prokopetz:

Setting the ethical dimension of topic-based censorship on social media aside for the moment, the practical problem with “Tumblr shouldn’t allow posts about X” is that there is no possible world in which every Tumblr post about X is going to be reviewed by a human moderator, so we’re necessarily talking about automated content filtering, and there isn’t an automated content filter in existence which can reliably distinguish between “posts advocating X”, “posts criticising X”, and “posts which mention X in the course of discussing some related topic”. In practice, a blanket algorithmic ban on, for example, the Harry Potter franchise would result in transphobia-critical posts getting hit with automated takedowns because they happened to mention J K Rowling, which I’m pretty sure is not the intention here.