………….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).
when i saw the headline ‘golf digest helps free man from prison’ i thought it was gonna be, like
“he’s clearly in the background of this golf photo! that proves he wasn’t at the crime scene!!”
as opposed to, like
“this guy in prison sent us his cool golf fanart but we didn’t want to promo a serial killer, so we looked into his case and thought it looked pretty flimsy and probably racially motivated”
2015: glitch that basically let people fuck with post formatting and everything looked like this
2018: staff ignored the spambot problem for like years at this point and the app was removed from the app store as a result of the site being absolutely fucking laden with spambots, which finally motivated them to do something about it, resulting in a hastily made protocol to detect bots utterly failing and deleting half of the sites userbase