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Over A Year After New Content Policies, “Self-Harm Social Media” Still Thrives
About a year and a half ago, just in time for National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, Tumblr took a hard stance against blogs on its network that encouraged “self harm.” This includes those that glorify or promote anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders, the company said, as well as those focused on self-mutilation and suicide. The company also said it would revise its Content Policy, and start showing Public Service Announcements (PSAs) when users search for certain keywords on the site, like “thinspo” or “proana,” for example. Other services like Pinterest and Instagram soon followed suit.
Here’s how well that’s working today.
The Challenge
Tumblr, which thrives on the emotional, sometimes diary-like output from a younger demographic who’s shying away from Facebook and the prying eyes of moms, dads, co-workers and bosses, serves as a pseudo-anonymous enclave where people can post, share, opine, vent and dwell on their interests — even when those interests are unhealthy ones.
The company is already well-known for having a “porn problem” — that is, it toes a fine line between permitting adult content but not wanting to host it directly. That’s a whole ‘nother ballgame, as they say, but while viewing pornography can be addictive, it’s not potentially lethal to the viewer.
The same cannot really be said for Tumblr users who are seeking out self-harm content, however.
In the U.S., 20 million women and 10 million men suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some point in their life. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental condition, as the sufferer is literally starving him or herself to death.
In addition to eating disorders, according to Your Voice, the offshoot nonprofit associated with rising mobile network for shared secrets Whisper, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for college students, but 75 percent of that demographic doesn’t seek help for mental health problems.
In other words, the chances for outreach and connection with sufferers are few and far between.
The problem with eating disorders, as well as other mental troubles involving “self-harm,” is that continually being exposed to content that portrays some sort of glorification of the practice involved — whether a rail-thin model or a photo of an arm marked up with cut marks — is extremely toxic to those who are susceptible to the disease or condition.
“We do know that exposure to the kind of content that glorifies dangerous behaviors that are characteristic of those that struggle with eating disorders which can be life-threatening is a real problem — particularly for people who have a genetic predisposition to being vulnerable to eating disorders,” explains Susie Roman, National Eating Disorders Association‘s (NEDA) Director of Programs. She says that social media sites can further entrench the disorder with those who are viewing the images and messages, and it can also delay or prevent them from seeking help or entering into recovery programs.
Tumblr, unfortunately, is the worst offender.
“We hear that Tumblr is where people are constantly seeing content that is very triggering and very harmful, in terms of pro-ana and thinspo images and content. We don’t actually get a lot of complaints about Facebook…we just hear a lot more about Tumblr,” Roman says.
Ashley Womble, Director of Communications for the subsidiary of Mental Health Association of New York City (MHA-NYC), which handles the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, also agrees that by its very nature, Tumblr is home to more self-harm content than others.
“If you type in ‘kill myself’ or ‘suicide’ on Tumblr, you’re going to find some really dark stuff,” she says. “You’re going to find that a lot of people are writing about the suicide ideation online; they’re posting pictures of self harm to what I consider to be a disturbing level. If you type in that same search term on Pinterest, you would not find that. In fact, you might not find anything.”
Her organization, which also works with Facebook, Google and Pinterest, sees more referrals from Tumblr than any other social media site.
Depression, stress and thoughts of suicide are not uncommon among Tumblr’s top demographic, either. “Half of all college students have said that in the last year, they’re either so stressed or so anxious, they’re unable to function,” explains Whisper co-founder Michael Heyward. Most at risk are those who are likely turning to a site like Tumblr in the first place — the bullied, or those who feel outcast or different. LGBT kids are four times more likely to commit suicide, for example. “The numbers are staggering,” Heyward adds.
