goes against community guidelines (etc), but by and large, if you post to a community, you can change that post as you please, whenever you want. If you realize that you made a mistake, you can edit the post to own it and add new thoughts, and—this is the important part—that is the version that people will see. Again, they might have access to the old version through screencaps or the Wayback Machine, but whatever the current version is will always include whatever updates you've made to it.
Overall, between these two factors, the interactions you'll have with people on Dreamwidth will likely be of a very different character than those you have on Tumblr.
Is it still possible to have huge flame wars and fandom wankfests on Dreamwidth? Absolutely; they happened with frequency on LiveJournal, which is the structure Dreamwidth was originally based on. But in general, it's easier to control the types of interaction you have on Dreamwidth than on Tumblr, and that includes fandom content and interactions.
Also, because Dreamwidth has threaded comments, there is no digging through the notes to find other subsets of conversation, and there is much less failing to realize there are other subsets of conversation. One could view the entry’s comments in flat view instead of threaded view, which would put them all in chronological order like going into the notes on a Tumblr post does; there is value to that, but it also separates each bit of a conversation from the context in the previous bit. In threaded view, the context is right there and other subthreads are right there.
Learning how to Tumbl after years on Dreamwidth required a lot of adjustment for me. While Dreamwidth posts are firmly situated in context by the site's architecture, with easy one-click access to what was posted directly before or after that post, or on the day or in that week or month. Those are things I usually couldn't find on Tumblr even if I wanted to.
Tumblr posts have to be constructed as entirely independent vessels with their own life-support systems. I can't rely on Tumblr users being able to look up context even if they're willing to, and I can't limit Tumblr posts only to people who I want to invite to the discussion.
Tumblr has made me very good at summarizing incredibly complex ideas as quickly as possible so I can talk about things that require that background understanding, but I'm still too wordy to succeed on Twitter.
When an LJ flame-war started, you could always retreat to your own journal, safe(ish) from the bullies and harassers. You didn’t know what was being said about you in other people’s journals and that was fine. What was said in the communities about you was public, but most community moderators would shut down flame wars and send people off their private journals to bitch about each other there, where no one but their friends saw it.
Here on Tumblr, it’s all right out in the open. Even the people whom I’ve blocked and they’ve blocked me - I can go visit their journals and see all their posts. Their posts don’t show up on my dash, but that doesn’t mean I can’t easily find them. Comments are traceable, all tags are visible, and private conversations can be carried out with only one person at a time.
If you get skunk-sprayed here on Tumblr (our recent race-faker as an example, or me by her gang a few months ago), it’s very public. There’s no ‘retreating back to your own journal to continue posting unaffected by the drama’. You can’t just dis-enroll from that particular fandom community and increase your participation in some other fandom after a short period to let things blow over.
Anyway, I’m thinking it would be good for my mental health to move most of my fandom presence to Dreamwidth. Anyone else up for that?
I've only been trying to get everyone to move there since before I gave up and joined Tumblr.
I mean! If anyone is interested in learning more about how Dreamwidth works, I've got several posts about it in my Dreamwidth tag that you can check out, and am prepared to answer any questions to the best of my ability! Dreamwidth isn't perfect (people who aren't used to it probably find the posting interface kinda clunky, and the image hosting options leave something to be desired, to put it mildly), but the fact that the only money they're beholden to comes from their users means they want to make us as happy as they can.
(Seriously though, I'm this close to just making this entire post a Dreamwidth friending meme 😛)
Okay, first question about Dreamwidth - how do I search for a person? Like, say, YOU?
I type in ‘bisexualbaker’ on site search and I get a whole bunch of strange-looking posts by levynite. Is that you?
Okay, so first things first, I'm soc_puppet over there (it was taken on Tumblr, as was 'Socchan', my even-more-usual internet handle), and I welcome new followers!
Second: To find people, you need to select "Site and Account" from the drop-down menu next to the search bar.
On most journals, the search bar can be found on the upper right hand corner, on a banner; on things like profile pages and Dreamwidth's home page, it's still on the upper right, but under some other stuff (either the log-in window, or, if you're logged in, links related to your own journal).
