Give me your banned, your flagged, your hassled bloggers yearning to post free.....

I have felt a great disturbance in the blogosphere, as if millions of voices cried out and damn well refused to be silenced.

Tumblr is one of the three main blogging platforms, the others being WordPress and Blogger (I don't count Facebook or Twitter because, though widely used, their systems and rules are oriented toward uses other than actual blog writing as I understand it).  The Tumblr user base seems to skew quite a bit younger and more radical-left than that of other platforms, and the technology is less open to interaction with outsiders than that of other platforms -- there's no equivalent of the comment threads on each post that WordPress and Blogger blogs have, for example.  I briefly tried doing a Tumblr blog once, but quickly gave up due to frustration with the built-in limitations.  Still, a lot of people like it.  There are estimated to be about 440 million Tumblr blogs.

A couple of days ago, Tumblr management announced a decision to, essentially, destroy the platform.  They declared that as of December 17, "adult content" would no longer be allowed, and the staff (or rather, algorithms) have already started flagging "explicit" posts and deleting blogs without warning.  This seems to be working out pretty much the way censorship usually does.  Innocuous art posts, drawings of animals, and even posts about minerals have been flagged.  A post about British police AI mistaking desert photos for porn was itself flagged by Tumblr's AI.  LGBT content, however mild, is especially likely to be flagged (this is not new, but will doubtless now get worse).  The algorithm even flagged Tumblr's own "suicide note" post.  But some non-sexual content such as Nazi propaganda remains unscathed.

The trigger for the new policy appears to have been a decision by Apple store to stop carrying the Tumblr app (no, I don't know what that means, and I don't care either) because of pornographic material on Tumblr, some of it genuinely nasty -- well, on 440 million blogs, any kind of content you can imagine will probably exist somewhere.  The fact that Tumblr is now indirectly owned by Verizon may also have played a role, though investors don't seem enthused about the ban.

There are quite a lot of Tumblr blogs among my regular reading, none of which are primarily dedicated to sexually-oriented material, and most of which I have never seen post anything of that description at all.  I spent most of Tuesday morning looking at those blogs, and on about three-quarters of them, the new changes were the main topic of discussion, the tone of which was a mix of ridicule and outrage.  Much erotica is as creative as any other art form, and the new rules will destroy one more safe platform for sex workers already being forced by SESTA into more dangerous ways of working.  Not a single blogger had anything good to say about the changes.

Bloggers are posting tips on saving work that may be in danger of deletion, but a major focus has been on finding a new home -- for example, apparently there's a largely-automated process for transferring an entire Tumblr blog to WordPress.  It's always possible that Tumblr will reverse course -- the Blogger platform tried something similar in 2015, but backed down within days after a firestorm of reaction from the user base.  But if the new policy stands, and Tumblr goes the way of MySpace, hundreds of millions of bloggers will be looking for a new platform.  This will potentially benefit Blogger and WordPress, but there's a growing interest in sites built and owned by users themselves, such as AO3, which cost some money to use but are at least guaranteed not to go on a mass-deletion jag just because a bunch of purse-lipped grey fossils in a shareholder meeting heard about somebody's yuri art page and freaked out.  Pressure groups, government, and corporations will never stop trying to impose the meatspace world's control-freakery on the internet, and it's surely worth a few bucks to achieve independence from them once and for all.