According to the research team at SimiliarWeb, which studied a sample of 1.6 million Tumblr blogs, only 0.17 percent contained one of the more obvious self-harm tags (e.g. Cutting, Suicide, Self harm, Suicide note, Suicide notes, Suicidal, Suicidal thoughts, Commiting suicide, Thinspo, Thins, Anorexia, Anorexic, Thinspiration, Bulimic, Bulimics, Eating disorders, Bulimia, Purge, etc.). If that figure was extrapolated to Tumblr’s overall user base, there would be nearly 200,000 blogs about these subjects. If it included the “alternate” words — the misspellings (“thynspo”) and less obvious terms — that number may be even higher. (Note that SimilarWeb’s study can’t discern the positive self-help blogs from the negative).
Social Media PSAs And Policies
While one could argue that a social media service has no business or responsibility to police the images or posts that appear on its platform, it’s worth noting that when it comes to “self harm” content, all the major sites have taken action.
Last year, Pinterest also came under attack for its growing number of thinspo images around the same time Tumblr took its big stand. And in the month following Tumblr’s announcement regarding its revised content policy, its plans to suspend non-compliant blogs and run PSAs, Pinterest soon after did the same.
According to Roman, NEDA technically reached out to Pinterest first but the company was already in the process of reaching out to them, as it turned out. She describes Pinterest as having an interest in being proactive, and a “receptive” and “eager” partner.
Like Tumblr, Pinterest posted a revised Acceptable Use Policy where it explicitly spells out what sort of content is prohibited (that which “creates a risk of harm, loss, physical or mental injury, emotional, distress, death, disability, disfigurement, or physical or mental illness to yourself, to any other person, or to any animal.”) However, it did stop short of banning topics altogether because someone searching for “warning signs,” “help,” “support groups,” or “recovery stories” may include those banned terms in searches, a company representative explains.
That being said, Pinterest partners with NEDA and SuicidePreventionLifeline.com to help provide the site with PSAs that run against searches for terms like “proana” or “suicide,” for example (the latter is more dominated by the “Suicide Girls” pinups, we should note).
Meanwhile, Instagram, though never having weathered quite as broad a media attack on the matter as Pinterest once did, quickly followed the others’ leads. In April 2012, it also updated its content policy to ban accounts, images or hashtags that glorify, promote or encourage self-harm. And it went a step further, making hashtags like ”thinspiration,” “probulimia” and “proanorexia” no longer searchable. This remains the case today. Plus, a year after the policy was enacted, the site also banned the new hashtags its community had turned to in order to avoid censorship (e.g. misspellings like “thynspo”).
Instagram also partners with NEDA to run PSAs related to eating disorders; for searches related to things like “cutting” or “suicide,” Instagram points users to BeFrienders.org instead. Unlike Pinterest, which more unobtrusively displays its PSAs at the top of its website or in the app’s search-results pages, Instagram actually requires users to click ”Show Photos” or “Cancel” after reading a pop-up PSA message.
Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, is a bit different. Though the site is not running PSAs against self-harm searches on its newly launched “Graph Search” service, nor on individual communities, it’s highly involved in monitoring content. Simply put, the company attempts to make the most serious self-harm content unfindable by the general public. (A search for “suicide,” for example, sends you to page after page of organizations involved in prevention.)
Its content policy prohibits self-harm like the others, and Facebook offers tools to allow users to report suicidal content, it provides suicide hotline info worldwide, and works with partner organizations to help inform its policies. Though a number of potentially “triggering” groups remain, Facebook has huge teams of moderators to police content related to self harm, hate speech and more, in addition to its automated systems. So while there are pages of “thinspiration,” for instance, there aren’t massive sub-sites (Facebook Pages or communities) with millions of members supporting each other’s decision to starve or kill themselves.
Tumblr Runs Its Own PSAs
When asked for an update on Tumblr’s earlier plans for PSAs, a company representative provided only a brief comment via email: ”We have been and continue to suspend blogs based on reports we receive from our users and partner organizations.” The company never responded to subsequent requests to discuss the matter further by phone, or follow-up questions. The rep added, however, that “there is no plan to run PSAs or any other content on individual user accounts, nor are there planned changes to Tumblr’s content policies.”