You can also try typing in example-username (dot) dreamwidth (dot) org and see where that gets you, but I recommend trying the search function under "Site and Account" first.
Some useful reading for the upcoming Post Plus Protest!
idk how this "prev tags" nonsense got started but i promise you i am not following a breadcrumb trail to find out what those tags were. if they're that funny then share them with the class in a reblog like a normal clown this isn't twitter
There are angry Tumblr users screaming their tags were stolen. I have been here for a fricking DECADE and this is the first time I've had to say #notmytags. #notmypost.
This is a big reason for Tumblr reblogs falling. Twitter, instagram users migrants think REBLOGS ARE SAME AS REPOSTING. THAT USING OG TAGS IS STEALING.
wow can't believe i just made this meme and already got to use it twice
we talk in the tags and then the tags go to peer review and if they're deemed Good Content somebody ELSE will put them in a reblog and publish them
replies also go to peer review and get added to the main post if they pass the board
How could you leave this in the tags, etc.
Hi everyone! Some of you may be aware that Tumblr has been offering a beta of the new web interface for a little while now. This new web experience comes with some nice perks, such as color palettes, soft refreshing, a built-in tag viewer, and a better user blocking system. It’s also much more accessible for those with reading difficulties, and should be fully compatible with screen readers.
Unfortunately, such drastic improvements has come at a price for those that truly rely on XKit features - the new web interface is entirely new, written from the ground up, and thus, XKit doesn’t work on it.
Recently, we’ve become aware that some people have been forcibly opted into this beta with no option to exit it, and this lines up with the projection that this new web interface will be fully launched by April 2020. However, we do not expect to be able to fully update XKit for this new dashboard before its full launch.
You would be amazed at what’s actually happening. A few Tumblr engineers are working with us and are building things into the new dashboard specifically to make our jobs easier! So please, rest assured that XKit being broken currently is not part of some grand scheme to make the Tumblr dashboard unmodifiable - we just need more time to catch up, and we’re being helped along.
This is a problem we see echoed a lot. While we will be updating XKit to work on the new dashboard, we can’t give anyone a timescale. So, in the meantime, we ask that you learn to use the new dashboard with all its new features, and give clear, constructive, and respectful feedback to Tumblr support.
Tumblr has already implemented some equivalents of existing XKit features, and we’re already expecting more to appear down the line. If you can successfully communicate why certain XKit features are invaluable to your usage of Tumblr, we may see that list grow.
This is not the end for XKit - merely a stage of metamorphosis. Thank you all for your patience!
I think tumblr has left a lot of us emotionally stunted. This is a great community for empowerment, catharsis, or coping, but those things aren’t recovery in and of themselves. Comparatively, they’re easy when compared to the painful self-reflection and real-world scenarios you’ll have to encounter on the road to true recovery. Not only does Tumblr not focus enough on recovery, but there’s almost a disdain here for the very notion.
There’s a lot of time spent validating everything. “Your symptoms are valid! Your responses are valid! Your depression is valid! Your coping is valid!” Well, yeah, all that stuff is definitely valid, and understanding that is important step in recovery, but it’s certainly not the final step. All that stuff is valid in the same way a baby chewing on a teething ring is valid, and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about if your recovery is still in its infancy, but Tumblr almost encourages you to stay there, to never grow out of it.
There’s a difference between what’s valid and what’s healthy, what’s best for you. I recently saw a post that validated people who stay in their room all day. Is that a valid response to anxiety? Sure. Is it a healthy response? Hell no, and there isn’t a person on Earth who can convincingly make the argument that the best thing you can do for your anxiety is to never leave your room.
Or how about those “how to care for a _________” posts? They’ve got some great tips there, and a lot of what they say is true, but you cannot reasonably expect people to coddle your issues, insecurities, or self-perceived inadequacies. Your recovery has to come from you. It has to be a difficult decision you make with yourself and carry through with because you need it. Your recovery can’t come from hoping other people will validate you.
No one should be ashamed of where they are in their recovery process, but there’s also no reason why you should be in the same place with your issues as you were in 2010.
Your final goal is not validation. It isn’t empowerment. It isn’t finding a way to get through the day. It isn’t being comfortable with your problems, nor is it accepting that they’ll never go away. The final goal is health. The final goal is happiness. The final goal is contentment. The final goal is recovery.
