Tumblr’s banning “self-harm” blogs that promote eating disorders and suicide
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Freedom of speech does not apply when you participate on a private organization's platform.
For those that strongly oppose these types of policies from social networks, I'm very much in favor of you starting your own social network to cater to tastes and generes that suit what you feel is appropriate for your community.
edit very first line from http://www.tumblr.com/about
"Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything."
which is a bold faced lie.
It takes about 5 seconds to find import generic drugs spam on tumbler. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/generic-drugs Reimporting drugs is out and out illegal, but they don't seem to be cracking down on that.
Personally, I'm really torn. Perhaps being vocal on tumbler will encourage friends to help self mutilators get help. Perhaps the act of public expression is really damaging. Without a lot more information, i'm ok with tumblr doing whatever they feel is best.
The thing i hate is the out and out hypocrisy. Share anything. To me, that means: this is a free and open place. be who you are, tell the world.
I'm not picking out some random line in some pr statement. This is the first line of the about page. This is content that should be vetted, that really matches the company's values.
I am all for free speech, but there is a long list of things like child porn, state secrets, copyrighted material, etc that I think we would all agree is not in Tumblr's best interest to not be shared effortlessly.
Tumblr is free to do whatever they want. Users are free to ditch Tumblr because "self-injury" isn't defined and Tumblr gets to be the sole decider of what is or isn't allowed based on their arbitrary rulings.
(Hm, downvoted for pointing out that the only person here who brought up free speech... is someone who preemptively and unnecessarily argued against using free speech as an argument. Literally, no one here is saying Tumblr is required to allow this for free speech reasons.)
Libel laws for example, limit our free speech. Another definition of rights is set out in the UDHR, article 5 states:
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
The case can be made that promoting eating disorders and other forms of self harm is a cruel and degrading way to treat your fellow humans. Even if the perpetrator believes themselves to be acting in everybody's best interests.
Is it cruel to find a gay kid's tumblr and tell him to kill himself? What if I simply say gay teen should kill themselves? How about that they're sinners and are going to hell? What about simply saying that I think marriage is between one man and one woman? Where does untasteful become cruel enough to ban?
(I know this isn't a reply to your actual argument, but I don't have the authority to delete epistemically dangerous posts, so I figured posting this was more appropriate than trying to get myself set up as a censor. :-) )
(Also, is there a commonly agreed-upon way of putting a :-) emoticon at the end of a parenthesized region? The apparent paren mismatch bothers me.)
Edit - Working sleepless nights may seem normal in the HN community. But, this is also something that puts the health in danger (sometimes even more than eating disorders). Now who is going to decide what is bad and what is not bad ?
Now, those pro-anorexia blogs are creepy and disheartening; I looked through some a while back, and they really are as sad as they sound. If Tumblr's goal is to prevent more teenagers from latching onto that subculture, there are a few things they might try. They could stick warning banners up on the blogs in question, visibly registering their protest without going so far as to remove content. Or they might shrug regretfully and say there's not much they can do, since they hardly have a monopoly on the blogging platform market, which would be true. Setting themselves up as censors was not their only option, and as far as I'm concerned, it should have been pretty far down on the list of ideas.
In general, I'm uncomfortable with the impulse to try to stop people from saying messages that you don't want others to hear.
As rational individuals, we can decide where to draw the line. This vastly increases the surface area of critical attacks - the line will seem arbitrary, and there will always be boundary cases which could go one way or the other. "Why this and not that?" will be heard often. It's an easy target. So yes, the easy answer is that all discourse should be allowed.
But really, I don't want people advocating that bullshit to teenagers.
1. Freedom of speech is important, but this is a special case.
2. This stuff really is harmful. I don't want bad people exposing children to sex/communism/homosexuality/anorexia/witchcraft/whatever.
3. We're only going to censor $TOPIC_OF_THE_DAY. This is not a slippery slope.
4. Be reasonable.
Of course in this case, the stakes aren't that high, since it's easy for censored blogs to move away from Tumblr. This policy is more about social signaling than about seriously trying to help anyone.
Livecasting of own suicide: freedom of expression + freedom to make choices with regard to own life.