Roman corroborated Tumblr’s claim that the site has worked with NEDA in the past, and even provided the organization with a dedicated email address that would allow the group to contact Tumblr of reports coming from its Media Watchdog program. She also says that some of those blogs did get pulled down. However, when pressed to ballpark how many requests were handled in this manner, Roman said there were “dozens.”
That’s not a lot.
Tumblr has more than 116 million blogs, so clearly a “one-off” method like this was not intended to be a long-term solution. The solution is, of course, running those PSAs — the alternative being Facebook’s heavy involvement in content oversight, something that a startup like Tumblr could probably not afford…at least, pre-Yahoo. But it has also struggled to communicate with its non-profit partners about its plans.
NEDA helped Tumblr craft the language for the PSA which Tumblr posted on its staff blog, and provided the company with a list of search terms to run PSAs against, like the terms it has in the past given to Facebook. But a year later, NEDA’s own PSAs still don’t run, despite the company’s assurance to the organization earlier this year that a solution was in the works.
“Because of so many technological challenges, given the magnitude of the content of proana and thinspo content, they were experiencing a lot of problems with being able to address it [with PSAs] on a one-by-one flagged basis,” Roman says of Tumblr’s explanation. “We’re disappointed to see that, a year later, the PSA is not popping up.”
But oddly, Tumblr is running PSAs, NEDA was just not aware of this.
Either the startup had not let NEDA know that PSAs have been running against search terms (they weren’t using NEDA’s text, however) or Tumblr rolled these out very quietly or very recently — perhaps not making a big announcement about its troubled users in advance of the big sale to Yahoo. Today, messages on select Tumblr searches for general terms, like “ana,” “thinspo” or “suicide,” for example, read:
“If you or someone you know is dealing with an eating disorder, self harm issues, or suicidal thoughts, please visit our Counseling & Prevention Resources page for a list of services that may be able to help.”
(Some searches also show no posts when Safe Search is switched on.)
Roman says that NEDA’s earlier contact at Tumblr didn’t answer the company’s questions about the missing PSAs as of just last week, and instead directed her to another Tumblr staffer who also never responded. The nonprofit did not advise on the “Counseling and Prevention Resources” web page or the current PSA, and — since it doesn’t do counseling, actually — would have provided different language about how it would like to be referenced.
However, Womble’s experience with Tumblr has been different. Her suicide prevention organization advised the service to put outreach information on its website and provided Tumblr with a list of terms that match those searching for info on suicide. She doesn’t know when Tumblr began showing the messaging next to searches, but is satisfied that it is doing so now.
Is There Another Way?
Though Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram’s content policies say all the right things, those vulnerable to eating disorders, depression and other mental illnesses have found thriving communities on the sites nonetheless. It’s difficult for sites to keep up as users change their preferred tags. Instagram may have revisited its policies this year to correct for the now-rampant misspellings that are used to bypass search filters, but across it and other sites, searches for misspelled words (“proanna” or “thyn”) or other non-obvious tags (“thigh gap”) will still take you directly to large communities that have seemingly continued on undisturbed.
Whisper, for what it’s worth, is the only service that’s really trying something different. Instead of policing someone’s (unhealthy) thoughts, which may glorify or promote self-harm and then trigger others, the small but growing startup allows the post to appear to go through. But the post doesn’t show up for other Whisper users to view.
“We’re not going to sweep things under the rug. But if you ever say something even remotely suggestive, we remove the posting and watermark it,” Heyward explains. Only the poster can see the watermarked version. The copy reads, “your Whisper has been heard” and directs users to Your Voice for help and offers a hotline number.
For those posts that are borderline – and many are – the service has created a supportive community where negative and trolling content disappears with less than half a minute. “We don’t mess around with banning,” says Heyward.