The elevator dings, and slowly, the doors open.
“Hello, you must be new here.” A demon greets, his eyes filled with fiery intent.
You’ve just reach the bottom floor of Hell.
“Welcome to Tumblr,”
Let’s all take a moment to appreciate this comment:
So, listen.
While we’re all having a good laugh and/or panic at tumblr’s incompetent censorship implosion, I just want to take this opportunity to draw a parallel to a lot of the recent fandom wank about what content should or shouldn’t be allowed on AO3. Specifically: there’s a lot of people who want the Archive to ban particular types of fic, but who have no real understanding of how you would actually implement that in practice.
While there are legitimate arguments to be made about the unwisdom of tumblr’s soon-to-be-forbidden content choices - the whole “female-presenting nipples” thing and the apparent decision to prioritise banning tits over banning Nazis, for instance - the functional problem isn’t that they’ve decided to monitor specific types of content, but that they’ve got no sensible way of enacting their own policies. Quite clearly, you can’t entrust the process to bots: just today, I’ve seen flagged content that runs the gamut from Star Trek: TOS screenshots to paleo fish art to quilts to the entire chronic pain tag to a text post about a gay family member with AIDS - and at the same time, I’ve still been seeing porn gifs on my dash.
It’s absolute chaos, which is what happens when you try to outsource to programs the type of work that can only reliably be done by people - and even then, there’s still going to be bad or dubious or unpopular decisions made, because invariably, some things will need to be judged on a case by case basis, and people don’t always agree on where the needle should fall.
Now: consider that this is happening because tumblr is banning particular types of images. Images, at least, you can kiiiiinda moderate by bots, provided you’re using the bot-process as a filter to cut down on the amount of work done by actual humans, and also provided you’re willing to take a huge credibility hit given the poor initial accuracy of said bots, but: images. Bots can be sorta trained to recognise and sort those, right?
But the kind of AI sophistication you’d need to moderate all the content on a text-based site like AO3? That… yeah. That literally doesn’t exist, and going by tags and keywords wouldn’t help you either, because there’d be no handy way to distinguish what type of usage was present just on that basis alone. Posts about content generated by neural nets are hilarious precisely because our AI isn’t there yet, and based on what we’ve seen so far, we won’t be there for a good long while.
It’s a point I’ve made again and again, but I’m going to reiterate it here: it’s always easy to conjure up the most obvious, extreme and clear-cut examples of undesirable content when you’re discussing bans in theory, but in practice, you need to have a feasible means of enacting those rules with some degree of accuracy, speed and accountability that’s attainable within both budget and context, or else the whole thing becomes pointless.
On massive sites like AO3 and tumblr, the considerable expense of monitoring so much user-generated content with paid employees is, to a degree, obviated by the concept of tagging and blocking, the idea being that users can curate and control their own experience to avoid unpleasant material. There still needs to be oversight, of course - at absolute minimum, a code of conduct and a means of reporting those who violate it to a human authority in a position to enforce said code - but the thing is, given how much raw content accrues on social media and at what speed, you really need these policies to be in place, and actively enforced, from the get-go: otherwise, when you finally do start trying to moderate, you’ll have to wade through the entire site’s backlog while also trying to keep abreast of new content.
Facebook, which is a multi-billion dollar corporation, can afford to have paid human moderators in place for assessing content violations instead of relying on bots; however, it is also notoriously terrible at both following its own standards and setting them in the first place. To take an example salient to the tumblr mess, Facebook has an ongoing problem with how it handles breastfeeding posts, while its community standards regarding what counts as hate speech are, uhhh… Not Great. Twitter has similarly struggled with bot accounts proliferating during multiple recent elections and with the seemingly simple task of deplatforming Nazis - not because they can’t, but because they don’t want to take a quote-on-quote political stance, even for the sake of cleaning house.
