Tumblr apologizes for blocking innocuous LGBTQ+ content with Safe Mode
Google recently caused controversy and upset by censoring LGBTQ videos from appearing in Restricted Mode on YouTube. The company later apologized, fixed the problem, and then updated its policies. Now Tumblr has found itself caught up in a similar hullabaloo.
Complaints were raised after -- just like YouTube's Restricted Mode -- Tumblr's Safe Mode was found to be filtering out LGBTQ+ content. The site has now apologized, updated its algorithms, and explained why the problem came about in the first place.
It seems that the policies that governed Safe Mode were rather too broad, and they were being automatically applied by Tumblr's algorithms. In a blog post the company explains that blogs that were considered to deal with explicit content automatically had their entire contents categorized as sensitive. From now on, Tumblr says that it will consider posts on an individual basis.
We've heard from a bunch of you that Safe Mode was filtering posts from the LGBTQ+ community even though they were completely innocuous and totally safe-for-work. Please know that was never our intention, and we appreciate you letting us know so quickly -- and forcefully! We're deeply sorry.
The site is introducing a number of changes that it believes should correct things:
Changes to self-marked blogs
What was happening: Because we consider Explicit blogs to be predominantly sensitive content, we were automatically marking all their posts as sensitive. That was too broad.
What we fixed: Now each post is classified individually. As they should be.
Changes to reblog chains
What was happening: If an Explicit Tumblr reblogged a safe post, we were marking that reblog as sensitive. This was even happening to text posts. Which is silly.
What we fixed: We changed the logic so that if the OP is safe, all its reblogs will also be safe.
Changes to photosets
What's (still) happening: When you make a photo post, a computer algorithm classifies the image as safe or sensitive. It’s a machine so it’s not perfect. And the chances go up with photosets because there are multiple images. But out of an abundance of caution we keep posts marked sensitive until the OP requests a human review (by tapping the appeal button on their posts).
What we're working on: We plan to have photosets analyzed as a whole group, rather than as individual images. That should reduce the number of mistakes the machine makes.
The timing for Tumblr is interesting as the problem -- or at least the fix -- reared its head during Pride month.