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notajerusalemcricket reblogged hellionmutt Nov 22, 2023 This post was flagged because somewhere in your reblog there might be sexually explicit content tothearkmoved Jun 24, 2020 karhs Follow Nov 18, 2023 Lost In Transi the terrible spectre #whatever floats your stoat... #not my joke ALT QI tumblr staff shaking in utter fear and dread of the terrible spectre ? CLU

← Post Rita, Tumblr Fugitiv @mAD_hØF⚫ Feb 20 literally too much for tumblr to handle NO 3 2718 126 Ilil 1.4K Matt Mullenweg @photomatt Follow These photos are fine for Tumblr. Someone else could post them. You can't because you violated the community guidelines and terms of service multiple times and are banned for life. With your new accounts on other services, consider not posting deathwishes against their staff. • 6:14 AM Feb 22, 2024 153 Views

Rita, Tumblr Fugitive @mAD_h0....1d literally too much for tumblr to handle 5 MIC 1722 Matt Mullenweg @photomatt 179 2.2K Follow Replying to @mAD_hOPZ When will you be honest with your followers? That the repeated adult content violations were not pictures like this, but likely ones on your other accounts (actual names): irishbigcockgirl, burgerfootjob, furryvore-burps, bredstrogen, cumburp, doggirlballsack, hungqueen, bigtittycockgf, bigcocktittygf, girltaint, muskmommy, girlballsack, showersharts, sapiosexual-breeder, catgirlhairball, catgirlcondom, catgirlcumsock, catgirlballsack, cumspangler 12:45 22 Feb 24 · 2,404 Views

jame7t I mean this genuinely: the ceo couldve absolutely just gotten away with this still right after the c/a/r h/a/m/m/e/r posting saga if he just stayed on vacation. Following a woman to a second website (AFTER SHE SAID SHE WAS DONE WITH THIS ONE) and continuing the drama, blaming her for being banned (when the crux of the issue wasn't even the bans, it was the repeated harassment staff did nothing about!) I seriously don't think he realizes how much this undermines this platform and staff. Like, dude, come on. "If you don't like it, leave!" Is not a good response, especially if you're going to follow her to a different site anyway and personally bother her. He's even complained about receiving death threats- and death threats are bad! It's bad to have death threats sent to you. So why is it ok when they're sent to her? Like that was the issue. THAT was the issue. And from all his posting it seriously seems like he doesn't get that. The time to own up to s--- and apologize was a few days ago at this point. This is putting a lot of really bad behaviors on display in front of two websites now.

juniepops Incredibly intelligent maneuver by tumblr ceo to make a post that boils down to "if you want to deserve staff looking into preventing your months of harassment as well as explaining why your accounts keep getting scorched-earth deleted when you've made a point to follow TOS, you have to avoid hurting OUR special feelings or we'll call the FBI on you. This is totally not transphobic despite only happening to trans women btw" and then delete the same trans woman's account again. Excellent work sire you've reached new depths of spinelessness and ineptitude

magicalgirlmindcrank Follow God photomatt following Avery to Twitter to commit DATA LAW BREACHES and effectively STALKING AND HARASSING HER when Avery's only complain in the first place was not getting any help with all the STALKING AND HARASSMENT she suffered for TWO GODDAMN YEARS is genuinely f------ INSANE. I wish photomatt a very lose all your money.

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About

Tumblr CEO Transphobic Moderation Controversy refers to criticism levied against WordPress co-founder and Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg, whose online handle is PhotoMatt, for banning the Tumblr account Predstrogen and, according to some users, for allegedly encouraging content moderation with an anti-trans tilt on the website. Matt issued several public responses to the questions posed by disgruntled Tumblr users in February 2024 and cited a post in which Predstrogen describes him dying in a car explosion involving hammers that "go flying everywhere" as the reason for Predstrogen's ban. The incident led to numerous Tumblr users sharing memes about cars and hammers and discussing the various times they believe Tumblr demonstrated anti-trans moderation practices.