It’s also because, quite frankly, neither Facebook nor Twitter were originally thought of as entities that would one day be ubiquitous and powerful enough to be used to sway elections; and when that capability was first realised by those with enough money and power to take advantage of it, there were no internal safeguards to stop it happening, and not nearly enough external comprehension of or appreciation for the risks among those in positions of authority to impose some in time to make a difference. Because even though time spent scrolling through social media passes like reverse dog years - which is to say, two hours can frequently feel like ten minutes - its impact is such that we fall into the trap of thinking that it’s been around forever, instead of being a really recent phenomenon. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, tumblr in 2007, AO3 in 2009, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011, tinder in 2012, Discord in 2015. Even Livejournal, that precursor blog-and-fandom space, only began in 1999, with the purge of strikethrough happening in 2007. Long-term, we’re still running a global beta on How To Do Social Media Without Fucking Up, because this whole internet thing is still producing new iterations of old problems that we’ve never had to deal with in this medium before - or if so, then not on this scale, within whatever specific parameters apply to each site, in conjunction with whatever else is happening that’s relevant, with whatever tools or budget we have to hand. It is messy, and I really don’t see that changing anytime soon.
All of which is a way of saying that, while it’s far from impossible to moderate content on social media, you need to have actual humans doing it, a clear reporting process set up, a coherent set of rules, a willingness to enforce those rules consistently - or at least to explain the logic behind any changes or exceptions and then stand by them, too - and the humility to admit that, whatever you planned for your site to be at the outset, success will mean that it invariably grows beyond that mandate in potentially strange and unpredictable ways, which will in turn require active thought and anticipation on your part to successfully deal with.
Which is why, compared to what’s happening on other sites, the objections being raised about AO3 are so goddamn frustrating - because, right from the outset, it has had a clear set of rules: it’s just not one that various naysayers like. Content-wise, the whole idea of the tagging system, as stated in the user agreement, is that you enter at your own risk: you are meant to navigate your own experience using the tools the site has provided - tools it has constantly worked to upgrade as the site traffic has boomed exponentially - and there’s a reporting process in place for people who transgress otherwise. AO3 isn’t perfect - of course it isn’t - but it is coherent, which is exactly what tumblr, in enacting this weird nipple-purge, has failed to be.
Plus and also: the content on AO3 is fictional. As passionate as I am about the impact of stories on reality and vice versa, this is nonetheless a salient distinction to point out when discussing how to manage AO3 versus something like Twitter or tumblr. Different types of content require different types of moderation: the more variety in media formats and subject matter and the higher the level of complex, real-time, user-user interaction, the harder it is to manage - and, quite arguably, the more managing it requires in the first place. Whereas tumblr has reblogs, open inboxes and instant messaging, interactions on AO3 are limited to comments and that’s it: users can lock, moderate or throw their own comment threads open as they choose, and that, in turn, cuts down on how much active moderation is necessary.
tl;dr: moderating social media sites is actually a lot harder and more complicated than most people realise, and those lobbying for tighter content control in places like AO3 should look at how broad generalisations about what constitutes a Bad Post are backfiring now before claiming the whole thing is an easy fix.
It’s so incredibly odd to me to throw in “Twitter can’t even do something simple like deplatform clear Nazis!” after the part where you explain why that’s not easy at all.
I mean, can their image algorithms distinguish between:
Can it do the same for text, which is apparently even more difficult?
After reading this primer, why on Earth would we believe that deplatforming Nazis was any easier than deplatforming Adult content?
You’re conflating two separate points here: firstly, that it is easier for Twitter to deplatform Nazis than it is for tumblr; and secondly, that tumblr is being criticised for prioritising a ban on NSFW content ahead of deplatforming Nazis, regardless of the difficulty.
Twitter, unlike tumblr, isn’t primarily reliant on algorithms to monitor content; it has a large number of actual, physical employees responding to reports of user violations and the proven ability to delete accounts en masse, as per their recent purge of bots. We know that Twitter is capable of deplatforming Nazis and white nationalists with a high degree of accuracy; they’re just really reluctant to do that, because of the unfortunate yet unavoidable fact that there’s a whole bunch of real, blue-check-verified politicians and public figures using their service, many with vocal support bases, who espouse or tacitly condone those beliefs. The problem here is that Twitter still thinks of itself as a ‘neutral’ platform, because it never considered being in a position to spread violent ideologies or political misinformation on this scale - but now that it is, and now that extreme right-wing positions are being increasingly normalised (in part because of its own negligence in letting those ideologies gain traction in the first place) it doesn’t want to be seen to sacrifice that neutrality by drawing what ought to be a basic line in the sand.
