a little bit of Uh Huh and a whole lot of Oh Yeah

Tumblr's Contemplated Self-Harm Content Policy

Dunno about others, but I find this disturbing.  Tumblr’s “Content Policy” statement already forbids “Hate Content, Defamation, and Libel” and “Sexually Explicit Video” submission, despite staff’s statement that it is “…deeply committed to supporting and defending our users’ freedom of speech.”  Libel is illegal in many jurisdictions, certainly, as is other banned content like identity theft and copyright.  Hate speech is illegal in some jurisdictions reached by Tumblr, as is pornography.  Fine.  Self-harm is a form of expression that is not per se illegal in many parts of the world; some artists consider it part of their oeuvre,  whereas others simply view it as a way they communicate to the world.  Tumblr’s decision to block this content is not consistent with “..supporting and defending [its] users’ freedom of speech.”  It’s rendering a judgment about content which is typically not illegal.

Self-harm bothers me.  It bothers a lot of people.  Most view it as a manifestation of psychological or pathological disorder.  But there are people in the world who would consider my political beliefs, for example, somehow psychologically disordered.  What about speaking out in defense of science and scientific principles?  I disagree with people who don’t believe in climate change or evolution, for example, but I don’t want Tumblr censoring their content.  And that’s where the self-harm issue crosses a very uncomfortable threshold.  In fact, this sounds a LOT like Twitter self-censoring in order to expand its user base (and its business bottom-line), or Google giving in to Chinese demands that it censor its search results to block politically-sensitive sites or in India to avoid angering the cultural and religious elite.   Social media were crucial in fomenting the tide of revolution in the Arab Spring, yet all these social media outlets seem to stunt their own growth as powerful agents of communication and social change.  But at the end of the day, these are all corporations with financial obligations of various stripes, and the arc of corporate will bends towards the dollar rather than always doing what’s right.  Suppressing speech may be good for the bottom line, but it doesn’t serve society.  What Tumblr needs is more voices, not fewer.  In his concurring opinion in  Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

If this concerns you as much as it does me, and you want to see the flow of legal information via Tumblr unencumbered by social and political judgments, I urge you to email Tumblr and tell them — just as I have.

staff:

One of the great things about Tumblr is that people use it for just about every conceivable kind of expression. People being people, though, that means that Tumblr sometimes gets used for things that are just wrong. We are deeply committed to supporting and defending our users’ freedom of speech,…