Edit: This is not to imply that Tumblr is not entitled to do whatever they damn please with their own website. But, should someone build a website specifically for livecasting suicides I would very much disagree with its censorship.
Put a warning on it saying that it's NSFL, maybe run a free banner ad next to it for a suicide prevention hotline. Those things are reasonable, productive responses. Censorship of the video would be as symbolic as waving a flag, and about as useful.
Censoring the video may actually have prevented the suicide, because viewers were egging him on. It's hard to know.
I agree with you, it's awfully two faced of the popular organizations. Historically, if you really wanted freedom of speech, you pretty much had to own the printing press. I think the same thing is largely true now. You gotta own the server that hosts the blog. no one out there will protect you.
Tumbler may choose to censor other stuff, they will not choose to censor other stuff simply because they chose to censor this. They will censor other stuff because the other stuff is offensive (or not, they still have choices to make).
Also, i saw the phrase slippery slope and dismissed that part of the argument. It's meme-ridden fuzzy thinking at best. the "for the greater good" is imho suspect because of the Orwellian emotional ties to big brother.
So, i'll say both clauses of your or are true.
Well obviously. That's not the form of the argument here, though. The argument is that, once Tumblr gets used to censoring one view they consider harmful, they're more likely to censor others. The claim being made is not one of logical implication, but of conditional probability.
1)Increasingly the only places to talk are privately owned.
2)Private interests can control and prevent speech if in their domain.
Also, just wondering if Tumblr is going to be removing Tumblr blogs that have their own domains?
What public places did we have to talk in forty years ago that we don't have now?
> 2)Private interests can control and prevent speech if in their domain.
If you own an newspaper/magazine/website/whatever you have a right to exercise editorial control over it. That's always been the case.
2) We live in a world where community events are now happening in malls. Formerly publicly owned halls have been sold off. Parks have been turned into condos with civil planning concessions of 'public' play areas and child care provisions. This should be increasingly apparent where population density is higher and/or the funds to maintain public spaces is harder to come by.
I don't see how that's a problem. If I had a vegetable garden and this year was a bumper year for carrots I wouldn't be complaining that there's proportionally less potatoes.
Um, pass the potatoes?
- slippery slopes don't exist, they're apparently some sort of imaginary fallacy
- If you argue that Tumblr shouldn't remove content at their own arbitrary discretion, that must mean you want people to have eating disorders and commit suicide. I will call you disgusting and imply that even having a discussion about censorship or suppression of content is akin to defending child porn, I mean, suicidal content.
On a less sarcastic note, I really do want to hear how people are going to tell me this isn't a slippery slope. "“that actively promotes or glorifies self-injury or self-harm.”". My [imaginary] Tumblr talks about how I deprive myself of sleep working long hours, use marijuana for stress relief and recreation and how I don't like to wear my helmet when I ride my motorcycle, better find a new blog (or whatever Tumblr is) platform.
Freedom of speech does not apply when participating on a private organization's platform.
Just because these platforms have huge audiences doesn't mean they are appropriate for your individual message.
For the record, I do use my own platform and don't really ever use Tumblr. The sorts of things I write about don't really attract the "repost"/"like" style of Tumblr and I don't think the audience would be relevant anyway. I can say that if I ever decided to start a photography blog or something where mass audiences and such were important, I would be much less likely to use Tumblr knowing that this is their policy.
I guess I feel like your defending Tumblr from some sort of attack by me. Like I said, Tumblr is free to do whatever they want and their users can leave or stay. I just think this policy is a turn-off and I wouldn't be shocked if in 3 months we see "Tumblr bans tumbles(?) about drugs/rock-n-roll, etc" posts.
AFAIK (I may be wrong though) this isn't due to external pressure or some PR fiasco (coughreddit), this is something Tumblr has decided did not reflect their company ethic, and wants off their platform.
The difference between this and reddit's last run-in with offensive content is that Tumblr has shown no weakness here, whereas Reddit more than proved that a sufficiently large PR catastrophe is all it takes to change site policy.
What Reddit has encouraged is more boycotts and more PR shitstorms from 3rd parties hoping to affect change on the site. Tumblr, by acting proactively, has not opened these doors (yet). They are still their own arbiters of good taste, as opposed to opening the floodgates of mob-rule.
