#community labels

[staff]

Thanks for all of the recent feedback around Community Labels being incorrectly applied to content. In particular, we appreciate the input we’ve received from the LGBTQIA+ community and understand the frustrations from folks who felt that their content was unfairly labeled. When we realized this was happening, we immediately investigated and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.

The LGBTQIA+ community makes up about a quarter of the Tumblr community. It is important for us to support all Tumblr users, especially those whose safe spaces are under threat in certain parts of the world.

As you know, alongside of the rollout of Community Labels we also expanded the types of content allowed on Tumblr as a way to welcome more creativity, art, and self-expression. Our goals remain the same today. Human error happens and we apologize to anyone who has been impacted by these mistakes.

We are working to better understand what happened and will follow up with more information soon.

[ariapmdeol]

hey so tumblr just added this thing (community labels) and by default ALL these category filters are set to remove anything labelled with these from your feed entirely (not just blurred).

Please remember to go into your settings and adjust them to what you prefer! if you're under 18, you won't be able to adjust them as they are set to Hide until you turn 18

this is what it looks like in settings (i have everything set to Show, the default is Hidden)

[internetgremlin-writes]

IMPORTANT: TUMBLR & FANFICTION

Alright kids, listen up because @staff have pulled off a corker of a hot mess and have decided to add "Community Labels". I guess they've decided we can't be trusted to add our own warnings and people can't make sensible choices with what they engage with.

But why does it matter to me?

Tumblr have made labels AN OPT IN SITUATION which means every single blog here is automatically set to hide any triggering content

If you want to continue to be able to access and read fanfiction PLEASE go into your settings and click "show" on at least the "Mature" and "Sexual Themes" labels!!

ALSO IOS USERS: there's an extra fun "Hide additional content" bit just to really try and block us from any hopes of success. Make sure you opt out of that too otherwise I think content will be blocked on the mobile app!

Attached to this post are screenshots from my settings so you guys know what to look for. I could only find it on my desktop settings and not on the mobile app (for now at least)

[I feel like I should add I don't want to sound like I'm pressuring anyone... if you don't want to see certain content obviously keep it hidden and protect yourselves BUT this post is mainly targeted at the horny little gremlins I write for who will be suddenly deeply confused when their smut supply is cut off]

[messylustt]

just a reminder to those who report works for being too sexual. if you feel uncomfy or dislike the work don’t put a community label on it, instead don’t read it. most writers put content warnings on their posts. read them before venturing further, please. and if you dislike something on there, again don’t read any further. smut etc. isn’t for everyone, that’s perfectly fine. but don’t do that to a writers hard work. please and thank you.

[iznsfw]

Update: How To Keep Seeing My Smuts & Other Writers'

As per Tumblr's New "Community Label" Update

Hello! I've seen other writers make a post about the new update, so I wanted to make one of mine to notify my readers.

As you may know, Tumblr is pushing a Community Label update in which users are allowed to filter the content they want to see. While this is highly beneficial for those who want to avoid seeing content they aren't fond of, this can make you stop seeing the smuts a lot of writers in this community create.

If you want to keep enjoying our smuts:

For Website:

Go to Dashboard Settings, and click the Show circle in the Community Labels section on Mature content. Do the same for Sexual themes. You can choose whether to tick the options of the other choices or not.

Image taken from @writerpeach <3

For Mobile:

Go to Account Settings, then choose Content you see.

Go to the Community Labels section and click the arrow beside Hide on Mature. Then, click Show for both Mature and Sexual themes. Again, it is your choice if you want to tick the Show button for the other choices.

Thank you for reading, and reblog to spread the word!

[catgirl-kaiju]

reminder that i have also had nonsexual photos of me tagged as explict and sexual. i rarely post even any nudity and when i do, i put them on a side blog and voluntarily put community labels and filterable tags on them. any time i post an appeal, it never gets answered. i'm not even able to appeal community labels on those photos any more, and it breaks my heart because those are some of my favorite photos of myself. i've straight-up stopped posting selfies on here partly bc i've not taken many that i enjoy enough to share recently, but also because it's just too much of a hastle.

i've had this same blog continuously since 2012, since before i came out. over a decade now. if i lost it, i would be devastated. i also have meticulously curated side blogs for all of my art and comics, and my headmates also have their own blogs under this account. all of that would be lost.

predestrogen did not deserve this, she did nothing to violate tos. and it very easily could have been me or any other transfem person on here.

i've met friends and lovers on here. my art has found an audience on here. i've been able to crowdsource financial help on here when i've been at my lowest. i don't know if i would still be around if this website wasn't available to me. the thought of some staff member just erasing my presence from here is legitimately terrifying to me.

i'll repost every sfw image i've ever gotten a community label slapped on here and i fucking dare staff to do it again. i fucking dare you.

i'm lucky that it's not very many, but it's still true that none of these are mature content. none of these are images a cis woman would get flagged for. fuck you @staff for your blatant transmisogyny. fuck you for never taking my harassment reports seriously. fuck you for letting terfs and nazis just keep on existing here no matter how many times they're reported for violating tos.

