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Artist | Nonbinary| POC | 27 years old
Asks are always open I just don’t always get notifications so if I don’t respond immediately, that’s probably why. Please try and keep things appropriate. I do not condone hate, violence or guilt tripping of any kind. If you wish to be taken off a taglist for a specific fandom, please send an ask or send a DM.
All WIPS as of now will be posted on Ko-Fi. Will be slowly moving all Commissions there as well over time. Most items there will be accessible to all.
This blog does occasionally engage in fandoms meant for older audiences. This is your warning. All troubling topics will be tagged accordingly.
wannabee twitter already bending the knee to terfs
If we are ever going to stop this, then you guys need to start learning why this happens.
And it’s not always because some executive made a decision to favor a TERF. It’s because the technology is broken in a way TERFs have learned to use to their advantage.
So content moderation is a HUGE task. It is incredibly inefficient to manually monitor all user reports– when you “flag” something as spam or inappropriate or ‘inciting harm’ (what Blueskye is saying the banned users had in their posts). So what actually happens is that the bulk of it is reviewed by machine. The precise “how” is a bit of a black box (if you say exactly, it makes it more vulnerable to being bypasses), but we generally know it’s a bit of machine learning (“ai”, but not he chatgpt kind) and a bit of automation. Generically this gets referred to as an “algorithm” (which is a meaningless word I don’t have time to unpack here).
The TERFs have a formula. A battle plan, if you will. I’ve been watching them use it for almost a decade. And they play social media sites like a fiddle every single time.
The way it works is that they coordinate attacks on targets they dislike. (Usually trans people, but ace discourse is a notable example of targets not necessarily fitting that demographic.) They send links to each other of posts to report. They’ll flag it for whatever the nearest thing they can is. The blueskye users were wishing ill to JK Rowling, so “inciting harm” was the excuse selected. “Inappropriate or sexually explicit content” is a common selection for other trans content.
Then what happens is the content moderation “algorithm” sees a huge influx of reports for a certain post or user. And instead of making a human manually review all of that, it automatically initiates a ban or takedown. And if the “algorithm” has word censorship built in, it will begin to auto-flag for things containing words in posts frequently flagged, so it begins to auto-flag the word trans itself.
This has been happening for almost a decade. There was a trans youtuber who proved TERF hater group chats flagged his videos so much that it started auto-demonitizing identical videos with the word trans in the title, but leaving ones without the word alone. I strongly suspect this is why we see huge amounts of trans women banned for no reason on tumblr. And this is clearly what is happening now.
How do we fix it? There’s no easy solution. All the things about the “algorithm” that make moderation easier for the social media platforms are the exact reasons it’s so difficult to defeat. It’s hard to teach a machine what’s a genuine flag and a malicious one. Again, it’s been almost a decade since the issue was raised with youtube, and there has yet to be a solution for rooting out malicious coordinated flagging.
But here’s one thing that can help: get TERFs off of social media. Stop letting them bait you into petty fights. Learn how to identify them. Block and report them.
Blocking TERFs and other assorted bigots is especially effective on bsky, because the block function there is nuclear. In short, if you block someone, not only can they not view your account or any of your posts, but any replies they made on your posts will no longer be viewable by others, even if they haven’t personally blocked that user themselves. If they quote you, you can even decouple your post from their quote. In short, blocking someone on bsky produces mutual hiding of content, and it’s extremely effective at starving these cunts of oxygen. Bigots who can’t convince people to fight with them and whose posts don’t gain any traction because they’re blocked by everyone and their dog leave the platform, i.e. Jesse Singal.
It works, people just need to remember to do it more. Preemptive blocking of dickheads before they start shit with you is the best way to prevent things like this from happening.
do y’all remember before direct messages tumblr had a dumbass ask limit of 10 per hour and communication was impossible until they introduced dumbass fan mail and we were basically sending telegraphs back in forth trying to communicate those were…dark times
Do y'all remember when they finally gave us direct messages and instead of doing it normally, they gave it to a few people at a time and we had to infect each other with it like a virus
remember when any post with more than like 6 people talking was unreadably smushed except for the last few additions remember when any post of over 500 characters became a link back to op’s blog readmore style remember when video and audio posts had about a 10% chance of working when you click play
As a recent user I love finding out shit like this from older users. What the fuck guys???? Why were you USING IT AT ALL?!??
believe it or not, we liked that more
its worth noting that immediately after these updates that made everything better, we were all angry about it