Background

Various Tumblr users expressed their discontent with Tumblr's moderation policies leading up to February 2024, with many accusing Tumblr of censoring specifically transgender bloggers and mislabeling their content as explicit material. Tumblr^[6] user @unlettered-heathen posted one example of such moderation on August 3rd, 2023, gathering over 77,000 notes in six months (seen below).

transmortifried ayyyyy guess who got her navel pierced today 1 transmortifried Hello transmortifried, We've reviewed your classification appeal and after careful review, we have determined that your post is considered adult under our Community Guidelines. Don't worry, this post hasn't been deleted, it is just hidden from public view. For more information about what is considered adult content, please see our FAQ support post or our Help Center. Thank you, Tumblr Trust & Safety tumblr yeah okay it's a pattern 60 29th Street # 343 San Francisco, CA 94110. Email settings zenonym Follow and now they killed my blog! you f------! #rb #ARE YOU F------ SERIOUS #GOD IM SORRY

On February 20th, 2024, Tumblr^[1]^[2]^[3] CEO Matt Mullenweg posted a series of responses to questions about content moderation practices on Tumblr, notably stating that he was addressing it due to "mass misinformation."

Many of the questions posed to him revolved around the banning of the Tumblr account Predstrogen, operated by a trans woman (shown below).

photomatt Follow cowgirl-cow-girl asked: You gonna do anything or make any statement about the rampant transmisogyny on this hellsite, especially in cases like predstrogen recently? Or yall gonna stay silent and keep letting/making us get pushed off of it. : I have a number of asks about this, so this is to address all of them, I won't do each individually. We generally do not comment on individual cases, but because there seems to be mass misinformation around this, I will make an exception and comment on predstrogen. First, Tumblr has a number of LGBT+ including trans people on staff, and they see things from the inside fully, and they're not protesting this case. Why do we wrongly have a transphobe reputation? We did have an external contract moderator last year that was making transphobic moderation (and also selling moderation, criminally). As soon as we were aware that person was fired, and we later terminated the entire relationship with that contracting firm and have brought almost everything in-house (at great cost). I have previously commented on this publicly, several times. I am not aware of any Automattician (people who work at Automattic and Tumblr) who has made any transphobic moderation actions. If it's reported it is investigated immediately, if anything were found that person would be terminated for cause immediately.

In predstrogen's case in addition to some mistagged sexually explicit posts, which on its own wouldn't be that bad, we have documented cases of harassment against other users. Most importantly, and why she is banned from Tumblr for life, is she made threats of violence against Tumblr staff. That is never okay. Threats of violence is not protected speech. We will work with police and FBI where appropriate. I just got a death threat yesterday from someone mad about predstrogen, and that account was immediately terminated. So regardless of whether you still think Tumblr staff is somehow a bunch of transphobes, know that threats of violence or death are still not acceptable and will result in immediate and serious action. Know that when you rile people up, they can do dumb things with possibly permanent consequences. (2 hours later update: I have changed instances of the pronoun "they" or "their" to "the account" because I am unaware of pronoun preference in this instance and don't want to misgender anyone. Thank you for the people who reported this as an issue. Update 2: "She" is apparently better, the post now says that. Sorry for the mistake.) Here's one (of many!) examples of the harassment violations, this one targets me but there are others targeting other users on the site. predstrogen predstrogen predstrogen i hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere how long until deathwishes against the ceo get me banned or flagged. right now im p----- off enough that i want to find out The second part seems to indicate she wanted to be suspended, I'm unaware of why, perhaps to create this sort of uproar. #transgender #tumblr #ama #automattic #predstrogen

photomatt✔✔ Follow puppydragonbite asked: all you ever do is drop the ban hammer on trans women you don't like, while casually ignoring the harassment they face because of your ineptitude, well done you mis- erable bag of lies AHBARINGWEN IST #ama #moderation #tumblr THER SE Community guideline violations, including mistagging, harassment of other users, and threats of violence, all three of which were repeated in predstrogen's case, were the reasons for the suspension, not her identity. There are obviously tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of trans men and women on this site-why would our accused transphobia be applied to just this one user? The most parsimonious explanation is that it was because of the stated community guideline violations, not her identity as a trans woman.

photomatt✔✔ Follow changelingrain asked: it's been four hours and nothing you've said has made this decision look better, congratulations on the successful transmisogyny! you have, to be clear, f----- it. I am genuinely sorry. I wanted to respond to what seemed like big concerns, and what I believe to be fully false accusation of transmisogyny. My responses seem to have just stoked the flames, and made people madder and more dug in on their perception of Tumblr staff, and now a lot of that is directed at me personally. For those who think my responses made it worse than if we had just never commented at all, which is the standard policy, I have failed you, failed in what I was trying to communicate, and I am sorry.