Today, he believes that other social media sites need to do more. “A lot of people are unwilling to make short-term sacrifices for long-term viability of the business,” he says, pointing out that Myspace also once had a lot of issues around cyber bullying and teen suicide. ”[These sites are] addicted to traffic…they’re not willing to do anything that even remotely alienates a small amount of the audience or that’s going to affect their daily numbers.”
Facebook, however, removes harmful posts all the time. So will Whisper. “It’s the right thing to do morally and ethically,” Heyward says, “and by happenstance, it’s the right thing to do for the business, as well.”
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or 800-931-2237 for the referral helpline offered by NationalEatingDisorders.org. Not in the U.S.? Try Befrienders Worldwide or the International Association for Suicide Prevention.
Image credits: top: Jenni Holma, Getty Images; sad boy: Shutterstock / sokolovsky
SiteScout Acquires IP Developed By Defunct Ad Exchange adBrite
Ad exchange adBrite shut down earlier this year, but its technology isn’t disappearing entirely — self-serve ad-buying company SiteScout is announcing that it has acquired “certain intellectual property assets” that were developed by adBrite.
Neither the financial terms of the deal nor the specific assets involved are being disclosed. This is purely an IP purchase, SiteScout says — it isn’t hiring any adBrite team members.
When I spoke to SiteScout CEO Paul Mokbel about the deal, he said he isn’t getting into the ad exchange business (exchanges work primarily with publishers, while ad-buying platforms like SiteScout work with advertisers), and instead, his company is “cherry picking different components to integrate into our stack.” He predicted that we’ll start “seeing the fruit of this acquisition” in the next quarter or two, but it also sounds like the company is still figuring out exactly what it’s going to do — in Mokbel’s words, “It’s definitely a win for us, and it’s going to take some time to position it properly.”
He added that he was particularly impressed by adBrite’s ad serving code, which he described as “phenomenal.”
Mokbel said adBrite had a lot of funding with which to develop its technology (more than $40 million, according to CrunchBase). He didn’t draw the comparison directly, but later in our conversation he noted that SiteScout is entirely bootstrapped, and it now has eight-figure annual revenue — I heard last fall that its revenue for the past year had been $20 million.
Logitech Decides To Retain Its Harmony Remote Division
Logitech took to the wires today to announce the Harmony Ultimate Hub, a device that turns an iPhone or Android device into a universal remote, is available for purchase. It’s $100.
But more importantly, Logitech also announced that it decided to keep the Harmony division within the company rather than spinning it out into its own company, turning the division, once again, into a startup fighting for attention in the wild electronic forest.
Once upon a time, May 5, 2004 to be exact, Logitech acquired the privately held Intrigue Technologies of Canada, maker of the famed Harmony remote controls, for $29 million in cash. Fast forward nine years. Logitech did the company right, pushing out countless quality products under the Harmony name, cementing it as a leader in the market. However, with growth slowing, Logitech was pondering spinning the division back out into the wild.
As today’s press release states, the company has determined that retaining ownership is in the best interest of its shareholders. Apparently the success of the Harmony Ultimate, a universal remote that merges the touch capability found in a smartphone with the traditional remote controls, changed Logitech’s mind. The new remote “exceeded the company’s expectations for customer connections.”
The universal remote, and with it, Harmony products, have been under assault from startups and outside players the last few years. Countless hardware startups have attempted to turn the smartphone into a remote. But a smartphone does not a quality remote make. There’s something comforting about have a physical remote on a coffee table, always willing to change the channel. It’s so much easier than pulling up an app on a smartphone.
It’s not going to get easier for the Harmony division. As more smartphone makers include IR ports within their devices, the competition will get tougher. But if the wonderful Harmony Ultimate and the Harmony Ultimate Hub is any indication, the engineers and product managers at Logitech know what they’re doing.
