Tumblr Snapping Aquafresh Out of Existence

[rynling]

How an Aquafresh Parody Tumblr Got Swept Up in a Hate-Speech Purge
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/aquafresh-parody-tumblr-got-swept-up-in-hate-speech-purge.html

It turns out that in addition to the “aquafresh” username, Josh was also squatting on vacated usernames of Nazis that had formerly used Tumblr. The list includes usernames like “bayareanazi,” “fuhrerofgermany,” “lightning1488,” and “aryanprincessx3.”

Josh possessed these Nazi URLs as part of a community-led effort he started in mid-2016 known as Woody’s Roundup, or the Woody Collective. Basically, people would take the former usernames of hateful or problematic users (which were vacant either because the user had been pressured off the platform and deactivated their account voluntarily, or been penalized by Tumblr’s moderators) and change that username’s avatar to Woody from Toy Story and the associated blog’s title to “Howdy Partner.” Tumblr’s discourse is structured around reblogs — taking an existing post and adding to it — and so even if a bad user vanished, links to their work might still exist on the platform. Reasserting control over those links and leading them to a Woody blog was, in effect, a way of further diminishing those users’ lingering presence on the platform.

This is a short but wild story, and I think the moral is probably that you need to be trained as an investigative journalist in order to understand what's happening on Tumblr at any given moment.