CherwellOxford\'s Independent Student Newspaper
Cherwell Staff List HT21
Oxford professor claims NHS could vaccinate Britain in 5 days
Jonny Yang
The professor also calls for authorities to start treating the pandemic like a war, and that they should drop everything to contain the virus spread.
Covered Market remains open despite lockdown
Charlie Hancock
Traders such as Bonners Oxford grocery, Cardew's coffee and tea shop, the Oxford Sandwich co. and Ben's Cookies are remaining open for in-person shopping or providing takeaway food.
Emergency accommodation for rough sleepers in Oxford open for 19 consecutive days
Yihang Fang
In view of the ongoing pandemic, rough sleepers in SWEP accommodation are now offered their own room for the night, while in previous years they would sleep in shared spaces.
Thames Valley Police will fine those who "wilfully and blatantly" break lockdown rules
Angela Eichhorst
Home Secretary Priti Patel defended police presence in a press conference on Tuesday (12 January), where she confirmed 45,000 fixed fine notices have been handed out across England for lockdown breaches to date.
BREAKING: University confirms 45 positive cases this week
Sasha Mills
"The University has confirmed 45 cases of Covid-19 amongst staff and students from Early Alert Service tests for the 9th-15th January, with a positivity rate of 20.3%."
AllCartoon
Why 2020 Should Not Be Forgotten
Charlie Aslet
Many want a Men in Black-style mind wipe that will erase the past year from our collective memory, only to be recalled 50 years down the line when a funky new virus dredges up the memories from the bottom of the dustbin. This, I think, is a mistake.
Capitol Riots: Putsch and Prejudice
Jack Carter Benjamin
'It is difficult to overstate the rage I feel against America's right wing for allowing us to get to this point. Shame on Mitch McConnell. Shame on Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. Shame on every Republican who acquitted Trump of impeachment charges. Shame on the entire Trump family and every single one of his enablers.
Opinion: On Scotland, Devolution, and The Labour Party
Matthew Bowen
Unionism can only work if all nations are satisfied: a real regard for the Scottish people must be made. Such regard that is formed by compassion and a distribution of wealth, power and opportunity would ensure that this positive situation is not only made but sustained.
I'll Bark if I Want To: On Letting Women Be Angry
Alice Garnett
So I say: let women be angry. Let us bark at men in the streets who catcall us, let us foam at the mouths when men tell us to smile more, let us hiss at those who deem our clothes 'too revealing.'
The limits of liberté: France's 'global security law'
Katie Child
Is France's proposed 'global security law' a necessary step to protect individual police officers or a breach of international human rights? At the end of...
Clubs in crisis: the UK's declining night time industry
Annabelle Grigg
"If not for a healthy dose of nostalgia to remedy bitter envy, remembering the cultural importance of clubbing will ensure the scene doesn't collapse entirely."
Going Viral: Religion and the Pandemic
Itrisyia Dayini and Joseff Govinda Howells
Pandemics are nothing new, but we now live in a technological age - a globalised world where people and information travel further and faster...
And They Call It Puppy Love: Pets in Lockdown
Yii-Jen Deng
I was the kind of child that hankered after a fluffy four-legged friend – the hopeful child that exasperated parents would try to fob...
'We Don't Need No Education': Assessing What Matters in Schools
Jess Dunmore
"In this drive to ascribe value to students, we risk losing sight of what learning can and should be: an ongoing, unfolding and communal process."
The bloody problem of PMS research
Marietta Kosma
"Women have historically been side-lined from medical attention at a greater degree than men and there is little known about the premenstrual syndrome (PMS)."
What does the climate crisis mean for global health?
Lucy Goodfellow
"It's clear that the World Health Organisation were right to declare climate change one of the major health challenges of the 21st century."
Science Snippets: Outrageous Octopuses
Flora Clark
"octopuses are prone to a peculiar habit. They have been seen punching (yes, punching) fish"
Science Snippets: Cardiac Construction
"A study from the University of Minnesota ... reports the successful creation of a functioning, scaled-down human heart pump using a 3D printer."
The Oxford Vaccine – How generalisable are the trial results?
Danielle Perro
"Oxford-AstraZeneca has devised a vaccine in an unprecedented amount of time... However, with any and all science, it is important that we be critical of the claims being made, and question the scientific method used to arrive at such conclusions."
Bianca Pasca
"The echo in the chapel chimes as I take my unlikely seat."
Tom W. McGrath
"Did you ever meet the man, Who lived once in this place?"
'I rue the lost hours and days: a finite life, this one'
A Love Letter to Living With Scientists/An Apology to My Housemates
Claudia Bullmore
'I am not sure what broke me. I think it's a close tie between the discussion around NaCl when I asked for the salt to be passed down the table or when someone genuinely asked the group what their favourite way to measure the centre of mass was.'