Vine Has A Head Start, But There's Plenty Of Room For An Instagram Video Win
Facebook is making an announcement later today that we have heard could do with Instagram, its very popular photo app, getting a video service. If true, Facebook would be entering a crowded market – but one that is nevertheless ripe for the picking, with no single app yet to achieve more than one-tenth of a potential audience.
We got the researchers at Onavo to pull together some statistics for us on how the leading video apps are playing out at the moment, charting what percentage of consumers are accessing these apps each month. (To keep things simple, we kept these numbers restricted to iPhone and U.S.-only.)
Here’s how the market shares of video apps look at the moment:
As you can see, Twitter’s Vine — the newest player on the scene, launching only in January of this year — is far and away the biggest of the top-four video sharing apps. It has 10.7% of all iPhone users monthly. Among the next three biggest — Cinemagram, Viddy and SocialCam — as of the month of May, not one of them managed to attract more than 0.5% of users, and they’re actually all in decline, according to Onavo’s figures.
But Vine’s winning share says something else: it points to how small this market is at the moment. Assuming that most people would not use more than one video app, together all four still make up less than 12% of all iPhone users. On the other hand, as a sign of why Vine specifically might pose a competitive threat to Facebook, it is also the only one of the four video apps that has been growing — and sharply, too.
How much growth is left? Compare the video app proportions to those of photo apps. For all the video apps out there, there are even more photo sharing services, but these are reaching into much bigger proportions of consumers, and bigger overall numbers.
Instagram has been steadily creeping up and is now at 35.5%; while the second-largest, Snapchat, is at just under half that size, at 16.8%; Flickr is at 1.15%; and Facebook’s own camera is at 0.46%. (In the last quarter, Facebook noted that Instagram has now passed 100 million monthly active users, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they updated that number today. That is, if the news is about Instagram.)
While Snapchat is the opposite of a public posting site — the ephemeral quality is something that Facebook itself tried to mimic in its own Poke app — it’s notable that Snapchat lets people take both photos and video. And I don’t think the feature growth will end there: I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it move into more ways of “sharing” pictures longer term, and possibly attracting people away from sites like Instagram. (There’s another story to tell here, too, about how Yahoo will need to start making good use of all its new acquisitions and talent fast to turn around things like that paltry Flickr mobile audience share. Another time.)
Indeed, while Instagram looks like the clear winner now, we are still far from being in a saturated market in photo apps. Video looks small compared to photo, but when you compare photo app use to social networking app use, it also pales. Facebook, notes Onavo, is currently being used by some 72.40% of users. Twitter is in second at 27.10%, with Pinterest at 10.90% and LinkedIn at 9.65%.
The video opportunity
Video, and specifically video with a social and/or mobile spin, are hot tickets at the moment. For consumer apps and websites, video provides a route to picking up more users, getting those users to spend more time on their networks, and possibly laying the groundwork for brand-friendly advertising. For users, the rise of smartphones with good cameras, combined with a surge of interest to document our lives and share those clips with others over better and faster networks, are all contributing to a boom in the market.
But it’s not at all a sure-fire formula. Lightt, a video taking, editing and sharing app that is popular with Instagrammers, is currently getting a lot of prominence from Apple in the “new and noteworthy” and “photo & video” sections of the App Store. But Lightt didn’t make the top-four cut, Onavo tells me.
We’ll see if that changes. Backed by investors like Maveron; and founded by Alex Mostoufi, who also started up and then sold me.com to Apple, Lightt is still young and may yet have some more flashes left in it. Mostoufi tells me that it’s currently “doubling and sometimes tripling” its user base every week.
Photo: Instagram
Vine Goes On The Offensive, Teases New Features Ahead Of Instagram Video Launch
Nice timing, Vine.
As we inch closer to Facebook’s big Instagram press conference today, Vine co-founders Dom Hoffman and Rus Yusopov have taken to Vine (what else?) to show off some new features and UI enhancements that should be coming to the app soon.
