In 1985 the Parents’ Music Resource Center, a what-about-the-children group, decided it wanted to put ratings on music the same way as movies. This came before the Senate in what became known as the “porn rock” hearings and several musicians were brought in to testify.

Two of the typical rock and roll types whose music was being targeted, Frank Zappa and Dee Snider, testified. Then, wholesome All-American John Denver, the guy who sang Country Roads, sat down. Years later, Dee Snider admitted that he and Frank Zappa had met before the hearings and had been worried which side John Denver would take. But his testimony was actually the most damaging to the PMRC’s case. He talked about how his song Rocky Mountain High had been banned for promoting drugs, a completely false accusation. His point wasn’t that he got accidentally got caught out by good rules, it was that the rules were wrong. People were always going to twist them to target anything they didn’t like. Even if people followed them, they would get caught up in them because they were designed for that. The ostensibly innocent ratings system would be used to limit and ban music on a completely subjective basis.

I’m not freaking John Denver, but I am a rule follower. I have an almost completely sfw blog and can easily remove the few offending posts. And yet I’ve been marked as explicit and come December 17th will have some settings reset to the default and will be excluded from search, and possibly worse. I’m by far not the only one and I’m not even someone who uses this platform for exposure, like artists and writers and sex workers.

The problem isn’t that the rules are being applied incorrectly and they’ll eventually improve, it’s that they’re wrong in the first place. It is technologically impossible to do what Tumblr is attempting and not have many sfw posts and blogs flagged. And this is acceptable collateral damage to them.

For what? What real reason is there to ban all adult content? I’ve seen some arguments, so let’s go through them.

Tumblr itself says that it’s to make the place more positive. But they don’t actually say how. The logic behind that is that all adult content is negative, which is a value judgment and an untrue statement, since they created the site and let it run for a decade with adult content. If being more positive was a priority, why not ban hate speech? Why is violence not mentioned at all? What is the connection between all adult content and negativity?

Some people say that it’s necessary to get rid of the CP. First, we already know they were implementing this change before that became an issue. Second, how is getting rid of it? The idea is that eventually the algorithms will become so good they’ll be able to flag all adult content? That is impossible. In fact, it will be the CP that will evolve to avoid the algorithms while everything else, including normal content, will be caught by it. And if your reasoning is still, fine, I can tolerate that to get rid of something so evil, which is fair, are you insisting on that for the rest of the internet? Otherwise that seems a bit hypocritical. Oh, other places have better policies in place? Then maybe Tumblr should do that instead.

Others say it’s Tumblr’s platform and they can do what they want. If people want porn, they can go elsewhere. But we’ve established that a lot of completely sfw posts are being flagged. And a lot of art and political posts are being caught up too. But most of all, there’s a really wide variety of adult content out there and the way people engage on Tumblr is pretty different from those other places. What’s available here isn’t available elsewhere. Not the platform, not the brands people have already built, and not the community. Sure, Tumblr can do whatever they want but let’s not pretend this is fair or well-intentioned.

As it is, I’ve appealed my explicit status but it’s been a few days now and I don’t know what’ll happen. I don’t feel particularly enthused to post anything knowing it could be pointless in a week.