By comparison, what’s bothering people about the continued white nationalist/Nazi presence on tumblr during this purge - aside from, you know, the obvious - isn’t because we think the algorithms would somehow magically become more competent if directed towards Nazis, but because the decision to crack down on naked tits first makes it pretty clear that the priorities of those in charge are broken.
So, yes: Twitter and tumblr both face difficulties in deplatforming Nazis, but the types of difficulties in each case are radically different. Twitter’s problems are, in order of priority, the need to acknowledge that the platform itself cannot be and is not politically neutral, the need to establish a coherent set of guidelines for users going forward shaped in acknowledgement of this fact, and - last but absolutely not least - the need to figure out legal standpoints and protective measures for deplatforming politicians, given the inevitable blowback. Tumblr’s problems are a bunch of broken algorithms that are nowhere in the ballpark of working properly, an ongoing conflict between tumblr staff and the ultimate owners at Verizon, and the fact that they are still overrun with Nazis.
Hope that clears things up!
Twitter has already shown it is capable of deplatforming nazis in Germany - they’re legally required to do so, so things are blocked specifically for that location….rather than say….site-wide.
Pillowfort be like
Literally what happened
Question: when people leave their tumblr on a fic, do they *really* want readers to talk to them? I don't know... i've thought about doing it before but it's always seemed kind of strange to just go up and be some stranger sending messages to someone on tumblr. Especially if their fic is old. Like is there a time limit on those sort of "feel free to talk to me about _fanbase_! i'm at _url_" things in A/Ns? It would be weird to get messages like a year after posting it, right?
Nope. It would not be weird at all.
Writers love the stories they’ve written sort of like children. They were created with love and each one has a special place in their heart. They’d very likely love to talk to you about their story or their writing in general whenever you happen to see it.
There’s really no time limit on giving your encouragement and support to your favorite writers.
–Mod M
Writers are sluts for their own stories. If we could sneak them into every conversation, we would. What happens behind the scenes of a written story is often just as crazy as the actual story, and yes, we all want to talk about it constantly. Readers reaching out is how I’ve met all of my fandom friends, so I say PM authors. Never hurts.
Dude, we leave the tumblr urls in our end notes precisely because we want you to come into our messages and squeal at us. No matter how long it’s been. No. Really. REALLY really. Really.
Really.
I have met some of my very greatest online friends (and some have become RL ones!) through fic comments. Please do this.
Oh HEY RL friend I met through fic comments. How you doin’?
Anon, I recently received Tumblr messages about the first fanfic I ever wrote, from like years and years ago, in a fandom I’m not super active in any more, and let me tell you I WAS THRILLED. It literally made my week. Authors ALWAYS want to hear from you, I guarantee it. Even if we arent active in a fandom anymore, if we’ve left the fic up it means we still hope people will read and enjoy it. And most of the time, we are more than ready to jump back into fanning about said fandom with a new person even if we havent touched it in a while. I promise.
Real talk, literally every one of my online friends are people I’ve connected with over writing. We seriously wouldn’t be dropping those links if we didn’t want people to come holler with us.
So hell yeah, swoop on in and make someone’s day <3
Stop censoring the words people are using to blacklist, you are actually exposing people to the word/subject you think you’re protecting them from. If rape is on my blacklist and you have an in depth account of rape and you used r*pe for everything, I WILL NOW BE EXPOSED TO IT because my blacklist DIDN’T BLOCK IT because YOU CHANGED THE WORD.
^^^^^^ To add: Censoring is only really necessary when it comes to a slur your cannot reclaim, but you still need to at least tag the post with the themes so anyone who has, say, antiblack violence blacklisted for instance, won’t be exposed to what it is that triggers them.
I would really appreciate it if people could reblog this instead of ignoring it because this IS becoming a wide spread problem. I have had several panic attacks over the last month due to things that are on my blacklist not being caught specifically because of people censoring the black list word. Blacklists can pick up on words inside posts, but they can’t pick up on those words when you change one or more letters to a star.
