so do trans women keep getting banned because theres a handful of moderators who need to get a life, or because theyre the target of mass reporting campaigns and staff just doesn’t have the resources to give a shit?

tl;dr: lack of resources, buggy site, over-reporting of trans women esp with any sort of sexual content on their blog.

infodump:

so, disclaimer: i was fired in 2024, what i am writing here may be out of date or inaccurate. do not take this as fact.

anyway, when i was involved with that i don't recall any systematic efforts to ban trans women or other groups. a lot of the T&S workers i knew (and some still there!) are queer and trans themselves, including some trans women. they DID give a shit, but the company was never incentivized to really do much about hate speech and harassment. that's true for pretty much any for-profit social media sadly.

i suspect a big part of why trans women are banned so frequently is a few reasons:

firstly: it's easy to report shit, so people do it a lot. the amount of reports during my time kept going up, so there were constant efforts to move faster and faster. if you see stuff that was flagged and it's like a photo of a tree, that is just a mistake. unfortunately, getting stuff reported is easy but appeals are a pain in the ass and often have a lower priority, so linger forever. a lot of stuff would have been reversed if the OP requested a review, but they often didn't.

and yeah: people report trans women more than they report random cishet dudes stealing porn. it sucks.

secondly: during the review process, the blog age wasn't a factor so if you post like three porn posts in a blog from 2011 with 100k+ posts you get a ban. also, if you post on your main blog your entire account gets suspended, including secondaries! so if a completely innocent blog suddenly gets a ban, it may be due to violations on the primary blog. it's impossible to really know unless it's your blog.

thirdly: sexual content is a big thing. a bunch of trans blogs during my time were taken down bc they posted OR REBLOGGED stuff that broke the rules, which people often didn't quite understand (and policies kept changing!)- for example, furry or other porn that is drawn or animated can be against the rules, which people didn't get all the time. and ofc a lot of furries are queer and trans.

harassment was also something i saw a lot. like yeah, if a terf gets in your asks and says transphobic shit its really tempting to tell them to kys. unfortunately, that meant according the rules you got banned and they were free to bother another blog. like they can theoretically get a harassment ban but a pattern needs to be established which is very hard bc it's all DMs and asks.

if anyone is reading this wants to know what to do, what i'd say is firstly: never ever put anything visually horny on your main blog. make a side blog, rb to that- it's what i do. it sucks bc no DMs, but there's not a good alternative as this site is buggy af.

also, if you are banned or have stuff taken down, definitely submit an appeal if you think it's wrong! but don't try to fool them- i built the tools, it's easy for them to see for instance if you replace the image with one that's not porn.

anyway, i hope this wall of text answers the question? i and friends of mine tried our best while we were there, but a lot of the fixes require some major changes to how reporting is done and internal policies and resources, all of which aren't gonna happen.

happy to answer whatever else!

getrealprim:

echo:

zingring:

Echo is right a lot here, though I will say that our Tumblr T&S teams are doing an amazing job, as compared to even the beginning of 2025. We aren't yet on top of the backlog but we are knocking it back, queue-by-queue, and managing to stay on top of new incoming volume. That does mean that some older appeals are still languishing. We know how much it sucks, and we are trying to get to them all - it's just going to take us some time. We also have been fine-tuning our automated tools, and historically some have been absolutely awful (dating back to before Automattic acquired Tumblr, but also more recently as well), but no tool is able to be perfect. They do keep a lot of actual bad things off the platform, which is our goal - false positives do hit hard, especially in marginalized and vulnerable communities. It's a difficult balance to strike, and one we will never be comfortable with.

So, while we are a very small group of people, we do give a shit, and are working on constantly improving tooling so our human moderators can have the biggest possible positive impact, while our automated tooling can handle the obviously violating stuff (porn, spam, etc).

yeahhh. that was something we were going to do before the staff of tumblr got cut down. there's SO MANY ways to improve the situation for the people who actually get harassed or targeted, but it always came back to resources.

tbh i'm glad i no longer work there. it was ultra-stressful to have to deal with zero resources or ability to change stuff you know is broken, plus having to worry constantly about getting shut down all the time. i kept proposing ways to improve the situation and it just didn't happen bc they wanted to find ways to break even first. and that's on top of the other issues (like the sideblog thing i mentioned, and soo many more).

mind you my current job also doesn't have resources either, but at least Mastodon / the Fediverse is way different structurally

Still not entirely convinced on a lot of this.

Like “You can get TERFs in your inbox and if you tell them to kys your blog can be banned while they’re free to harass others”

But what are the TERFs saying in those asks? Why are TERFs and racists routinely allowed to say “kys” and act in ways that encourage minorities to do so? I know this was after your time but why would a trans woman’s missing poster be marked mature? Why would screenshots of articles critical of automattic and tumblr be deleted with entire reblog chains of women deleted? Why do waves of trans women get deleted with appeals preemptively denied and the rare occasion a major transphobe does get banned, their blog is reinstated in 48 hours? Why does staff post spineless boilerplate apologies not even directed at the communities they affect?

I know a lot of this was after your time, but even in 2024 with the Predestrogen situation, it is really hard to believe that staff and the ceo doesn’t have it personally out for trans women.

just to clarify- TERFs cannot say "kys". nobody can. the problem is that they can say shit that is bigoted as hell but within the rules, and if you react in anger with stuff like kys you are the one in trouble. the thing you're supposed to do is just block and move on... which ofc doesn't help if there's a targeted harassment campaign.

as for the CEO, i wasn't really talking about him. he did do some transphobic shit for sure, and i was part of the group that wrote the letter posted on @staff in response. my answer above wasn't about the CEO, but about policy as a whole in the company. i don't believe there was a secret order to harass trans women- it is more systemic issues that affect vulnerable minorities the most.

I know this was after your time but why would a trans woman’s missing poster be marked mature?

if you're referring to nowadays, i see false flags out there so often. they've switched to some new system that is very aggressive in flagging stuff with a high false-positive rate. i don't have any details beyond my own observations though. is there biases there? probably, esp if it's an LLM of some variety. but idk enough to speculate well here.

Why do waves of trans women get deleted with appeals preemptively denied and the rare occasion a major transphobe does get banned, their blog is reinstated in 48 hours?

idk about pre-emptively denied appeals? i do recall when i was involved the percentage of people that actually tried to appeal was very very small.

part of this is many bigots, especially TERFs, can express their bigotry openly and justtt skirt under the rules. a comment i recall from a paper about Twitter's content moderation still sticks with me: "If we banned [bigotry], we'd have to ban multiple US federal officials."

(i'm deliberately not saying specifics about what TERFs can and cannot say bc i don't want to give them more ammo)

also when the bigots DO come back, it's ban evasion and against the rules. that ofc doesn't stop them, but enforcing ban evasion means you need to detect when that's happening- which is very hard to figure out when you have thousands of new accounts a day!

Why does staff post spineless boilerplate apologies not even directed at the communities they affect?

open, transparent, and honest corporate comms are very rare, and Tumblr is no exception.

corporate communications just needs to project a vibe of "we take this seriously" but avoid specifics. tbh they are disincentivized from directly engaging with criticism or responding to people because there's no real benefit to them- it probably won't satisfy people who are angry, and increase the likelihood of press running negative articles.

all of this goes extra for content moderation. they'll NEVER be talking about that stuff bc there's a lot of harm it can do and basically no benefit. like the CEO was WAY out of line and if literally any member of staff outside of the CEO posted specific moderation things like he did they'd probably be fired.