#i know it’s hip and cool to hate the man
kat:
friends, to say that “staff is full of terfs” is really, deeply upsetting to the many trans people who work here, myself included.
The criticism was you guys not banning actual terfs and claiming lack of tools then using said tools to nuke someone who pointed out that a public profile linked by you is a hp fan not staff “being full of terfs” lmfao
Staff made a bad choice in deleting all the partyjockers posts because it ended up amplifying the attention this was getting (aka the Streisand Effect). They definitely fucked up there, but I can wager a guess that their rationale for doing so was that someone on staff was being actively harassed. This has happened to Staff members in the past, and the best course of action was just to ignore it until their attention went else where.
Since this is the first case of a harassment campaign under Automattic, presumably they don’t even have a plan of action for Staff being harassed (because they never owned a social network). So they fucked up by trying to wipe the site of these posts. Just drew more attention to it.
Comparing the deletion of the harassment posts to TERF activity on the site (or any site, for that matter) is erroneous for a number of reasons, most obviously:
1. These posts targeted a specific person and were the same thing over and over again, thus easily identifiable. Conversely, TERFs change their language and posts general, vague things to blend in (like all fash).
2. One account was leading the charge of this harassment, and was being extremely vocal about it. Comparatively, TERFs are a whole group of people who will try to hide their hate behind other language, or manipulate the message so it’s hard to identify as explicit transphobia.
3. The accusations being flung were completely false. They were, “since a staff member likes HP, they must be a TERF and a fascist that are single-handedly making sure that these people are given safe harbor on Tumblr.” So it was ultimately a harassment campaign by an angry fandom poster who will hopefully look back at their behavior and cringe someday, not any sort of legitimate activism.
(reiterating my opinion from a previous post: I, too, think HP is terfy/racist bullshit and JKR is a TERF, but I also know that people sometimes just consume media and that doesn’t automatically make them a raging TERF too. Not everything is black and white once you poke your head outside of your bubble)
Moreover, since this was a very acute and active, targeted campaign against one person, it was very easy for Staff to spot and delete these posts (again, reiterating, I think this was a bad idea for Staff to do this, just explaining the mechanics of it). You can use photo dna to ban images very easily, it will have the same checksum every time.
Tumblr does ban TERFs and Nazis if you report them (IF you report them, there’s no passive mechanism scanning for TERFs like some internet metal detector. It doesn’t exist. Please just fucking hit the report button and fill out the form for hate speech, don’t just post about it).
Is there a site out there that has successfully dealt with the issue of TERFs and fascists on their platform? Is there a social network that’s free of those people? No, there’s not, because it’s a huge problem. There are lots of TERFs and Nazis, and there’s no effective way to filter them out automatically. It’s a manual process of reporting, reviewing, and acting on the reports appropriately. Unfortunately, too, is that these moderator teams are frequently understaffed, underpaid, untrained, and overworked. And when they do get it right and ban the fash, they just remake. Especially on a site like Tumblr where there’s a low barrier of entry for making a new account.
I’m not disagreeing with you, what i mean is the core issue of deleted fash posts still floating around after being deleted while that deleted post was deleted with all reblogs, something that was claimed to be impossible. And this being the only acknowledgment by staff of the situation feels like a try to derail the actual criticism by arguing with something that only a fringe group was claiming
No,staff has mass-deleted fash posts before. Why they don’t do this more often I can’t answer, I didn’t have any insight to this process. Nobody remembers this because it was good, and it’s more fun to just hate on Staff because they don’t know how to run a website (but they do know how to identify TERFs and make sure they don’t ban them, apparently).