Stop censoring words in posts that aren’t slurs, you are not protecting us from exposure, you are forcibly exposing us to it. You are doing precisely the opposite of helping us.
IS THAT FUCKING WHY
The only reason to c*nsor words is if you don't want to show them up in search, in my experience - you do need to tag them still. If you don't want them to show up in the tags, remember the 5-tag-rule - anything after the 5th tag won't show up.
Without safeguards for user-generated content, Article 13 would require your favourite websites to implement systems that monitor user-generated content and automatically remove any content that could potentially infringe upon copyright, giving publishing giants the power to block your online expression. Sites like YouTube, Tumblr, GitHub, Soundcloud, etc., could be required to block the upload of content based on whether it has been “identified” by big corporations, rather than based on its legality. The law is still being debated, and it is difficult to predict how it would impact the OTW’s projects, including the Archive of Our Own, if it is passed. Regardless of how this vote comes out, the OTW will work as hard as we can to keep the Internet fan-friendly. But we need your help. The most effective thing you can do right now is contact your Member of European Parliament. You can use one of these tools to e-mail your MEP or call your MEP to tell them that having user-generated content on the internet is important to you.
Here’s what you can tell them: Without safe harbors for user-generated content, Article 13 of the Copyright Directive would stifle free expression on the Internet. We don’t want mandatory filtering. Algorithms don’t understand limitations and exceptions to copyright like parody, public interest exceptions, fair use, or fair dealing, and we don’t want our non-infringing videos, website posts and art blocked because of a biased algorithm created by big corporations. We want the law to protect user-generated works, not harm them.
OTW Legal will keep fighting for fan-friendly laws!
Please signal boost if you can’t help directly!
If any of my followers are in Europe, please help protect the AO3 (and other fannish archives as well)!
Tumblr’s at it again, thanks to the new European Privacy Laws. There’s probably nobody who will read this, but it pissed me off so much that I decided to make a post about it. (Ignore the weird language mish-mash, depending on your country the language might differ.)
OK, so many of us get this screen when we try to access our dash:
Realise how the ‘OK’ button is a nice, attention-grabbing blue? If you’re like me, you’re not exactly into reading a 100 pages document and tend to just click it.
My tip? DONT. Instead click on ‘Manage Options’ right next to it:
Now you’ll see this page:
Still pretty harmless, right? That ‘Accept’ button is looking really attractive right now. Instead, click on Verwalten (Probably something like ‘Manage Options’ or something in english) and you’ll get to this page:
Now that’s not too bad, right? I just switched all the buttons to ‘off’, because I’m jealously guarding my personal information and don’t want Tumblr to go off and do who knows what with it. Looks like we’re done! But wait: There’s a SHOW option.
When we click on that one, what we will get is this:
A HUGE list with OVER 300 ENTRIES of companies that can use your data by default if you’d just clicked ‘OK’ on that very first page. Coincidence that this list is hidden that much? Me thinks not. They’re all switched on by default, but I am still a petty bitch that doesn’t want to give out her data, so I switched them all off. All 300+ of them. There is no option to switch them all off at once, and even if you disable all the options above, the companies are still switched on.
(If you wonder how i got that number, I copied the list into excel and looked at the cell number. No way am I actually counting all those entries)
I too, am a petty bitch who unticked every single one.
What pisses me off is that I didn't get the Manage Options button - mine said Decide Later. I clicked it several times because I had no time to figure out what's going on and you never, ever just plain up agree with something. It's no longer popping up for me, so I have no idea what happened to those options. Also, I don't even want to know how long tumblr has been doing this before the new European Privacy Law forced them to be more transparent with it.
Greetings Tumblr, we have some important news for those of you who call Europe home.
In early 2012, the European Commission set out to better protect the data privacy rights of those citizens living in Europe. And on May 25, 2018, the culmination of those efforts, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), goes into effect.
More specifically, the GDPR gives you more control over your personal data, privacy, and consent.
We are also updating our TOS and Privacy Policy as part of our commitment to these new regulations.