[thatdogmagic]

Remember this smug as hell post?

Well, keep it in mind.

I'm going to give some people here the benefit of the doubt and go into this post with the assumption that they genuinely don't know how fucking awful the Tumblr """"porn filters"""" are for images deemed - or reported by users as - 'NSFW.'

This is a rehash of everything I wrote out before, but it's going over all of it in one big post, because this issue with community labels moves well beyond debates over what is and isn't NSFW. There are doublestandards within doublestandards, and no way at all for artists and creators to know for sure if their post is going to get blacklisted.

We're not merely talking about the fact that these filters exist. We're talking about the fact that they are wildly inconsistent, and that reported images aren't seen initially by a person so much as an extremely stupid algorithm. That's why there's the option to say 'this ruling was made in error.'

There are literally no set guidelines for what qualifies as NSFW, and what doesn't, when it comes to nudity, and to what characters those guidelines actually apply. Staff rulings do not match up to one another. They legitimately do not make sense. You cannot divine how a ruling is going to end up, and it is infuriating that staff is jerking us around like this when the platform very clearly wanted artists like us back.

Not only that, they were, yes: that fucking smug about it. In case you forgot, that 'cheater' picture is talking about people who fled the NSFW ban specifically.

Examples follow:

Both of these images were caught by the filters, and then appealed. The first one was (visibly, as you can see) downgraded to Everyone, in spite of the character showing more secondary sex characteristics than the first (breast, visible nipple).

Similarly, a male character showing a pube fluff was left alone, even in spite of being cited in my appeal on the second image.

Last, there is, as noted, this readily available image of Felicia, that you can find by searching 'darkstalkers Felicia' on the search bar. Did people forget that she's bottomless, and those aren't panties?

Using fluff to cover junk is an age-old trick for characters like this. And it clearly isn't a problem with the male character.

Further, you can go through just about any archive and see a ton of images that were not subject to community labels, many of which are much more racy, and much more legitimately "NSFW."

So, yes, beyond the disgust of Tumblr staff treating any body like mine as filthy and inherently sexual in nature, this is also about a system that is arbitrary, penalizes artists for no good reason, and has deeply opaque standards. You never know when a piece of yours is going to run afoul of a bot, or what a staff ruling will ultimately be, or why the ruling is there in the first place.

And that's bullshit. If you think it's anything other than bullshit, you're being a contrarian ass. Especially since a forced label absolutely WILL kill your visibility, where compared to implementing the label yourself. It is punitive, it is punishing, and I will say again: it is completely unnecessary to jerk us around like this when the platform very clearly wanted us back.

And now that we are, we're back to being treated like garbage, constantly having to guess what the rules actually mean, how they apply, and to which sorts of bodies they apply, all while watching our viewcounts on contested posts eat ten kinds of shit.

tl;dr, do not talk to me about 'following rules' when the rules are so ill-defined as to be quite literally useless, to me, and to every other artist on this website.

[yourlocalgaymafia]

Just a daily reminder that it’s ok to have complex identities that no one apart from you understands. Always feel free to use as many labels as you like because your identity doesn’t exist to make sense to other people, it exists so that you can better understand yourself <3

[sreegs]

just a psa in case you didn't notice it: if people report posts as missing community labels that shit gets thrown into review and the OP may get stuck with a bullshit label for no reason. fuck that.

however: some people are reblogging posts and self-tagging them with community labels, and that only affects that post and any other post reblogged from that post. the OP is unaffected

i'm pointing this out because i've seen posts marked as mature and people tagging/commenting "why is does this have a mature label??" but if you go back to the OP it's fine

if you see a post flagged double-check the OP or go back through the reblog notes and see if it just flips to mature somewhere in the reblog chain. that's someone self-flagging for some reason

[staff]

Introducing: Community Labels

As you know, art and artists make Tumblr what it is. We want everyone on Tumblr to be able to fully express themselves while also having control over what they encounter on their dashboards. That’s why we’re introducing Community Labels, an extension to your “Content you see” settings. Our ultimate goal is to create a more open Tumblr, and this is our first step in that direction. 

As a poster and reblogger, Community Labels are your way to help your followers avoid anything they’d rather not come across on their dashboards.

