"I feel like this article isn’t making good faith arguments."

The EFF is an advocacy organization. It definitely "advocates", and does not generally make "rational" arguments. If you always like everything they do, you may have a hard time seeing this, but if you've ever seen them speak about something you are either ambivalent about (probably a lot of people on this matter today) or even outright disagree with them on (as I have), it becomes clear.

I'm not particularly trying to be critical of them here. They advocate; it's what they say they do, it's what they are set up to do, and they're generally in a space that nobody else is even close to advocating for. But I do think it's important to understand them for what they are.

I don't have an opinion either way about the EFF especially, but I disagree that being an advocacy organization means you don't / can't make rational arguments. I think rational arguments should be expected of everyone; if you're part of an advocacy organization then presumably you think the arguments in favor of that organization's positions are winning, and so you should present those arguments.

Not every position needs to be advocated for.

I generally feel it hurts an advocacy group's credibility when they advocate for something without a rational argument. (And it's not just the EFF that do this.)

It's an interesting dynamic in the role of advocacy...

You can make rational arguments, but the rational advocacy organization quickly learns that it's a great deal less effective than hyperbole and emotion.

And if you want to bemoan that, hey, I'm right there next to you, but, here we are....

Sincerely, I thank you for this post. In our current era, many people blindly follow what their echo chamber has to say. Your post is a refreshing reminder on the difference between advocating a position, as opposed to merely presenting one. The nuance is lost on many.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought, without fully accepting it" is an axiom I always have to remind myself of (and sometimes, frustratingly, others when discussing contentious matters).

Just because one is able to dissect and understand a position that exists and how it functions logically doesn't mean it has their support. After all, I hold the opinion that if you can't articulate a counterargument to your own and truly appreciate its structure, it's probably not the "hill you want to die on".

Pornography is not just removed from the app, but also the website. Previously, apple users could browse to the website. Now, they no longer have this option. This is worse.

Also, the burn-down-the-world response to child pornography by removing every single female-presenting nipple is such an overwhelming response it's hard to believe this is appropriate. Even assuming they could do it correctly - their current implementation flags pictures of chrysanthemums as lewd content.

> the burn-down-the-world response to child pornography by removing every single female-presenting nipple is such an overwhelming response it's hard to believe this is appropriate.

They are not removing every single nipple. And the EFF is criticizing them for not removing every single nipple, complaining that it's "subjective" and will "leave a lot of people on uncertain ground."

> They are not removing every single nipple.

It's worth taking care to distinguish what's being done from what the new policy is. The policy exempts artistic, political, and some other non-erotic uses of nudity, which is good to point out. But so far, the actual outcome is that nudity is being flagged and removed with no regard for context (or, say, the difference between a human and a statue). Some of it is being restored on appeal some of the time, but that's very different from "not removed".

Admittedly it's quite hard to draw a specific conclusion about how non-sexual nudity is being handled, since what's being removed is basically the random output of an untrained classifier. (Which, incidentally, leaves all of their users on uncertain ground.) But the examples of many other websites with similar rules suggest a major chilling affect on ostensibly approved content, either because it's not restored or because takedown-and-restore patterns prevent normal engagement with material.

Agreed. And I don’t know the details of what is actually being done to remove porn, but I assume it’s an implementation detail that is temporary, has some problems (which Tumblr acknowledged), and is being worked on.

The policy - the goal - is what’s important, and what I was referring to, not today’s rollout hiccups. The exaggeration in the above comment and in the article are what I’m reacting to. Tumblr is not intending to remove “every single nipple”, they are taking down porn, which has and always will have some gray areas at the edges. The hyperbole and exaggeration that they’re intending to ban any and all nudity, when they’re not, weakens the arguments against Tumblr.

It’s not like any of this discussion will change Tumblr’s decision, but if people want to make a point of criticizing their decision, the strongest arguments will show why their stated policy is bad, not put up a strawman that Tumblr is trying to censor socially acceptable nudity when they’ve already stated that’s not their goal.

Right. So "artistic" nipples are fine (what is art?), as are breastfeeding nipples, nipples after several procedures are fine, and of course, animal nipples are okay, as well as male-presenting nipples.

We've seen in the past "no nipples some exceptions" from Facebook, and if enforcement there is any indication, I'm not convinced there will be a practical difference.

> Tumblr is not intending to remove “every single nipple”, they are taking down porn, which has and always will have some gray areas at the edges.The hyperbole and exaggeration that they’re intending to ban any and all nudity, when they’re not, weakens the arguments against Tumblr.

