………….we knew this shit was an issue that staff has been ignoring for ages but it finally came to bite them in the ass
hey general psa that in the notes theres a bunch of really stupid misinformation bullshit (as i should have expected) abt how this is a fandom thing, about fanart/fanfiction, and i would just like to clarify for as many people as i can that this is not a fandom thing at all, it is an issue targeting IRL minors.
minors have been running “sex work” blogs, selling private snapchats, et cetera, using tumblr as their platforms. there are also adult rings of CP (photographs and videos of IRL minors) distributors on tumblr that have managed to slip by filters. this is the issue being looked into by law enforcement, this is the issue being pursued by tumblr, and it is the reason the purge is being done so hastily and messily (protection of minors being sexually trafficked is generally more important than avoiding Jane Doe #193′s doctor who blog being nuked by accident). reporting fandom blogs to tumblr for written content and fanart is only going to confuse the matter further and make it more likely that minors will be put at greater risk (if fake reports come in massive quantities and drown out the real reports or make alarm fatigue likely).
okay, most of what i do re: harry potter is criticism, and hp is flawed in such a number of ways, but sometimes i just sit here and
i mean, you all have a comprehension of just how drastically harry potter changed literature, yeah? like. it revitalized it. it blew the literary scene apart. the new york times had to create a separate bestseller’s list for children’s lit just because harry potter existed. harry potter changed reading.
so many people on tumblr were born in the ‘90s. when the first book came out, most of us couldn’t read. but we grew up in a world where everyone, everyone, everyone was reading harry potter, no matter how old they were; we grew up in a world where the most popular story in the entire world was a fantasy children’s book.
it’s sort of difficult to grasp, sometimes, the extent to which harry potter is not just a book. the extent to which what is basically a series of fun, interesting, and fairly good novels is such an enormous, enormous part of our lives, a cultural touchstone, a truly universal reference point, something so many people have shaped their lives around, a foundation for all of the stories we would read and watch for the rest of our lives– for so many of us, the first books we ever loved
the extent to which so many of us can’t call ourselves “fans” of harry potter, because it would like being a “fan” of, like, having lungs.
it’s not even about liking it or disliking it. it’s just a part of us.
This reminds me an awful lot about Starbucks.
No, seriously. Before Starbucks, America was a coffee wasteland. Coffee was a thing you got at diners and drivethroughs. It was a cheap hot thing you put made palatable with tons of cream and sugar, and most people (but waning!) had a coffee machine at home.
Starbucks told us that we could like coffee. That coffee could be an enjoyable thing, that it could be a status symbol and a ritual. That there could be a place where you go for coffee, and you enjoy it.
As a coffee snob, I think Starbucks’ coffee is awful. But Starbucks is why we have better coffee. Starbucks created the market space for third wave coffee shops and artisanal roasters. They reintroduced “espresso”, “latte” and “cappuccino” to the American lexicon.
We need stuff that’s heinously popular. That’s how culture works.
Tumblr was deemed too full of inappropriate content to be allowed to be downloaded from the app store.
It has this “inappropriate” problem because of rampant porn ad bot accounts. The old solutions were bots to detect image sets with nsfw content, the automatically enabled safe mode, tag filtering for mobile, and wide takedowns of nsfw bots based on words used (that’s why their messages are full of numbers and symbols, to evade this)
Tumblr released their own bot supposedly capable of wiping the ad bots, but it’s taking down many popular blogs, possibly due to sheer amounts of posting or sheer amounts of ad bots in their notes. This bot was likely rushed to be put out.
You are more likely to be accidentally flagged if you post external links, as well. If your acct is taken down you CAN get it back, but it’s a pain. E-mail tumblr support for help with this. It takes down side blogs with the main ones.
I’ll be halting posts for about a week or until this problem is fixed.
fadeslikewhispers 