In the post, Matt denied that Tumblr has an anti-trans bias in its content moderation, saying that Predstrogen was banned for issuing a threat against him. The threat was a post by Predstrogen in which she wrote, "I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere" (seen below).

predstrogen predstrogen predstrogen i hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere how long until deathwishes against the ceo get me banned or flagged. right now im p----- off enough that i want to find out

In an email correspondence with Know Your Meme on February 21st, 2024, Mullenweg stated that the account was not suspended for a single threat. Mullenweg listed the reasons for Predstrogen's suspension as follows:

* Mis-tagging adult content against Tumblr's community guidelines, repeatedly.
* Harassment of numerous other Tumblr users, not just me.
* Multiple threats of violence, not just the one I shared.

Mullenweg also acknowledged that his sharing one example of Predstrogen's "multiple threats of violence" may have confused readers and that he considers the phrase "I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death" a "very scary thing to read."

Predstrogen / Rita's Response

On February 22nd, 2024, the person behind the username Predstrogen posted images of herself to her X / Twitter handle @mAD_h0PZ. The photos were titled, "Literally too much for Tumblr to handle."

Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg responded^[9] to Rita's post, saying "When will you be honest with your followers? That repeated adult violations were not pictures like this, but likely ones on your other accounts." Mullenweg went on to list various Tumblr handles purportedly attributed to Predstrogen, many of which had explicit usernames. Mullenweg has since deleted his reply (seen below, left).

Rita responded to Mullenweg (seen below, right),^[10] writing, "a man worth $400,000,000 followed me to another website to publicly out me as owner of the tumblr username 'showersharts' on my selfies over internet drama," adding, "for the record, half of these were blank and were just funny urls I had on a sideblog in case I wanted to change to it. even then, the man said I was banned for harassment, not sexual content. hes backtracking and seeking me out."

Rita, Tumblr Fugitive @mAD_hØPZ - 19h a man worth $400,000,000 followed me to another website to publicly out me as owner of the tumblr username "showersharts" on my selfies over internet drama when he banned me 3 times in a week and mentioned calling the cops incredible x.com/photomatt/stat... This post is unavailable. 13 131 Rita, Tumblr Fugitive @mAD_hØPZ 1K ₁310K 9:57 AM Feb 22, 2024 26.5K Views In predstrogen's case in addition to some mistagged sexually explicit posts, which on its own wouldn't be that bad, we have 口企 for the record, half of these were blank and were just funny urls i had on a sideblog in case i wanted to change to it. even then, the man said i was banned for harrassment, not sexual content. hes backtracking and seeking me out. avewy and cyprederone broke no rules either :

Online Reactions

On February 20th, 2024, Tumblr^[4] user Elerium posted a screenshot supposedly showing PhotoMatt direct messaging people who responded to the aforementioned posts addressing Tumblr moderation. The post gathered over 6,000 notes in a day (seen below, left). Elerium also claimed that Matt messaged "dozens" of other people.

Also on February 20th, Tumblr user stratomod^[5] shared an example of Tumblr's allegedly biased anti-trans moderation practices, with the thread gathering over 190,000 notes in a day (seen below, right).

it almost goes without saying but for posterity's sake i want people to remember that during @photomatt's meltdown last night he dmed dozens and dozens of people (near exclusively trans women, For Some Inexplicable Reason), sometimes less than a Minute after they left a reply, responded to a post of his, or even just Made Their Own Post about it. photomatt ↓x photomatt Co-founder WordPress; CEO Automattic; Currently running Tumblr Not following each other Not sure the point you're trying to make. That we should continue to serve customers that make threats of violence against staff and harass other users? oh my god you really are having a meltdown about this aren't you. this is so like. pure intimidation tactics at their most blatant and obvious. why else would you sit on your namesearch, refreshing and refreshing and Instantly jumping into our dms the second we participated in the conversation. that isn't normal, not for a ceo and not for like, Anyone Else for that matter. matt spent a lot of his little episode making sure everyone knew he didn't think he was a transmisogynist. that was very important to him, that he defended himself from that. congratulations bud you f----- it

dancing-coyote: holycrapitsbags: .....….....…......................…... chavisory: (via queenfrau) funnytwittertweets: ……………………………….………………………………………….. This content has been removed for violating Tumblr's Community Guidelines. [Tweet by Gillian Branstetter reads "If enforcing gender norms requires a constant state of surveillance and censorship then they probably aren't as biological or innate as you think they are] This post is now a work of political art that is just A+ February 202024 "Why does this site have a reputation for transphobia?" - The site's literal owner, two hours ago

Also on February 20th, 2024, Tumblr^[6] user Problemnyatic posted a meme showing Mr. Krabs from SpongeBob SquarePants saying, "We used to kill people with hammers for saying things like that." The meme was in reference to Predstrogen's car-hammer-explosion post and gathered over 12,000 notes in a day (seen below, left).

