Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr owner Automattic, is supposed to be on sabbatical. Instead, he’s caught up in a heated debate with Tumblr users over a controversial content moderation decision. The situation has sparked widespread outcry and accusations of transphobia within the community.
Over the past few days, tensions have escalated to the point where Mullenweg himself has engaged with the user in question on other platforms, even sharing private details about their account publicly.
The incident began when a user with the blog name ‘predstrogen’ was banned. Prior to the ban, she had reported experiencing transmisogynistic harassment on the platform, but received no action from Tumblr. She also claimed that her account was suspended for sharing photos of herself post-gender affirming surgery while fully clothed. In response, she posted a statement on her blog, saying that she wishes for the CEO to “die a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.”
According to Mullenweg, predstrogen was banned for posts that threatened violence against Tumblr staff, specifically citing her statement about his death.
He also clarified that her transition photos were not the cause of any violations of adult content policies.
“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 wrote on his blog, photomatt. “Tumblr has a number of LGBT+ including trans people on staff, and they see things from the inside fully, and they’re not protesting this case.”
Some users argued that Mullenweg’s reaction was exaggerated and that the language used in the statement was too exaggerated to be taken seriously. However, Mullenweg saw the post as a direct threat.
“Threats of violence are never okay. Threats of violence are not protected speech,” he wrote. “We will work with police and FBI where appropriate, though to be clear predstrogen’s case hasn’t warranted that so far. I’m referring to what we may potentially do for other threats.”
Tumblr did not respond to requests for comment on the situation.
In response to the growing debate, Mullenweg took the discussion off the platform to X and publicly commented on the banned user’s post. He also shared several of her side blog names on one of his Tumblr posts, which is considered private information (many users create unused side blogs as placeholders for URLs).
“On the adult content mistagging, I added context to say it has nothing to do with clothed transition photos, she had 20+ other blogs and multiple accounts with names so explicit I can’t post them here without a mature tag,” Mullenweg wrote, listing some of the accounts by name.
Although it’s not unheard of for CEOs of social platforms to weigh in on individual content moderation decisions, it is rare. It’s even more uncommon for them to publicly share private information about a user’s account.
It’s worth noting that last year, a similar situation occurred on the platform Bluesky. In that instance, a user made a statement about another prominent user, saying that they wished they would “get pushed off of ‘somewhere real high.'” Bluesky’s team determined this was not a legitimate death threat, causing conflict within the platform’s relationship with its Black users.
“Wisely or not, many people use violent imagery when they’re arguing or venting,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber posted at the time. “We debated whether a ‘death threat’ needs to be specific and direct in order to cause harm, and what it would mean for people’s ability to engage in heated discussions on Bluesky if we prohibited this kind of speech.”
These two moderation decisions demonstrate the complexity that platforms face when making decisions about certain types of speech. While Bluesky did not consider the statement to be a real threat, Tumblr deemed the statement about a “forever painful death” to be a legitimate threat.
Tumblr has been experiencing a downward trend in popularity for some time now. The platform was acquired by Yahoo (now TechCrunch’s parent company) in 2013 for $1 billion. However, it has since struggled, ultimately leading to its sale to Automattic for $3 million in 2019. Last year, Mullenweg shared that Tumblr loses $30 million annually and has reassigned most of Tumblr’s staff to other projects. It’s worth noting that none of the trust and safety team was affected by this reshuffle, meaning their decisions around content moderation were likely not influenced by the company’s restructuring. Nonetheless, Tumblr has a history of making controversial content moderation decisions, particularly those involving trans individuals.
“We did have an external contract moderator last year that was making transphobic moderation (and also selling moderation, criminally),” Mullenweg wrote on his blog. “As soon as we were aware, that person was fired and we later terminated our relationship with the contracting firm, bringing most moderation in-house at considerable cost.”
Mullenweg also pinned a post to his Tumblr titled “My Beliefs and Principles” in response to accusations of transphobia. Currently, he is on sabbatical until May.
