anonsally: lies: I’ve noticed another apparent inconsistency…
lies:
I’ve noticed another apparent inconsistency between Tumblr’s stated policies and the horror movie ads in the Sponsored Posts program.
I posted previously about how the ads appear to violate Tumblr’s Community Guidelines. But they may also violate Tumblr’s Acceptable Advertising Policy, which says that “content that falls into the following categories won’t be approved to run as Sponsored Posts”, and lists this as one of the categories:
Content related to death
It would be interesting to hear Tumblr explain the logic that was used to determine that this ad for The Conjuring (warning: horror) is not “content related to death.”
This is an excellent point. They are violating not just their guidelines but their policy. How do we get them to stop?
Something that occurs to me is that the specific sponsored post I linked to above (the ad for The Conjuring, with the feet of the dangling corpse) appeared in my dash last summer, when that movie was in theaters. I don’t know when Tumblr’s Acceptable Advertising Policy page, with the specific mention of “Content related to death”, was first published, but it looks like it was after that.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has two copies of that page, both of them identical to the current version. The first time it was retrieved was March 14, 2014. So if that was not too long after the page went live, it raises the possibility that the Acceptable Advertising Policy, including the “Content related to death” provision, was enacted at least in part in response to concerns about that particular ad for The Conjuring. That is, that our (and others’) complaints may actually have had some effect, in terms of getting Tumblr to put at least some limitation on the images used in horror movie ads.
The particular limitation they imposed (no images of death) seems suggestive. It may have been a result of Tumblr’s lawyers being concerned about the kind of legal exposure I discussed in my post earlier today. The Acceptable Advertising Policy focuses on one aspect of the problematic horror movie ads (suicide/death), while leaving out other elements (gore, mutilation, and torture) that are mentioned in the Tumblr Community Guidelines.
This makes me feel both good and bad. Good, because it may mean that Tumblr has taken a quiet step to tone down some of the worst aspects of the horror movie ads. But bad, because this action doesn’t go very far, and may be evidence of an attempt by Tumblr to water down the principles expressed in the Community Guidelines.
The latest horror movie ad I received in my dash was a couple of weeks ago, well after the appearance of the new Acceptable Advertising Policy. It was this sponsored post for The Only Way Out Is Down (warning: flashing images of mutilated humans/zombies/something or other). And yeah, there are no actual corpses, so in that sense it complies with the new policy.
It’s still horrific. It’s intentionally horrific. It depicts gore and mutilation. As such, it violates the pre-existing Community Guidelines for it to be inserted into my dash against my will.
Tumblr appear to be creating a two-tiered system for regulating disturbing content: One set of rules for regular users, as embodied in the older Community Guidelines. And a second, looser set of rules for itself and its advertisers, as embodied in the new Acceptable Advertising Policy.
That worries me.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1tdni3k.