Later on February 20th, Tumblr^[7] user blackjack-void posted an Oh That's Real Nice meme commenting on the controversy that gathered over 12,000 notes in a day (seen below, right)

3 with We used to kill people hammers.. for saying things like that so do I send this to photomatt 3 Posted 1 day ago 12,239 notes

oh thats thats the ceo of tumblr banning several trans women from the platform for and threatening them with violence and legal action for complaining about the complete lack of effort or moderation to try and stop the targeted harrassment campaigns on tumblr and misgendering the trans woman who he banned for life twice in the process

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External References

^[1] Tumblr – PhotoMatt

^[2] Tumblr – PhotoMatt

^[3] Tumblr – PhotoMatt

^[4] Tumblr – elerium

^[5] Tumblr – stratomod

^[6] Tumblr – problemnyatic

^[7] Tumblr – blackjack-void

^[8] Tumblr – unlettered-heathen

^[9] X – photomatt

^[10] X – mAD_h0PZ

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Post Rita, Tumblr Fugitiv @mAD_h0F • Feb 19 tumblrs ceo threatened to call the police on me and deleted my account when i pointed out that he was calling law enforcement on a trans woman tumblr has not emailed me about my harrassment in months. theyve done nothing its been a week 1723 87 1.5K Matt Mullenweg ❤ @photomatt Follow Reporting credible threats of violence or terrorism is actually a legal requirement. No one reported your "i hope photomatt dies forever a painful death", however. There's no problem with your transition photos, or the millions of others that have been posted. 6:12 AM Feb 22, 2024 87 Views

staff ♥ 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. #announcements #transgender #trans rights #trans

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Tumblr CEO Transphobic Moderation Controversy

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About

Background

Many of the questions posed to him revolved around the banning of the Tumblr account Predstrogen, operated by a trans woman (shown below).

* Mis-tagging adult content against Tumblr's community guidelines, repeatedly.
* Harassment of numerous other Tumblr users, not just me.
* Multiple threats of violence, not just the one I shared.

Predstrogen / Rita's Response

On February 22nd, 2024, the person behind the username Predstrogen posted images of herself to her X / Twitter handle @mAD_h0PZ. The photos were titled, "Literally too much for Tumblr to handle."

Online Reactions

Later on February 20th, Tumblr^[7] user blackjack-void posted an Oh That's Real Nice meme commenting on the controversy that gathered over 12,000 notes in a day (seen below, right)

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References

^[1] Tumblr – PhotoMatt

^[2] Tumblr – PhotoMatt

^[3] Tumblr – PhotoMatt

^[4] Tumblr – elerium

^[5] Tumblr – stratomod

^[6] Tumblr – problemnyatic

^[7] Tumblr – blackjack-void

^[8] Tumblr – unlettered-heathen

^[9] X – photomatt

^[10] X – mAD_h0PZ

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Jill Moderator

Feb 21, 2024 at 08:34AM EST in reply to tino768

It should be noted this is more "straw that broke the camel's back" situation. People on Tumblr noticed that a lot of trans fem accounts were slowly banned for the stated reason of containing "explicit content" when there was no clear indication of it (many believe it was transition photos they saw as such) and ban appeals were ignored. Meanwhile, actual porn accounts would remain up, as well as users that sent transphobic harassment asks. This is in addition to numerous other more generic things like mods removing posts that straight faced criticized them or the company.

That's the backdrop to the post in question.

Matt cites as a "threat of violence" a post that reads:
"i hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere."

Many find this absurd senario an odd thing to view as a real threat of violence.

+63

tino768

Feb 21, 2024 at 06:36AM EST

Sounds like someone was banned for saying shitty things, what's the big deal? And note to any trans people reading this, if this kind of behavior is your SOP you people really need to take a step back and reevaluate your approach because why would anyone wanna treat you people as normal when you keep doing THIS psychotic bullshit?

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Tumblr CEO Transphobic Moderation Controversy

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