burn notice!

So, Tumblr's on fire

More than usual, that is, with the new hard-line stance on NSFW content. I figured I'd be okay since everything I post over there had to get past the CW censors before airing, but nope. So far, the following items have been flagged:

  • Sam’s chest (3+ times)

  • Dean’s wet head and bare shoulders

  • A couple of junk drawers

  • A dude in a t-shirt holding pencils

  • A close-up of the Colt

  • Close-ups of a couple of knives

  • Several clothed people standing in a room together

  • The shadow of Meg falling out a window

  • Sam drinking a smoothy with a straw

  • Sam and Dean drinking beers together in the kitchen

  • A young girl looking at some candles

  • Dean holding a plate of pie

  • Dead Sam from “All Hell Breaks Loose” / Dean’s teary face

  • Dean about to get stabbed in the eye / Sam freaking out in the closet

  • A close-up of a couple holding hands in bed. All you can see is their hands and the surrounding sheets

  • A guy looking out the window through Venetian blinds

  • Someone in a dark room shining a flashlight

  • A group of children standing in a circle

In a way it feels worse than the Strikethrough crisis back in ye olden days of LJ--at least there, you could be pretty sure which journals were at risk and had the option of preemptively friend-locking yours if you were feeling paranoid. Here, it's just willy-nilly, with completely innocuous content getting flagged by the system. And because only the original poster can appeal, if you happen to have reblogged something from a now-deleted account, if it gets flagged there's no way to get it fixed.

Pretty sure we're going to see another fandom exodus, if people can figure out where to go. Tumblr's free image storage is a pretty big lure, but they're destroying that with this scatter-shot approach to making the site 'safer'. Especially when two people can post nearly identical gifs/images and one gets flagged by the system and the other doesn't.

Don't think the weekly screen cap spams will get affected too much, but if some post without the purported number of images, it's probably Tumblr's fault.

UPDATE: All posts on appeal have been approved, so I think everything's okay for the moment.
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  • 9 comments
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    jj1564
    I'm so sorry your innocuous posts have been flagged, it all seems so random. I know no one wants child pornography available on any platform, but this all seems too draconian. It's such a shame, as it's going to affect a lot of fanart and fanfic. I think Tumblr is going to have to be renamed Tumbleweed by the amount of people who will be leaving!
    bratfarrar
    Yeah. The good news is that my appeals for clemency have been accepted and all the flags removed, but it's definitely something I'm going to have to keep an eye on in the future, which is annoying.
    jj1564
    I'm pleased you appealed and got the flags removed, but if it keeps happening it will be so annoying. Imagine all the thousands of users this is affecting and how many appeals are going on, what a waste of time and energy!
    timespirt
    The prude squad is alive and well ...being prudish. No wonder the world laughs at us. I don't think there is anything wrong with your pics from Supernatural.
    bratfarrar
    Aw, thanks. Good news is Tumblr agreed, once I got an actual human to look at the pictures.
    timespirt
    Someone said they banned stuff from Bob Ross the painter. He does landscapes so I can't see any porn in that.
    bratfarrar
    A friend who runs a blog just posting pictures of tree bark had a whole ton of them get flagged. It's a really, really stupid filter.
  • 9 comments
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