Tumblr is explicitly banning hate speech, posts that celebrate school shootings, and revenge porn by Shannon Liao.
From the post:
Tumblr is changing its community guidelines to more explicitly ban hate speech, glorifying violence, and revenge porn. The new rules go into effect on September 10th.
“It’s on all of us to create a safe, constructive, and empowering environment,” Tumblr writes in its blog post. “Our community guidelines need to reflect the reality of the internet and social media today.” The previous version of the guidelines can still be viewed on GitHub for comparison.
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Some people cheer censorship of undefined “hate speech, glorifying violence, and revenge porn.” At least until they realize that censorship is made necessary by poor design and assumptions about user incompetence.
Poor Design
The filtering options for a Tumblr account are especially sparse:
“Safe” mode is a shot-in-the-dark filter with no known settings.
You can only choose “tags” to filter on. As though “tags” are going to be assigned in good faith by bad actors.
A better design of filtering would include user (with wildcarding), terms (with wildcarding), tags, dates (with ranges), along with the ability to “follow” filters created by other Tumblr users. (That could be a commercial incentive for users to create and sell such filters.)
Centralized censorship at Tumblr is an attempt to correct for an engineering failure, a failure that denies users the ability to choose the content they wish to view.
Assuming User Incompetence
Closely allied with the lack of even minimal, shareable filters, is the Tumblr assumption that users are incompetent to filter their own content. Hence, Tumblr has to step in to filter content for everyone.
I don’t recall Tumblr (or any other Internet censor) offering any evidence that users are incapable of choosing the content they wish to view or avoid.
Are you incapable of making that choice?
I ask because the Spanish Inquisition censors made similar fact-free assumptions about readers. Why should Tumblr repeat the mistakes of the Spanish Inquisition?
Censorship shouts at everyone they aren’t competent to choose their own reading materials.
Conclusion
Tumblr isn’t the only Internet forum that is covering up poor design and making false assumptions about users and their competence to in choosing material. I mention it here only as a sign that censorship is spreading and should be resisted without quarter.
I think you are smart enough to choose the content you wish to view and I extend that assumption to all other users.
Do you disagree?