A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt’s response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

• The reality of predstrogen’s suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.
• Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.
• Last year, the “mature” and “sexual themes” community labels were erroneously applied to some users’ posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 
• Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.
• When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

• Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.
• Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.
• Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

Add Oil Comics (@addoilcomics​)

Originally posted by addoilcomics

Add Oil Comics explores social justice issues through the use of, well, comics. Some reblogged, some original, some inspired by submitted or found text. The one above illustrates a passage taken from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. See the full comic here.

CFBG Tips (@cfbgtips​)

Originally posted by cfbgtips

One part young woman’s journey on how to find her “mystical Carefree Black Girl essence,” one part tips on how you can do the same. Wholly good.

The Revolutionary Times (@therevtimes​)

Originally posted by therevtimes

The Revolutionary Times features two dudes discussing the things we all talk about with our friends: gentrification, worry and anger regarding the current presidential administration, Star Wars. Sometimes they’re time travelers, but usually they’re not. It’s a good read, and we suggest you start with their comics on Tumblr tag.

Follow these too:

• Black Comics Chat (@blackcomicschat​)—Not just comics (though they do have that), but also a space for Black people to talk with others about Black comics.
  
• Black Action Figures and Comics (@blactionfiguresandcomics​)—Fan art, action figures, movie stills, and more. Heavy on the reblogs, it’s a good reminder of the power of a curatorial Tumblr.

Thanks for celebrating Black History Month with us, Tumblr. Everything we’ve been highlighting here on the staff blog ultimately comes from you all. We couldn’t ask for better users.

For Hellsite Eyes only…,

Hello again, Tumblr. Now that our dashboards are back to normal (‘normal’ doing some heavy lifting here), the crabs are back in tropical paradise (for now), and Mr. Brick Whartley is back with them, we felt it was time for reflection.

In his opening statement on April 1, Mr. Whartley, our now-former Head of Viral Marketing and Exponential Growth and Front End Software Developer, outlined his ambition to “…increase clicks across the platform by any means necessary”. Quite the lofty ambition. And this got us thinking—how did we do? And by we, of course, we mean you. Well, you didn’t disappoint, and if you like unnecessarily large numbers, you’re in for a real treat.

• By 12:49 pm (PDT)/3:49 pm (EDT), the community had summoned 7.5 million crabs at a rate of 1.07 million crabs per hour. 
• By the end of the day, there were 20,000 posts by 14,000 of you with the tag “time for crab.” Time indeed.
• The community’s April Fools prank was a resounding success, with more than 52,000 posts from Tumblr users attempting to “crash” this Hellsite by scheduling posts all at the same time. 
• Mr. Brick Wharley’s blog accumulated more than 3,000 followers and 12,000 notes, while @staff received nearly 50,000 notes across the day.
• Perhaps Mr. Whartley didn’t do such a lousy job. Finally, the most important statistic of the day, the community summoned 25 million crabs across Tumblr on April 1, 2022.

Credit where credit’s due, folks. You did us proud, you did Mr. Whartley proud, and most importantly, you did yourselves proud. So give those index fingers a little rest—they deserve it. And you will need all your strength for April 1, 2023.

A note from the Tumblr team

A few weeks ago, a small but higher-than-normal number of accounts were mistakenly suspended. The suspensions were quickly reversed, but our response wasn’t good enough, and we want to say more.

We’re sorry it took us this long to address this. Trust and safety issues are difficult to discuss publicly, and we can’t share details about specific individuals or how our systems work without exposing Tumblr to bad actors. But caution led us to say too little, too late.

We’ve heard from members of the trans community on Tumblr that they were disproportionately impacted, and that deserves a direct response. According to 3rd party researchers, Tumblr’s userbase has the highest proportion of LGBTQIA+ folks on social media, so it makes sense that when something goes wrong, those communities might feel that disproportionate impact.

One thing we want to emphasize is that we do not moderate people’s identities. We moderate behavior. We know that identity shows up across a Tumblr profile in many ways, from followed topics to the flags people put in their bios, and more. However, these signals play no role in how our moderation systems make decisions. We monitor those systems for evidence of bias and take corrective action when we find it.

We understand that the communications sent to affected users, and our broader silence to the community, didn’t meet the standard people expect from us. That feedback is fair, and we apologize. We’ve updated the messaging sent to people impacted by these incidents. We are also overhauling our process with a goal of responding to mistaken suspension appeals within 24 hours, and have instituted an ongoing internal review of how suspensions and appeals are handled.

Going forward, we’re committed to finding a better balance: being more transparent with our community about issues that matter, even when we can’t share everything.

Tumblr belongs to everyone. We take that seriously, and we intend to earn back your trust. We are not afraid to have tough discussions with you or make updates based on your feedback, though on occasion, it might take some time.

To the people whose accounts were affected, and to the members of our trans community who felt targeted: we are truly sorry.

Tumblr Staff