Starting on May 25, 2018, some users in Europe between the ages of 13 and 16 may no longer be able to access Tumblr. This ultimately depends on the age that your country has determined is appropriate for you to consent to the processing of your personal data. Read more about our rules on age here.
If you are a resident of the US, this does not apply to you. However, all Tumblr users, no matter where you live, will be able to access the Privacy Dashboard in the coming days. There you can view, manage, and download the data associated with your account. You can read more about it here.
I know some people have gotten really upset about Tumblr apparently banning a bunch of black social justice blogs in their Russian foreign agent account purge. So I want to make sure y’all know what’s going on.
The IRA has a history (x) of making seemingly socially conscious activist accounts, operating them as legit activist accounts, and then once they’ve established their credentials they make occasional posts advocating serious violence or calling for ‘white genocide’ or the like. This is so that they can then post links to these seemingly real ‘violent SJW posts’ on alt-right or conservative forums, to inflame and justify their hatred.
So if it looks like Tumblr just used this whole thing as an excuse to delete black activist blogs, that’s not what happened. Tumblr is not the IRA’s primary focus for operating accounts designed to inflame the alt-right. I mean, they’re not not operating that stuff on Tumblr, but they get much better return on investment on Reddit, Facebook, 4-Chan, etc. What Tumblr is, however, is a very effective place for them to create sockpuppet strawmen accounts to hate on.
So yeah. That’s what happened.
Yeah, I got one of Tumblr’s you-may-have-unwittingly-interacted-with-propaganda-blogs emails too. And like everyone else, I kind of shrugged because really, what am I supposed to do about that now? I have search disabled on my blog, and my tags are a mess; there’s no way I could go through and actually find any of the propaganda I may have inadvertently boosted over the seven years I’ve been on this site.
But out of curiosity I looked over Tumblr’s list of IRA-linked blogs. And one username stood out to me. I recognised it because for several months last year it had been showing up constantly in my notifications after I reblogged one of their posts with a response.
That username was black-to-the-bones, and this is the post I reblogged from them:
When I first saw the post by black-to-the-bones, I wanted to know more about these women. I dug up the original Tweet, ran a reverse Google image search and… well, as you can see from my reblog, there turned out to be quite a lot of information about them on the internet, which I spent the next hour or two collating into my post.
Now, don’t get me wrong here: I am one hundred percent aware that history regularly erases the contributions of women, and especially women of colour. But as you can see from my reply, in this particular case the history of these three women absolutely is not “hidden from us”. The person attempting to hide these women’s history was black-to-the-bones themself.
The original post – which we now know was posted by a state-sponsored propaganda blog – took a legitimate issue, but misrepresented facts to stir up emotion about that issue. The issue was perfectly tailored to resonate with Tumblr’s culture of social justice, and it worked. The vast majority of reblogs of the original post do not include any correction or further information.
Again, don’t get me wrong: anger is important. It’s a necessary part of social justice. But we have clear evidence that bad-faith actors are intentionally fomenting false anger to keep us reacting emotionally rather than thinking rationally. And they are smart about it. They will mix in their attempts to divide and enrage us with innocuous cute videos to gain followers, and legitimate posts about issues. So that when they do post actual misinformation, it slips under our radar.
When propaganda blogs do something like try to smear a Jewish woman as a white supremacist, it’s obvious who their target is, and what their goal is. But I wanted to highlight the black-to-the-bones post above because it’s a subtler, more insidious kind of propaganda. It’s part of a continuum of tactics designed to keep up a constant background noise of outrage.
Because while anger is important, constant anger makes it harder for us to empathise with each other. It makes it harder for us to be constructive, rather than destructive. And ultimately, it just exhausts us and leaves us too apathetic to care.
So getting back to my original question: What are we supposed to do about that now?
Your racist grandparents aren’t the only ones being targeted by fake news. We are being targeted with posts that are specifically designed to appeal to Tumblr’s social justice culture. So if you see a post about an issue that makes you angry, stop before you reblog. Check the source. Google the details. Make sure your anger about legitimate issues isn’t being exploited by malicious actors.
Propaganda like this relies on us reacting to outrage before we stop to think. Be smarter than that. Don’t let yourself be manipulated.
