Tumblr Staff: A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs

kelseafish:

staff:

One of the great things about Tumblr is that people use it for just about every conceivable kind of expression. People being people, though, that means that Tumblr sometimes gets used for things that are just wrong. We are deeply committed to supporting and defending our users’ freedom of speech,…

PSAs i’m all for.  complete censorship of these things, no.  that’s a dangerous path to walk down.

I would perhaps suggest that allowing individuals to encourage others to do harm to their bodies is a dangerous path to walk down, particularly if we walk down it with the “but it’s a slippery slope” attitude. This is not a case of censoring free speech. It is stopping people with serious mental illnesses injuring others in order to justify their actions. Speaking from personal experience - not of disordered eating, but of self harm - blogs which encourage others and educate them on self injuring behaviour are not trying to ‘help’. They want to normalize their behaviour, and they do this by harming other people, both physically and mentally. Again, this is not a matter of free speech - this is a matter of stopping an individual from abusing their knowledge and pain to harm another person. Disordered eating, self harm and suicide are not issues which should be left as cases of ‘free speech’ - this suggests, once again, that mental illness is something that we do to ourselves - that it is, in essence, something which we could ‘just pull ourselves out of’. That it is a lifestyle choice, and not a result of deep seated and intensely painful psychological and personal issues. They are not, it should be added, censoring any blog which posts ‘thinspo’ or ‘fitspo’ pictures, stopping bloggers from using phrases to do with anorexia, stopping the blogs of recovering anorexics or those with EDs or other self injuring behaviour - they are stopping individuals from posting intentionally harmful information which could severely affect the recovery and mental health of a person.