And That’s The Tea 🍵.  I’ll Raise My Glass To That 🍻🥂

The internet can be a really wonderful place 

It’s changed the way we learn and research, the way we connect with others, and the way we express ourselves in positive, powerful ways. But it’s no secret that these improvements also present us with unique challenges. We can learn new things faster, but sometimes we have to sort through piles of misinformation while we do—and it’s not always easy to detect. We’re able to connect with people we never would have met otherwise thanks to social media, but it can encourage addictive behavior in the apps that keep us connected. We’re able to express ourselves more easily, but we sometimes overshare in ways detrimental to our careers, reputation, and mental health. 

We—as in Tumblr the company—are not immune to these challenges. You know it. We know it. And we hear you. We recognize that toxicity and negativity happen everywhere online, even on Tumblr. We are constantly striving to learn and utilize new ways to create a safe place for our communities. Opening up this dialogue to anyone who wants to join is the first step we’re taking in 2020 to foster a more positive, collaborative experience. Over the next year, we’ll be rolling out improvements and updates to our platform that improves your experience. 

We can all agree that these challenges exist, but let’s look out for each other; Teach other people and ourselves how to keep the wonderful parts of the internet in view while working through the troublesome bits. These issues are best addressed through honest, open dialogue. 

That’s why we’ve partnered with the UK non-profit, Ditch the Label (@ditchthelabel), to help spread some internet safety awareness as well as facilitate some much-needed conversation between yourselves—the community on Tumblr.

We’re calling it World Wide What

At the heart of this campaign is, well, you. We want to hear from you. Over the next month we’ll focus on six different topics with accompanying videos for discussion. Each one will feature a different real-world problem you’ve most likely faced as an Extremely Online Person (yeah, we see you) and what you can do to mitigate those issues. They’re live right now:

“Fake News, Skewed Views”

“Don’t @ Me” (Cyberbullying) 

“Authenticity Online” 

“Pull Down to Refresh” 

“Felt Cute Might Delete Later” 

“A Safer Internet: Moderation” 

Some posts will be accompanied by Answer Times with guests that can speak knowledgeably about one or more of the topics we’re focusing on. We’re looking at:

1/8 – @medialiteracyed taking questions about fake news

1/15 – @ditchthelabel opening up their ask box to discuss cyberbullying

1/22 – Jameela Jamil, founder of I Weigh, to answer questions about the effects of inauthentic social media personalities

TBD – Someone from the leadership team here at Tumblr to talk about user safety

One of the more beautiful qualities of the Tumblr community is that so many of you spare the time and space to look out for others. If you have someone in your life that you think could use a little guiding light to use social media in a safer way for their mental or physical health, this might be a good resource to send them. 

You can stay tuned for more updates on World Wide What, including when our Answer Times go live, by following this blog. If you want to be notified the moment a post from us goes live, tap or click the silhouette at the top of our page and select “Get notifications.”

In the meantime, we want to hear from you. What kind of impact has social media had on your mental health? If you want to start a conversation with the community, reblog this post or make a new one and tag it so others can easily find it.

#WorldWideWhat

““In a world full of mumble rappers, you (Cody) are a real lyricist.”- MJF

I don’t know if this is bad or not, but I literally have been laughing about this for 20 minutes lol 😂

Share this pancake cat with someone who could use some extra love! ❤️️

Chibird 2020 Calendar | Patreon | Webtoon

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this is the money jessica. reblog in 10 seconds for good luck 

This is like scary accurate...

Via This is my random life. 

@staff

An Open Letter to Tumblr about the Adult Content Ban and How it is Hurting Your Users:

Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more. 

You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again. 

We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue. 

 Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole.  There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough. 

You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:

Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind. 

We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.

 If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to. 

You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.

If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise. 

Sincerely, 

The users of your website. 

@staff @support

You also have these baby teenage mutant ninja turtles to protect you.

Contact Your Representative and Tell Them To Fight Against Trump’s Camps

Additionally, if you can see if you can donate money to these organizations

Lawyersforgoodgoverment.com

fairfightbondfund.org

lgbtqfund.org

communitybondproject.org

immigrantfamilies.org

freedomforimmigrants.org

@hobbitfalls135

" 𝐈 𝐰𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐢𝐭 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐲 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞," 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐨

“𝐒𝐨 𝐝𝐨 𝐈 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐆𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐢𝐟, “ 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐨 𝐝𝐨 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬. 𝐁𝐮𝐭, 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞. 𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐨 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐮𝐬."

~ 𝐉.𝐑.𝐑. 𝐓𝐨𝐥𝐤𝐢𝐞𝐧

𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐜 {𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐟𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞}