Pop quiz: What do the following terms all have in common? Ritalin, bald, antisemitism, violence, single parent, Eugene Levy.
Good guess, but no. They’re words that are banned on Tumblr, the social sharing website famous for being the gestation pod of identity politics and for hosting a great deal of pornography before that was banned in 2018. At that time, Tumblr took drastic action, in the eyes of its user base, because it was exposed to legal liability if it did not. Now, in an effort to comply with the “safety” policy of Apple’s App Store, Tumblr has created an ever-growing list of terms that it softly censors. It is easy to imagine how terms such as “suicide prevention,” “penis,” and “girl” are related to searches for the sort of content that can get Tumblr or its users sued, though they are inherently innocuous terms referring to things in the real world, unlike some of the other censored terms for web design (“userstream”) and sexual perversions (“vore”). Less so Eugene Levy and the pronoun “me.” Nevertheless, if you search these terms on Tumblr, you won’t find any of the content with these words in their tags.
Apple’s review guidelines for app developers include guidance that is remarkably vague, stipulating under the “safety” heading that “apps should not include content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy.” An app that plays horror movies is not banned, though. What creepy or offensive means is very much in the eye of the creeped out and/or offended. Yet Apple has just hit the $3 trillion market valuation milestone, making it the first firm to do so ever. It does a fat lot of good to try to argue with Apple’s internal coherence or clarity because Apple doesn’t create its policies with those aims in mind. Apple creates its policies, just as Twitter and any other large corporation does, with legal liability and growth in mind. This is what makes it so dangerous for us, citizens, users, individuals, to allow the rubric of “safety” and of “online harms” to be treated as intellectually legitimate.
I could have selected any one of a number of recent examples of corporate censorship on tech platforms, including the conservative children’s book series Heroes of Liberty, whose Facebook account was suspended. Or I could have mentioned the suspended-from-Twitter Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is not my personal favorite member of Congress, but who has the moral right to speak in public and on massively public privately-owned platforms. What is interesting about the case of Tumblr, though, is what it shows us about how unwieldy the censorship regimes are becoming, not just how unfair. It is not merely double standards in the political arena or the need to serve media narratives that cause censorship. Once we make the fatal mistake of granting that seeing words made out of pixels can “cause harm,” things avalanche, and you can’t use the word “me” or 440-odd others on one of the most famously left-wing social sites on the internet. Tom Wolfe once joked about how in the liberal imagination, “the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States, and yet it lands only in Europe.” Quite the opposite is true about liberal assumptions around internet censorship of disfavored ideas and phrases. It is always surgically targeting harassment and online harms and misinformation, and yet, it lands everywhere.