I don't think this represents Tumblr's statement accurately. The policy bans all adult content not meeting a small list of exceptions, not just porn plus ambiguous edge cases. The ban offers no exemptions for educational content, and its health and reproduction exemptions are limited to nipples - all genitalia outside of art and political content is apparently banned. Female-presenting toplessness is only permitted under narrow conditions.

This is not a small difference. A health-class video of a birth is banned. NYC's Outdoor Topless Fiction Appreciation Society couldn't post pictures of legal, non-sexual toplessness in Central Park. As written, National Geographic photos of tribes which are regularly topless are banned. (They might be news, but not "newsworthy speech".)

It's not "every single nipple", agreed, but there's no attempt at all to limit this to porn. Tumblr is trying to censor socially acceptable nudity - not all of it, but their stated goal includes several things which are socially acceptable.

> it’s an implementation detail that is temporary, has some problems (which Tumblr acknowledged), and is being worked on. The policy - the goal - is what’s important, and what I was referring to, not today’s rollout hiccups... a strawman that Tumblr is trying to censor socially acceptable nudity when they’ve already stated that’s not their goal.

Here, I think we disagree less on theory than on faith in Tumblr(/Oath/Verizon) engineering, and so I suppose the matter will be settled by fact eventually. What follows is just an outline of my current thinking.

I expect they'll eventually get an implementation which doesn't flag pictures at near-random, yes. But I expect they will never get past a state where any nudity less famous than David or Phan Thi Kim Phuc will be flagged and require a cumbersome human approval. Accounts focused on clearly-permitted nudity like Femen protests or breastfeeding positivity will end up banned for repeated flags and need human un-banning, if that process even exists reliably.

All prior evidence from Tumblr says that simple, well-documented bugs are likely to go unfixed for years, and "don't take down certain types of nudity" is not simple. And if I may be permitted some cynicism, I expect that both Apple's action and Oath's apparent business plans will make false positives far more appealing than false negatives.

If nudity of all types is restricted in practice, and I fully expect that outcome, then the stated goal is only evidence against malice. This obviously isn't a criminal matter, but the culpability framework is helpful. I agree that the general censorship of nudity was not 'purposeful', but I think the initial rollout was either 'negligent' or 'reckless' and running the planned full takedown on the 17th using the same algorithm would be 'knowing'. Past a certain point, it's not really worth discussing intent because everyone involved ought to be aware that their actions couldn't possibly fulfill that intent.

To be clear, they lost a spot on the Apple App Store due to child porn. I don't have a leg in this race. Don't use Tumblr, never have and likely never will but the decision is at best questionable considering the size of some of the communities they are shunting off the service.

I've read that they were planning this change for months before the App Store incident.

> I've read that they were planning this change for months before the App Store incident.

They were likely planning this since March, which is when FOSTA and SESTA were passed.

FWIW It should be noted that there's already been documented cases in which tumblr has marked artwork and paintings as adult content to be removed and confirmed as such upon appeal.

>I feel like this article isn’t making good faith arguments. Every single sentence is trying to tear down Tumblr’s announcement word by word without attempting to understand their position, making the worst case assumption about their intent rather than assuming reason, and Tumblr’s position seems to be completely reasonable.

Good lawyers can't trust faith to be held accountable, they need everything to be written in explicit terms in order to ensure that if a gentleman's handshake isn't enough then a lawsuit is.

With that said, I believe it is up to Tumblr to prove that they are acting in good faith; so far they have failed to do so in the most basic sense by simply blanket flagging most content as NSFW and turning against a huge portion of their user base in the first place to appease advertisers.

I don't believe in good faith arguments when it comes to services operated by big corporations: regardless of the good intentions of the humans originally involved, the corporate machine at some point takes over, and rules are enforced in such a way as to maximise share/stakeholder value and/or to minimize their risk.

If something is not explicitly allowed under the rules, I wouldn't trust that it's going to be allowed by some discerning human of goodwill.

They didn't lost their app store spot due to porn, they lost it to child porn

> Yes, the exact guidelines are going to be vague, that’s a good thing. It might just show they understand that it should be okay to allow art and breastfeeding and other forms of nudity that aren’t explicitly pornographic.

"Vagueness" and room for interpretation is not inherently bad, as you point out. But it's dangerous when your policies for automated filtering are vague, because filters almost always play it safe and end up creating a large number of false positives (i.e. wrongful content takedowns).

>without attempting to understand their position, making the worst case assumption about their intent rather than assuming reason

They want to clean up their image by removing anything that might rock the boat. What more is there to understand?