As a follower, setting your content preferences is a way to adjust your feed to your own comfort levels. 

How does it work?

When creating new posts (or editing old posts), you’ll see controls allowing you to label your post as unsuitable for those filtering certain content types it contains. 

When content is labeled, it will either be hidden, blurred, or displayed normally, based on each user’s preferences.

In your “Content you see” settings, you can now choose to show, blur, or hide content that depicts the following topics:

Drug and alcohol addiction: Contains discussions of substance abuse or addiction experience.

Violence: Contains violent or graphic content similar to what you might see in an age-restricted movie.

Sexual themes: Contains sexually suggestive subject matter, such as erotic writing or imagery.

Some examples of content that would require a community label:

Fanart of your favorite ship engaging with each other in...a very private moment 

Euphoria GIFs showing Rue’s substance abuse 

A movie trailer depicting graphic war scenes 

A graphic 50 Shades of Grey edit

This doesn’t change our content policies: spam, hate content, and porn bots are still not welcome in the community. It’s also still important that we abide by app store rules, which means we need to make sure that mature content is only accessible to people who are old enough and have opted in to view that type of content. More information about Community Labels is available in the Help Center.

This is an opportunity to work towards a richer, more nuanced Tumblr experience while making sure everyone who enjoys using Tumblr can do so safely. That future we mentioned above? We’re already moving towards it.

[dadralt]

PSA: tumblr introduced new community labels but automatically put them all on “hide” so make sure you check out your settings (and switch them if you wish)

[bucky-barnes-diaries]

I really hope more people will become vocal of how the Community Labels are doing nothing but killing interactions (which we’re already low from before) for content creators here on Tumblr 🙃

In theory? Yes the labels seems like a fantastic idea! It gives creators more freedom to post and express themselves however they want!

But in practice? The function is absolutely awful! As soon as a post gets a Community Label slapped on it, it’s basically dead! Shadowbanned! Censored! Nonexistent! This is most likely (I think?) due to not many people actually knowing that this function even exists so the content that they usually would enjoy is now completely hidden from them because the function was launched with the Mature Content being turned on for everyone automatically.

And the worst part of this function! PEOPLE CAN SUGGEST A COMMUNITY LABEL ON A POST! OTHER USERS! Not just Tumblr. This is going to get abused to bits (and definitely already is) by people that maybe just don’t like a creator so they want to see their content crash and burn.

I really hope Tumblr reconsiders this new function and make some HEAVY changes to it or just remove it altogether, because I wouldn’t be surprised if more and more people leave and quit this site because the content they put their heart, soul, blood, sweat and tears into dies within a few hours…

@staff @support @engineering @changes

[em-writes-stuff-sometimes]

Sign the petition: stop Tumblr’s community labels from destroying community spaces

SIGN THE PETITION HERE!

TL;DR:  Community Labels have become the newest form of cyber harassment on Tumblr.com. While the system is suitable in its conceptual form, in practice it has been shown to actively harm the very communities it claims to be protecting. We submit this petition as a request to Tumblr.com to review their Community Labels system and effect change that protects one of – if not the – major attractions of this platform.

Community Labels were announced by Tumblr.com’s staff account on the 27th of September, 2022. Cited as a desire for users to “be able to fully express themselves while also having control over what they encounter on their dashboards”, this move is just one step of many that the social media platform has taken to regulate the presence of NSFW – an internet colloquialism that stands for ‘not safe for work’ – content, from fanart, images, GIFs, fan-fiction and more. This encapsulates a broad range of subject matter deemed hazardous for underage persons to interact with, including but not limited to violence, substance use and sexual themes. The set-up of this function coincides with all Tumblr blogs – both newly-made and existing – being set to ‘default’, in which all mature content is hidden unless these settings are manually adjusted. Indeed, it is an effective idea; Community Labels would, in theory, allow minors and adults to coexist in the same space without the eventuation of crossover, the consequences of which range from questionably moral to borderline unlawful.

In theory.

There is no doubt that Tumblr staff had the best of intentions in launching what is effectively a ‘child lock’ system. However, what has resulted from the rollout of Labels does not align with the intended purpose as outlined above. Across the platform, thousands of creators are experiencing what can only be described as a ‘weaponising’ of community labels; one of the key functions of this program allows other users to report content as ‘missing a Community Label’, and the subsequent application of these supposed ‘missing’ Labels is swift and often devastating. In a community that relies so heavily on engagement, the impact of labelling by its very nature prevents the uninformed user from viewing content that is often lovingly crafted over hours on end, ultimately intended for a wider audience to see and appreciate.

