Matt Mullenweg, CEO of beleaguered micro-blogging site Tumblr, is in hot water.
Users have raised concerns about transphobic moderation practices and, though most CEOs would delegate a public response to a team of PR professionals, Mullenweg decided to respond directly to the criticisms himself. In a personal blog post published Mon., Feb 19, Mullenweg defended the platform in an attempt to push back on, in his words, its “transphobe reputation.”
But users are pushing back, questioning his fitness as a CEO, turning him into a meme, and underscoring that he has yet to address their main concern: How does Tumblr plan to be less transphobic?
The inside story of how Tumblr lost its way
Tumblr’s history of LGBTQ+ discrimination in moderation
Tumblr has a history of mishandling content posted by its LGBTQ+ users. The most significant event was in 2018 when, in an attempt to placate Apple’s App Store policies against child pornography, Tumblr leadership applied a sweeping ban on porn across the site. That same leadership had historically allowed consensual adult porn to flourish, which had enabled marginalized communities to find belonging in the “more loving, more queer” porn that appeared on Tumblr. When that porn was banned, the site weathered a significant drop in users.
The death of Tumblr porn left a void no other site can fill
The porn ban also led to an inquiry by the New York City’s Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) into how the site’s moderation practices may have disproportionately affected LGBTQ+ content and users. When Tumblr was sold to Mullenweg’s company Automattic (yes, Mullenweg named the company after himself) by Verizon in 2019, Automattic’s cooperation in the process constituted “a turning point in the investigation,” according to The Verge. In 2022, Tumblr and Automattic settled with the CCHR, agreeing to train human moderators in diversity and inclusion issues, hire an expert to identify potential bias in its moderation algorithms, revise its user appeals process, and review thousands of old moderation cases.
As Mullenweg notes in his Feb. 19 blog post, a more recent example of discrimination arose in 2023 when “an external contract moderator…was making transphobic moderation [sic] (and also selling moderation, criminally).” Says Mullenweg, “As soon as we were aware that person was fired, and we later terminated the entire relationship with that contracting firm and have brought almost everything in-house (at great cost).”
The latest events
Tumblr users say they continue to experience or witness a prevalence of transphobic rhetoric and targeted harassment on the site. This has led to criticism of Tumblr’s moderation policies and staff, specifically, whom users say do not protect them from harmful speech. Users assert that the site has taken down photos of trans users’ gender transitions for violating the site’s terms and conditions around “sexually explicit” content all while hate speech and child pornography remain visible on the site.
Those tensions boiled over recently when an openly trans Tumblr user blogging under the screen name Predstrogen was banned from the platform for life for making “threats of violence against Tumblr staff.” This concerned users, including one who wrote to Mullenweg, “You gonna do anything or make any statement about the rampant transmisogyny on this hellsite, especially in cases like predstrogen recently?”
It’s not unusual for Tumblr’s staff to communicate with users on a number of official accounts, and the relationship between the two has historically been quite open, even playful. But when Mullenweg took to his personal Tumblr account to address the question while on a very public sabbatical (which he has rebranded as a “samattical”), the reactive tone of his messaging made users question his leadership.
“You are posting normal things a CEO of a large social network would post and in a tone of respectability and competence tonight dude!” read one comment, “Very cool!”
What did Mullenweg say?
Mullenweg begins his message to users by noting that “We generally do not comment on individual cases, but because there seems to be mass misinformation around this, I will make an exception and comment on predstrogen.”
He explains that though Predstrogen had “documented cases of harassment against other users,” it was “threats of violence against Tumblr staff” — specifically against Mullenweg — that led to lifetime ban.
He provided an example of one of Predstrogen’s posts which reads, “i hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.”
Replies to that example were derisive. “Bro felt threatened by looney tunes shenanigans” wrote one user. “Will I get banned if I say I hope you run face first into a photorealistic painting of a tunnel on a wall,” asked another. Other Tumblr users pointed to instances in which threats to user safety were not moderated in the same way. “I have straight up reported a literal child trafficking account on here and nothing has happened with it,” write one.
Credit: Tumblr
Credit: Tumblr
Another comment read, “Sexual harassment, stalking, and abuse that I reported endlessly… was never even given a follow up on. Not to mention the literal hundreds of transphobic or trans misogynists I’ve reported over the past year alone that still are actively posting.”
Users noted that the ban on Predstrogen felt personal. “Why should an empty threat against a staff member be treated as more important than against another user?” wrote one, “Meanwhile you let terf and nazi blogs stay up despite being dedicated to hate speech inherently.”
“Does that make every terf, nazi and otherwise bigot account consistently and repeatedly harrassing [sic] users retroactively worthy of a total ban?,” asked a different user, “Or is it just making the CEO and staff look bad that you guys find important?”
Another raised a similar point, “I have had countless users on this site threaten to doxx me, kill me, rape me… And as far as I know… [staff] have never been able to take a single post down, let alone ban a user. It’s incredible how this website can only crack down on TOS-breaking behaviour when it’s by someone the CEO specifically has an issue with.”
Mullenweg notes that the suspension of Predstrogen’s account was “not protest[ed]” by “a number of LGBT+ including trans people on staff,” which users pushed back on the replies. “Maybe your trans employees don’t say anything because they see the kinds of priorities staff demonstrates and they know it’s not safe to speak up,” said one comment. Said another, “If I worked for you and this is how unhinged you’re willing to get in public about a trans woman that hurt your feelings, I would hate to invoke whatever ire you would let loose in private.”
Mullenweg digs in, DMs, and gets memed
As the replies piled up, Mullenweg continued to communicate with users through his own replies. “I’m not going to post every single violation or make any more exceptions in this case,” he wrote in one, purportedly of criticism from users that the Predstrogen post seemed insufficient for a lifetime ban. “I don’t think we’re going to change any minds at this point, so if you truly believe myself or the entire staff to be guilty of transphobic misogyny, you are free to export your blog and find another free or paid service. I would not patronize a business I thought was transphobic.”
In another reply, Mullenweg wrote, “Please consider the possibility that I’m not transphobic.”
Mullenweg also allegedly doubled down in his DMs, purportedly messaging at least one user directly about their comments on his post. “During [Mullenweg’s] meltdown last night he dmed dozens and dozens of people (near exclusively trans women, For Some Inexplicable Reason), sometimes less than a Minute after they left a reply, responded to a post of his, or even just Made Their Own Post about it” user Elerium wrote on their blog. “That isn’t normal, not for a ceo and not for like, Anyone Else for that matter.
Since then, the post has disappeared from Mullenweg’s blog, though it can still be accessed for some users via this link. Tumblr users have shared memes featuring cars and hammers, or referencing Predstrogen’s post. Mashable has reached out to Tumblr for comment on the situation.
On Feb. 21, Mullenweg posted a new note titled “My Beliefs and Principles.” “A number of people are trying to brand me as transphobic,” it began, “So I thought I would list out a number of my personal beliefs so folks coming across this in the future can judge for themselves.
And while he mentions that he believes “people should be able to change their name, gender identity, and preferred pronouns” and that Automattic’s medical coverage “has supported a number of people transitioning,” most of the list is dedicated to his support of the LGBTQ+ community.
Here Mullenweg, again, misses the point. Tumblr users continue to express their frustration, specifically, with the site’s treatment of trans people. By conflating his support of the entire LGBTQ+ community with his support of trans people, Mullenweg shows he does not yet understand the difference.
