sometimes neurodivergence questions will be like ‘do you find activities more enjoyable when they are activities you enjoy’ and it really makes me wonder if this ‘neurotypical’ thing has just been a big practical joke all along
‘do you find it disruptive to your focus when your focus on a task is disrupted suddenly and without warning’ this CANNOT be diagnostic criteria. they are playing us for fools
It drives me insane how many people dont realise how often they break the law and that if the full force of it was ever applied life would basically be unliveable. Like between traffic violations, petty workplace theft, account sharing and piracy alongside how common it is to have been in posession of some illegal drug at some point in your life. People still manage to get away with thinking “criminals” are people who commit crimes not just populations that are surveilled enough to be routinely prosecuted
mannnnn until we all get okay with the idea of people needing other people to get them water/food/etc like. idk we’re just never gonna make it
yes you have autistic in your bio but are you rude to people who need carers and assistance with basic tasks? do you call me lazy for a text post where i ask my father to bring me water? yes you have adhd and post constantly about executive dysfunction but if a schizophrenic person who needs but doesn’t have have a carer hasn’t showered or worn clean clothes in months exists, how are you going to react to that?
yeah yeah you’re all for disability rights but if someone is campaigning for adult changing tables in disabled stall bathrooms because they have incontinence and have to wear a diaper are you going to think they’re weird? if a person has a visible colostomy bag are you going to think it’s gross? what about feeding tubes? how does your opinion on these issues change if the person in question is fat, or homeless, or a person of color?
all the videos of "rescues" handling baby wildlife on tiktok make me want to pull my hair out, no reputable WRC would be talking to/petting these baby animals! they won't be releasable! arrrgh
It’s a mistake that is made far too often. I’ve been raising and releasing squirrels for more than ten years and I cringe terribly to think how much I handled them in the early days before I knew better! I worked as a volunteer for a rehabber that didn’t really explain the dangers of habituation. Fortunately I always worked really hard to raise my babies in groups, and I didn’t handle them once they were in their outdoor transition enclosure. I was really lucky that I never had a problem with release, but I greatly regret how much I handled them as babies.
I agree that even in the wildlife rehab world there is sometimes not enough attention paid to reducing risk of habituation. Saw a vid of a rehabber cuddling a young fox they planned to release and my jaw dropped. That said, the places that are good about it are really good and take monumental steps to minimize contact.
Thing is, I don’t think tumblr staff is uniquely transphobic - especially since it’s not just trans women’s selfies and transmasc art getting censored, but classic queer comics, Black bloggers (especially women), and more, even as our more visible staff members keep talking about trying to fix the problem.
I suspect it’s something much bigger and with much worse implications for the entire internet.
I suspect more appeals are being left to the automated system than we think (which they’re NOT supposed to do but due to the sheer volume theyre having to deal with, well…) and, between the evergreen problem of report-brigading by bigots, the other evergreen problem of a company internally sucking at determining where justified criticism of their practices ends and harassment begins, and the problems of fighting the porn bots (because every single one you see is a product of survivorship bias) leading the algorithm to become sexist (remember #girlgate?), the automod algorithm is basically collapsing in on itself and learning all the worst biases of society MORE than ever before.
Which, given that these systems are being deployed all OVER the internet and being touted as objective and unbiased because ~computers can’t be bigots~, should fucking horrify you.
To take this a step further, I feel tumblr’s moderation problems are a, uh…“lovely” preview of what we might need to be on the lookout for going forward with social platforms on the internet, in MULTIPLE horrifying ways.
Because…look. It’s flawed, but from a human cost standpoint it is FAR better for the majority of moderation to be automated. Manual moderation is a PTSD meat grinder. The stuff you don’t see that gets filtered out automatically from most platforms includes everything from CSAM, to execution videos, to animal torture, to hate speech so intense and graphically violent that it would make you nauseous, to actionable threats of violence aimed at kids and animals, and more. There is no ethical way to expose people to that 8 hours a day, at the volume demanded by the modern internet. We know this, because that’s how it’s worked in the past and the trauma it inflicts on people is well known. Never mind that, conditions in domestic cubicle farms are bad enough, but this work is often outsourced to the global south, 8 hours a day is a SHORT shift for a lot of the people working these jobs, which only makes the whole situation even worse…
But for one, we know for a fact that algorithms are…NOT ready to handle that job. For example, here on tumblr, we still see a ton of porn bots and other spam bots, but remember:
For every single one we see, I would hazard a guess that at least 20 get banned before anyone even gets a chance to notice, and they go away pretty fast once reported…
But we still see the ones that break through. Which, to be fair, is even worse under solely manual moderation, since an actual human person has to see the problem in order to stop it, but it is still very There to prove that the system is fallible. Luckily, we have the report button. Unfortunately, it depends on users knowing how to use it…and using it in good faith.