As I implied in my other comment, things like "self-injury" are very arbitrary and vary person-to-person. (Not that I should have to disclaim this, but I don't think things like suicide or eating disorders are "good" or healthy).
Sure, but the point of this is that Tumblr is the ultimate arbiter of what falls into and out of the content policy. And honestly, I expect "Tumblr staff" as a group to be a lot more focused and a lot less fickle than the internet community at large.
Compared to a reactionary response to external pressure, a la reddit, where you've essentially handed the reigns to third parties.
By acting proactively instead of reacting to PR pressure, Tumblr has basically drawn a line where their content policy lies, and they shown that they will determine what does and does not violate it - not some angry blog, community vote, or other mob-based "democracy".
Giving a small group of people editorial control is unlikely to lead to a slippery slope. Giving everyone editorial control certainly does, as special interests emerge and find out they can play the system.
I don't think you understand how/why the reddit decision went down. Reddit was under pressure because users were trading CP behind the scenes or asking for it in comments. They responded by simply saying "No more sexual pictures of any nature under 18, child pornography or otherwise". Still a new policy being implemented on their user base, but at least there is something somewhat defined in terms of criteria for disallowed content. Ultimately, "We will ban anything we deem self-injury" is far from a bright line in my opinion.
The fact that Something Awful started the reddit discussion and Tumblr did this themselves is barely important in my opinion, at least from the angle I'm coming from. I'm obviously no more happy with a mob in charge of determining "appropriateness", but then again, I'm not really happy at all with someone arbitrarily telling me what is or isn't appropriate to say. Hence why I host my own blog.
Let's back up and clarify. The traditional claim of slippery slope is that today we're going after suicide blogs, tomorrow we'll be going after offensive lyrics, talk about drugs, and we will continue sliding down the slope of banning ever more and more types of content.
I just don't see this happening here. There is some play in the way the policy has been defined, but it certainly isn't a wide gaping hole. The definition of "self-harm" can only be stretched somewhat before you hit its limits.
Compare with what Reddit has been dealing with - which is in my view a real slippery slope problem. They've basically announced to the world that they will alter site policy to ban any content that can muster a large enough PR catastrophe. This creates a huge incentive to groups to do exactly that and see their pet peeve content types banned. And indeed we saw that - no sooner had the CP subreddits disappeared did people start calling for the banning of dead baby pics, talk about beating women, etc.
Reddit has lost that game, permanently. The line between acceptable and unacceptable is now drawn by a community of millions, instead of the focused judgment of a few, and is subject to movement based on the whims of the masses. Tumblr doesn't suffer from this.
I don't consider myself a creative person, but I can already think of a decent list of things that people consider "dangerous" that I don't (and vice-versa). I mean, pick any random social-political issue and it's not hard to think of things that one side or the other considers offensive or cruel to say. I won't keep going because I think we probably agree a lot here, but I've discussed a few examples in my other replies on this thread.
A king may be a jackbooted oppressor, but he's consistent and more or less unwavering. A mob of peasants protesting the color of the flag is unlikely to get him to change anything. That's the point I was trying to make - Tumblr is the king, and is unlikely to change their tune dramatically, and thus, little risk of this new policy creating ever more new ones.
Is it desirable to have this much power in one place? Maybe. Maybe not. But whether or not this is a desirable or fair system is quite separate from whether or not this system is easily susceptible to slippery slope attacks.
Keep in mind that Tumblr is also not almighty here. Tumblr rules over a kingdom where people can emigrate effortlessly. It may not be democratic, but this presents a natural check on its power.
> "Or I guess I feel that increasing the number of people that have influence on the decision decreases the chances of their being something "arbitrary"."
I think this is where our philosophies diverge. The more cooks in the kitchen, the more arbitrary the meal is going to be, as each one is out to craft their perfect meal.
This might be ok if every person has equal influence on the decision, maybe (cue argument about tyranny of the majority, etc), but in a community-driven voice-driven case, it's less about community consensus and more about which tiny minority can rally the strongest army.
This is Tumblr as a company applying its morality upon the blogs it hosts. And in doing so it is completely within its rights.