A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:
We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally.
A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt’s response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:
The reality of predstrogen’s suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.
Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.
Last year, the “mature” and “sexual themes” community labels were erroneously applied to some users’ posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr.
Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.
When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.
Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:
Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.
Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.
Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.
We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.
We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.
We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.
— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.
Alright, let’s apply some critical analysis to this:
It did negatively affect Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community, but the particular group most affected were trans women, and to simply use the umbrella term LGBTQ+ and not mention trans women specifcally detracts from the reality of the situation.
The reality of predstrogen’s suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.
So, what was the actual reason then? After being incorrectly marked as an adult blog several weeks ago and having her profile picture removed, Avery contacted staff, was told the flagging had been done in error, and had her blog status returned to normal. So evidently, her blog was reviewed by staff and determined not to have broken TOS for having NSFW content. And if the post mentioned was also not the deciding factor, then that was?
Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension.
Again, not the correct language to use here; the community in particular should be specified to be trans women, and this description is again erasing the reality of the situation at hand.
Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.
It’s obvious that transition timelines are not against community guidelines, it’s the fact that trans women’s selfies have been repeatedly wrongly assigned Mature community labels that is being brought to light here.
Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.
Here’s the thing.
Obviously, we all know reporting blogs for anything other than sexual content just doesn’t do anything. This is a fault of the system (myself and others have experienced numerous just even trying to submit reports in the first place), a fault of the site’s content policies (transphobic, racist, antisemitic, and other inflammatory bloggers are protected so soundly by the site’s freedom of speech policies that anything they say short of doxxing people is immediately brushed off by moderation staff), and a fault of the people behind the desks (as seen from inequitable moderation and extremely long response times experienced by people trying to clear improperly flagged posts or blogs).
However, reporting blogs en masse for sexual content seems to work very well, so much so that any time a trans woman speaks up on Tumblr a wave of transmisogynists can just spam a deluge of false reports for sexual content and have her disappear overnight.
So, the real question here, is even if a new amazing anti-harassment feature is rolled out, will anything be done to fix the ways in which the existing reporting system is used to target trans bloggers?
Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.
First of all, the tag in question that is at the forefront of this discussion is #tgirl. #tboy isn’t blocked, #trans isn’t blocked, #tgirl is. This is specifically about trans women.
While this response is marginally better than silence,
It isn’t a proper apology, and it isn’t any amount of transparency for how trans people and trans women in particular are treated on Tumblr. If anything, this stands to only showcase how trans rights are put on a podium at the forefront of a display of progressive imagery while the actual people on the site are swept under the rug.