So, in the interest of trying to keep moderation…okay lets be totally honest the corporate reason is to make it CHEAPER; making it less harmful to human workers (because people still need to train the system, but they need to be exposed to a lot less horrible shit to train an algorithm than to actively monitor a website) is just a side effect, but the point is that we end up with…bias automation, which seems to only get worse and worse as time goes on.
For two, let’s look at the current tech zeitgeist. As much as I hate to bring up the drawbacks of the AI fad because it makes a lot of people’s brains just shut off in vehement rejection of anything that looks like AI might be involved, this really is one of them - too many people are trusting machine learning WAY too much. This is still in very experimental stages. It’s FAR from unbiased, as we’ve just discussed. Yet, because tech companies want to sell it NOW, they’re presenting it as Totally Ready To Sell, and The Future, and…Objective. Cold Hard Data.
Imagine how much worse it will be if these algorithms end up getting used in not just internet moderation, but full on law enforcement, before they get better. After all, they’re already trying to use facial recognition that way.
And, to make it even more horrifying, let’s also look at it from a legal standpoint on the platform’s end.
Tumblr, under Verizon, settled a lawsuit over moderation bias. They were ordered to go back to more human oversight and retrain the algorithm, and…for a while things were going okay-ish, the problem never went away but it SEEMED to be doing slightly better?
…but they can’t roll back the porn ban, because SESTA/FOSTA are a thing, and payment processors restrict services when it comes to anything they declare too “adult”, and KOSA is at risk of actually getting passed (PLEASE keep calling and writing your representatives!!), and so much else…
And we have a wave of book bans and state laws that formally declare queerness to be “sexually explicit” going down…
So, website operators are being put in a HELLISH catch-22 situation. On the one hand, we have nondiscrimination laws. As a business, you CAN’T just declare that a protected class of people is more Inherently Sexual than others. On the other hand, we have legal precedents being set that being queer IS inherently pornographic. In other words, we’re approaching a situation where it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a platform to stay legally above board. You DON’T censor the queers, you’re “providing porn to minors”. You DO, you’re violating nondiscrimination laws.
I cannot begin to stress how absolutely hellish that will be for EVERYONE - both users and webmasters alike.
Tl;dr: yes tumblr’s moderation is biased, and the probable reason makes me WISH it could be attributed to just some absolute raging bigoted fuckweasels on staff. Buckle up and call your representatives and for FUCK’S SAKE DO NOT LET DESANTIS GET ANYWHERE IN 2024.
East Asian fanartists are starting to migrate back to Tumblr because Twitter is insane, toxic, and dying, and what we’re NOT going to do is let the fucking exclusionists get them, do you hear me? We are not going to let a bunch of feral idiots try to apply the most myopic version of puritanism to foreign artists we’re not we’re not we’re not. Form an armed brigade if you have to, do you hear me. We’re not going to bully the artists who may or may not even speak English because we have our precious standards of moral purity. If we see art that makes us uncomfy we’re going to block the artist and tumblr savior their name so we don’t have to see them again AND WE’RE GONNA MOVE THE FUCK ON.
Important note for mobile users, you don’t actually need tumblrsavior to do this!
All you need to do is go to your account settings, scroll to “Filtered post content” and input their username. This will filter
all their original posts
all mentions of their username
threads where they made an addition
posts that were directly reblogged from them (unfortunately, these get caught up too)
I always thought this option was common knowledge, but apparently it’s not..? It’s especially useful since new users and artists who don’t speak english are notoriously inconsistent about tagging, which normally means their posts slip between the cracks with the “filter tags” settings.
Another thing I recently realized you should do is look up the translation of various ship names in other writing systems, since they might not use the english equivalent. Also, remember that depending on character dynamic and “who tops”, the order of the names in the shipname gets swapped! So you actually have to block two tags per ship. Alright happy filtering MWAH!!
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