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Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr owner Automattic, is believed to be on leave. Instead, he is arguing with Tumblr users over a personal content moderation decision, which has sparked community-wide outrage and accusations of transphobia.
Over the past few days, the situation escalated to such an extent that Mullenweg started confronting the concerned user other platforms and publicly shared personal information about your account.
The controversy began when a user with the blog name predstrogen was banned. Before the ban, she was frustrated with Tumblr because the platform failed to take action when she reported that she was being targeted with transmisogyny harassment. She also claimed that her account was suspended for posting photos of herself wearing clothes after undergoing gender confirmation surgery. This led him to post that he hoped the CEO would “die an eternally painful death, involving a car full of hammers that explodes multiple times and the hammers go flying everywhere.”
According to Mullenweg, Predstrogen was banned for posts that threatened violence against Tumblr employees, and specifically cited the “forever painful death” post. She also claimed that the photos of her wearing transitions were not a violation of adult content.
“We don’t normally comment on individual cases, but because there is massive misinformation about this, I’ll make an exception and comment on predestrogen,” he wrote on his blog. photomat, She added, “There are many LGBT+ people at Tumblr, including trans people on staff, and they see things completely from the inside, and they are not protesting this issue.”
Some users said that Mullenweg was overreacting, as the language was too cartoonish to be taken seriously. But Mullenweg took the post as a threat.
“Threats of violence are never okay. Threats of violence are not protected speech,” he wrote on his blog. “We will work with the police and the FBI where appropriate, although it is clear this is not yet necessary in the case of predstrogen. “I’m referring to what we could potentially do for other threats.”
Tumblr did not respond to requests for comment.
Mullenweg moved the debate off the stage to X, where commented On a post by a user who was banned on Tumblr. since one of his tumblr postsMullenweg shared the names of several of his side blogs, which are not public information (Tumblr users often create empty side blogs without any content to sit on a URL).
Mullenweg wrote, “On misquoting adult content, I added context to say that this has nothing to do with clothed transition photos. She has over 20 other blogs and multiple accounts under her name. So obvious I can’t post them here without the mature tag.” , then list some accounts by name.
Apart from Elon Musk since taking over Twitter (now X), it is unusual to see a social platform CEO commenting directly on individual content moderation decisions. It’s even more unusual for those CEOs to share private information about that user’s account.
Bluesky faced a similar situation last year, but it ran into trouble contrary manner, One user said he hoped a prominent black user would be removed from “some really high place.” In that case, Bluesky’s team decided it was not a legitimate death threat, which strained the emerging platform’s relationship with its Black users.
“Whether intelligently or not, many people use violent imagery when arguing or expressing anger,” said Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky. Posted those days. “We debated whether ‘death threats’ need to be specific and direct to cause harm, and people’s ability to engage in heated discussions on BlueSky if we restrict this kind of speech. What would this mean for the
When compared, these two moderation decisions reflect the difficulty that platforms have in making decisions about certain types of speech. While Bluesky believed that being pushed from “some real high place” was exaggerated, Tumblr decided that “an eternally painful death by a car loaded with hammers, which explodes more than a few times and hammers fly everywhere” is a sonic threat.
The tumbler is in an extended downward spiral. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo (now TechCrunch’s parent company) for $1 billion in 2013, but the platform struggled to the extent that Automattic bought Tumblr in 2019 for just $3 million. Last year, he said that the platform loses $30 million every year, and later, he reassigned Most of Tumblr’s employees are for other projects inside Automattic. But no one in the trust and safety team was reassigned, so the changes at the company presumably did not impact these moderation decisions. However, Tumblr has a poor track record when it comes to content moderation decisions, particularly decisions involving trans people.
“Last year we had an outside contract moderator who was making transphobic moderation (and also criminally selling moderation),” Mullenweg wrote on his blog. “We fired that person as soon as we found out.” “And subsequently we ended the entire relationship with that contracting firm and brought almost everything in-house (at great cost).”
Mullenweg pinned a post on his Tumblr titled “my beliefs and principles, where he addresses claims that he is transphobic. He is currently on leave till May.
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