As you can see from the Vines (embedded below), things are still relatively unclear. What we can glean from the six-second looping videos is that users may finally be able to create and save Vine drafts before sharing them. This would allow users to start a Vine, save it as a draft, and create other Vines in the meantime.
It’s a must-have feature for the new creation medium, which seems to ask for the passage of time in certain circumstances (like a Vine of you finishing your dinner, for example).
We also see an apparent redesign of the video stream, wherein the camera button moves to the bottom center of the screen and remains in place as you slide down the stream. Vines will pass down the stream one after the other, with no breaks for comments or likes.
It appears as though users have to click into particular Vines that they’d like to comment on, like, or read comments on.
The Verge has also spotted potential category additions to the app. As it stands now, popular hashtags float to the top of the Explore page, along with Editors picks. But the forthcoming update could bring standardized categories like Science & Technology, Comedy, Art, etc.
Clearly, Vine is pushing back against the possibility that Instagram will launch a highly competitive video-sharing service today. But as I’ve said before (and will likely say again), Vine will survive.
Revamped Video Stream/Categories:
Drafts:
A Term Sheet Written In Plain English? Put That In Your Silicon Valley Pipe And Smoke It
From the painstakingly obvious in retrospect why did nobody think of it before department: London-based early-stage VC Passion Capital has updated its standard Term Sheet so that it’s written entirely in plain English. For those of you who have never had to navigate a venture capital Term Sheet, the document outlining the terms of any proposed investment, they are usually worded by the legal profession, and as a result, dense in legal-gobbligook.
Why are they written that way, you may ask? Part of the answer is that’s just the way it’s always been done. So, Passion Capital, being one of the newer firms on the European VC block, has decided to buck the trend. And in doing so, the early-stage VC, run by Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero, is inadvertently challenging the rest of the investment community to follow suit.
Put that in your Silicon Valley pipe and smoke it.
The inspiration for dropping the legalise of its Term Sheet came from seeing the way the photo sharing site 500px updated their Terms of Service (TOS) with a second column with explanations written in plain English, says Passion Capital’s Burbidge. However, since, unlike a TOS, the majority, if any, of a Term Sheet isn’t legally binding, Passion realised it could go one step further. “So we knew there was no restriction on us to re-write the whole thing in plain English,” she says.
Of course, in retrospect or to an outsider looking in, the idea seems pretty obvious. Why, therefore, aren’t all Term Sheets written this way? Burbidge notes that some term sheets will have 1-2 clauses that are legally binding (Confidentiality and Exclusivity, for example), so that could be one reason. “But I think generally the main reason is to dress it up,” says Burbidge. By using legal jargon it looks a lot more “real” and meaningful and “the formality serves a purpose of making it feel ‘official’ and therefore more important.”
More cynically, it could be argued that a legally-worded term sheet is “also meant to be slightly intimidating,” says Burbidge. “And of course there is the most cynical view which is that when written in legal syntax it gives an advantage in negotiations to the party that understands (or drafted) the language in the first place”.
But, either way, googling archaic legal terms or going down the rabbit hole that is Quora trying to understand the likes of Liquidation Preference, Tag-along and Drag-along, isn’t necessarily the best way for an entrepreneur to spend their time (although, perversely, I quite enjoyed it).
For example, Passion’s new Term Sheet defines Liquidation Preference in these relatively simple terms:
We’re not asking for any complex preference rights… but we do ask for a so-called simple 1x liquidation preference. This means that if the company is sold, we’ll get the higher of either the amount of our investment or our ownership percentage of the sale value. In the worst case if the company is wound down with very little left, then anything left would be distributed to us as the investor.
“I’d rather take the time saved from having them parse through a legal term sheet and use that to sit down with them to talk about their go to market strategy, user acquisition, hiring the right team members or simplifying the product proposition”, says Burbidge. “Those are the areas where they should really be tested.”
Full Term Sheet embedded below (lawyers, look away now):
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