A while back, I moved my origami projects from my own personal site to Tumblr – figuring this would be a good platform to host my artwork and would save me some time in formatting.
A tumblr site is a bit like a blog, but very focused on photos. A site owner can post their own content – as I do – or they can repost other people’s content. Over time, this can lead to sort of “curated” sites focusing on a topic. It might be cute pictures of dogs, architecture, classical art, politics, knitting – anything, really. Those reposts connect sites and you could find many different sites that related to whatever topic or interest you had.
And because anything goes, some sites focused on adult content.
Which, of course, I know nothing about. Ahem.
Tumblr got bought out and the new owners decided that this platform would no longer host adult content. How they defined that has been widely reviled as sexist, racist, and generally bad for the LGBTQ community. You can look up “female presenting nipples tumblr” to see some of that critique of the new rules.
I figured that, with a site full of original paper artwork, this would pretty much pass me by. I didn’t like the rule change, but what’s inappropriate about origami?
Turns out the automated process that flags these posts didn’t like one of mine.
Here it is:
I had signed in to show someone a project I had posted and got a note that this post had been flagged as having adult content and was now hidden.
There was an option to appeal and I clicked the link to have a human review it. A few hours later I got an email that it had been reviewed, approved, and un-hidden. With a thank you that this process helps keep the site “safer”.
If their automated process is that bad, if it can see a photo of origami butterflies and decide this is adult content – what else is it getting wrong? And how is this keeping anyone safe?
There is a lot of darkness in people and a lot of that ends up on the internet. And censoring that can walk a fine line. Images of people hurting other people or animals, yeah, that’s an easy one to censor. Pretty clearly wrong and illegal. But human sexuality? Human nudity? That’s trickier.
What is appropriate? What do we, as a civilization or culture, define as taboo? Who makes those rules? And as we add more machine intelligence to the picture, how do we teach machines the rules that we humans struggle to define? The human form is amazing and beautiful and somehow, also, inappropriate. At least on the internet.
Tumblr hasn’t figured it out yet. And I’ll need to keep a closer eye to see what they flag next.
For now, though, enjoy the hand-painted paper butterflies.