Yall i just got an email from tumblr saying I interacted with accounts made by the IRA …… is this even real????
The internet is wild
Im literally imagining some government worker in russia logging onto tumblr.edu and thinking to themselves “better change my url to ‘black-galaxy-magic’ to stay young n hip and relevant with the youth of america”
sooooo let’s break it down then because the fact that tumblr sent this email is mega important
if yall haven’t been living under a rock for the last year and a half, you may have heard that trump won the election. and you may have also heard that trump was helped out by russia in a ton of ways. one of those ways was by the russian troll farm, the internet research agency (IRA). there were 84 accounts on tumblr spreading anti-hillary propaganda and general discontent, mainly targeting POC and “socially aware” youth. some of those accounts were HUGELY influential, “4mysquad” being one of the top ones with tons of followers and popular posts.
a lot of them started with relatively innocent, pro-POC posts to gain a following, before moving on to anti-police, anti-hillary, and general anti-establishment to create distrust in the only major-party candidate against trump. like I said, many of the accounts were hugely influential so their posts spread FAR. all that visibility led to increased voter apathy, meaning less voter turnout and fewer people voting against trump. and tumblr was silent on this after the official indictment of the IRA, until literally just yesterday.
so to sum up, the email you and a ton of other people got is saying that you were following and sharing posts from russian pro-trump propaganda blogs. i’d ask that you PLEASE reblog this, because it’s super important that everyone who got this email knows why they got it, knows what it means, and hopefully knows what they might be able to do better in the future
Y’all, I even got this e-mail.
ME.
And all I do is reblog Johnlock stuff.
Just so you know. I don’t make a habit of cross checking someone’s blog when I see fan related content. I just don’t. So don’t think this is something only politics related. They’re leaking into fandom spaces, too.
Hi Tumblr,
We’re all grappling with the influence that state-sponsored disinformation campaigns can have on our political conversations—and how wide-spread that interference turned out to be. So please take a moment to read this, think about it, and talk about it.
Last fall, we uncovered 84 Tumblr accounts linked to the Russian government through the Internet Research Agency, or IRA. These accounts were being used as part of a disinformation campaign leading up to the 2016 U.S. election. After uncovering the activity, we notified law enforcement, terminated the accounts, and deleted their original posts. Behind the scenes, we worked with the Department of Justice, and the information we provided helped indict 13 people who worked for the IRA.
Now that the investigations are done, we want to let you know how we’re going to help protect Tumblr in the future and what you can do to help.
The IRA employs more than 1,000 people who engage in electronic disinformation and propaganda campaigns around the world using phony social media accounts. Their goal is to sow division and discontent in the countries they target. What makes them so difficult to spot is that they’re not spambots. They’re real people who get trained and paid to spread propaganda.
As far as we can tell, the IRA-linked accounts were only focused on spreading disinformation in the U.S., and they only posted organic content. We didn’t find any indication that they ran ads.
Remember, the IRA and other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns play off our zero-sum politics. They want to drive a wedge between us so that we spend our time fighting with each other instead of building towards the future. We’ll be watching for signs of future activity, but the best defense is knowing how they operate and how to judge the content you see.
First, we’ll be emailing anyone who liked, reblogged, replied to, or followed an IRA-linked account with the list of usernames they engaged with.
Second, we’re going to start keeping a public record of usernames we’ve linked to the IRA or other state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. We’re committed to transparency and want you to know everything that we know.
We’ve decided to leave up any reblog chains that might be on your Tumblrs—you can choose to leave them or delete them. We’re letting you decide because the reblog chains contain posts created by real Tumblr users, often challenging or debunking the false and incideniary claims in the IRA-linked original post. Removing those authentic posts without your consent would encroach on your free speech—and there have been enough disruptions to our conversations as it is.
You’ve probably read that U.S. intelligence officials expect foreign agents to try similar propaganda campaigns in the future. We’ll be monitoring Tumblr for signs of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, and if we see anything we will…
There are also things you can do to help stop the spread of disinformation and propaganda.
Transparency won’t mean a thing if we don’t participate in the process. Whatever your political stance, voting ensures a government that represents your interests. For our U.S. users: You can register online or by mail, and many states are holding primaries right now.