There are two major design flaws in Tumblr’s approach to a Community Labels system: one, that a large proportion of users are unaware of the platform’s decision to conceal labelled content as a default blog setting; and two, that there appears to be virtually no discrimination when it comes to the application of Labels to reported content. Most new arrivals to the platform are uninformed of the default setting, raising questions as to whether or not Staff have appropriately informed users of this change. But what is more concerning is the manner in which reported content is dealt with.

It has become custom for individuals to target content creators – due to a range of reasons, but often personal and inflammatory in nature – by mass-reporting their work. It seems that, due to the speed and inaccuracy in which Labels are applied, a certain threshold reached results in an automatic Label being added. Because of this, engagement with work that is key to facilitating the growth and development of fan spaces online is nosediving and content creators are reporting decreases in engagement across the site.

Community Labels have become the newest form of cyber harassment on Tumblr.com. While the system is suitable in its conceptual form, in practice it has been shown to actively harm the very communities it claims to be protecting. So, what should be done about this?

Here are some suggestions:

The default setting should only be applied to accounts that are under 18.

The default setting should be applied across all accounts, but this should blur posts rather than conceal them completely for users who are above 18 years of age.

More advertisement of this change should be made available to users, new and existing – pop-ups in account settings, inboxes, DMs, whatever can be reasonably effected to achieve this.

Remove the ability for other users to suggest Community Labels, or ban accounts who mass-report content across a period of time from accessing this function.

These are but some changes that could be made, and are by no means an exhaustive list of potential responses to this rising issue. But something must be done.

We, the content creators, the backbone of fandom spaces in the modern age, have had enough. It is already difficult to navigate social media as a person who puts their effort and hard work out for the public’s judgement; we do not also need to contend with this new form of persecution and censorship.

We submit this petition as a request to Tumblr.com to review their Community Labels system and effect change that protects one of – if not the – major attractions of this platform.

[wip]

How long does it take for a post to get out of "Community Label Review"?

I have one still stuck in there 11 days after being wrongly flagged as mature content. As a result of the flagging, people who reblogged it had mature content warnings appear on their blogs. And the post itself is hidden from view for most users. Now at 11 days old, it'll be so buried that those users won't see it anyway even if it's unflagged.

It's hard enough for gifmakers these days without our posts being flagged because a fully clothed network tv character put on his police badge in an impure way?? 😭

Answer: Hey there, @xofeno!

Thanks for reaching out to us, and we’re really sorry for the long wait. We have a very small team working hard to get through all of the requests for Community Label review that we receive, and we can only work through these in the order in which we receive them.

It’s important our human teammates review these requests rather than letting machines decide which of your posts should have a Label or not. So, depending on the number of requests that come through, it sometimes takes longer than we’d like. We apologize for the frustration and inconvieniance caused here, but know that we are doing all we can to get them answered as swiftly as possible. In the meantime, your patience is much appreciated!

Thanks for your question, and have a good day.

Best,

—Jon

[w3bpunk]

PSA: community labels do not flag your whole blog as explicit.

They're not to punish users. They're for people to be able to not get jumpscared by an entire ass if they open Tumblr at work. They only hide you from the search results of people who have the option toggled to hide the posts entirely. If you have it toggled off, nothing changes. You see everything.

If you get a label applied, it does not mean your blog is on its way to being banned. You can use the labels voluntarily. It would not make sense if this was the case.

I just see a lot of people mistaking explicit community labels as the same thing as the flagging that the 2018 porn ban did. It isn't. All of this information is verifiable through the Tumblr help center. It would be great if this misconception could be cleared up.

[angelltheninth]

Community Labels Are Killing Fandoms and Creators

To point out how much current community labels hurt creators, interactions and fandoms here:

Before I got a bunch of things labeled (merely a few days ago) I was getting around 10k notes per day.

Now when so many of my fics and headcanons are flagged, not even all smut mind you just fluff that is somehow mature now, I barely get 5k notes.

I'm not saying this to brag about notes or make this all about me, I'm saying this because such a drop in such a few days doesn't happen normally.

I still love writing, I won't ever quit, but it hurts to see something you've put hours, days, so much love in to get flagged and shadowbanned and prevented from being seen anymore. It hurts people's drives and desires to create and be active in fandoms. Writers have already left this site because of it, not just writers either but a lot of other content creators too.

Community labels are killing this site as they currently are.

If you care about the creators on this site, if you want to keep them around, if you don't want them to leave and for fandoms to die please message the staff on their WIP blog and tell them you want changes done to the current label system because it is not working as it is.

In case you don't want to message them fine, you don't have to, but please at least reblog, signal boost, tag other creators and spread the word about this because its an issue that needs to be fixed.