2. On Censorship

underhandedpenguin:

Tumblr, I’m angry.

I’m not the only one, and frankly there are a lot of people who are worse off than me over all this, and who have a lot more right to be angry. If you implement this policy in the way you say you will, I’m not going to be affected by it, something I’ll go into more in the future, but which I think makes it all the more important to tell you how angry I am and why.

This isn’t about adult content (whatever that is), and that nebulous category isn’t what I’m angry about. What I’m angry about, Tumblr, is censorship.  

Because that’s what this is. No matter that you couch it in terms of community and expression, this is about putting a big black bar over content that you don’t want to see—because if you don’t want to see it, nobody should be allowed to see it. It’s about the fact that you want everyone’s morality to conform to a corporate morality that allows for the greatest possible advertising revenue for you, and are willing to use the power you have to make sure that happens at the cost of people’s ability to express opinions or ideas.

And, in an exercise in lexical gerrymandering that would put Shakespeare to shame, you’re putting it all in the language of freedom and safety and broadening horizons. Speaking as a writer, I have to say I’m impressed at your ability to say one thing in order to mean its complete opposite.

If you meant what you were saying it would be one thing. There are lots of places on the internet that people can post adult content, though those seem to be shrinking by the day, and so really losing Tumblr as a platform for that ought not to be a problem—all you’re losing is some content that you’ve decided you don’t want to host anymore. And at the end of the day, isn’t it your right as the ones maintaining the platform to decide what can and cannot be hosted on it? So we’ll keep the white supremacists and get rid of the female-presenting nipples, fair enough, that’s your decision to make.

Except, Tumblr, that censorship has never been about removing content. It’s always been about removing people. When has a censorship movement ever actually been about the material it was censoring? It’s never been about getting rid of propaganda, of subversive material, of porn. It’s always been about getting rid of communists, of queer people, of sex workers. The purpose of censorship isn’t to protect the public from content that might but uncomfortable or dangerous to them, it’s to protect an imagined body politic from having to interact with people you’d rather they didn’t. It’s to protect you from having your authority threatened by people who don’t conform to your ideal and don’t fit into your goals.

You claim your website is about community, Tumblr. Censorship is designed to separate people, not bring them together. Don’t get me wrong, othering people has always been a great community builder. It creates small, insular communities who are defensive and afraid of outsiders. If that’s what you’re trying to create, then keep up the good work.

As a content creator, censorship makes me angry, Tumblr. As consumer of content, it makes me angry. As a human being, censorship makes me angry. And it obviously doesn’t bother you, and I don’t know what to do about that.