Drawing Attention
Eve Harrington
'I'm making mistakes I'm crossing them out I'm making it ugly I'm making it shout'
Comment Does Tumblr's porn ban actually make the site safer for anyone?
Titian's Venus with a Mirror, c.1555 Source: Wikipedia
Does Tumblr's porn ban actually make the site safer for anyone?
Tumblr's porn ban fails to address the real issues
On 17th December, microblogging site Tumblr banned 'explicit sexual content and nudity'. This ban marks the end of a process of sanitisation of the site that began when it was bought by Yahoo in 2013, and the beginning of the end of Tumblr as a safe space for LGBTQ+ people, women, artists, and sex workers.
When Yahoo bought Tumblr in 2013 for a hefty $1.1 billion (including liabilities), the company were buying into millennial counter-culture before the rest of the world had realised what mainstream millennial culture was. Tumblr was, and in some ways still is, the home of devoted fangirls (and a few fanboys) producing reams of content inspired by countless books, TV shows, and films. This aspect of Tumblr is unlikely to change much in the wake of the site's recent ban of adult content: GIFs and edits that don't feature nudity or sex will be unaffected, as will written erotica.
This is where the Tumblr Staff's vision of 'a better, more positive Tumblr' starts to crack. Visual material featuring explicit sex scenes will no longer be allowed to be shared on the site, limiting the extent to which fans can appreciate their favourite shows and films: they can no longer share and create art featuring sexually explicit content that, in most cases, they have already seen. Moreover, such content was already automatically hidden for all users with Safe Mode (introduced in 2017, and nearly impossible to disable), as was other adult content. This should have been enough to keep such content hidden from minors and those who did not want to see it.
Look a little deeper into the semantics of the ban and its real targets appear. This ban was introduced to 'keep the community as safe as possible'. This explanation was the 'tl;dr' form of the fact that Tumblr was removed from the App store, after its filters proved ineffective at stopping child pornography. This is an oversight that should not happen on a site as big as Tumblr, and indeed does not happen on other social media platforms.
The removal of the Tumblr app from the App Store was probably the final straw, not the only reason behind the ban. Tumblr was one of the few places on the Internet where sex workers could practice their trade following an amendment to US legislation that held the owners of websites liable for the facilitation of sex work on their sites, and the site had a massive pornbot problem. Anyone with a Tumblr account probably had several pornbots following them. A blanket ban on all adult content was the easy way to cull the pornbots and protect the owners of Tumblr (now Verizon, who bought Yahoo in June 2017) from the legal consequences of sex workers operating on the site.
This all points to neglect of the site by its new owners, heavy reliance on algorithms and not enough real, human moderation.
Tumblr staff revealed the ban's more sinister side, however, through the actions they took in the two weeks between the ban being announced and it being enforced. In those two weeks, content in the queer and LGBTQ+ tags was being automatically flagged as NSFW. For decades LGBTQ+ people have been trying to show a cis and heteronormative society that their experiences of gender and sexuality are not inherently perverse and degenerate. Tumblr was a space where LGBTQ+ people could feel safe and had created communities in which they could explore their gender and sexuality away from such judgements. That space no longer exists. Tumblr staff have shown that they perceive any LGBTQ+ content as inappropriate simply because it is LGBTQ+, whether it is sexually explicit or not.
Whilst it is now more difficult for LGBTQ+ people to find content on Tumblr that validates and celebrates their identity, nothing has been done to tackle the growing neo-Nazi presence on Tumblr. Blogs that share overtly racist and violent content have been untouched by this ban, and another recent change in Tumblr's community guidelines that allowed all hate speech to be reported, which they took the pains to defend against claims of 'censorship': 'we are fierce defenders of free expression', does not seem to have hindered the growth of this side of Tumblr at all.
Worst of all, the announcement and wording of the ban show what Tumblr is becoming. Setting aside the blatant misogyny apparent in the fact that 'female-presenting nipples' are no longer allowed to be shown in a sexual context on Tumblr, the phrase suggests that Tumblr's ineffecient moderating team are to decide whose nipples are female and whose are male. As a result, they become the gatekeepers of trans identities on Tumblr. Not only that, but the same moderators who have already decided that LGBTQ+ content is innately inappropriate have also been given the power to decide which instances of nudity are politically, medically, or artistically significant, and which are not.
The Tumblr that gave LGBTQ+ youth access to pornographic content made by and for people like them, the vocabulary that allowed them understand and vocalise their identities, and a community they could find friends and role models within, is dead. In the words of an executive who left the site last year, "Nobody at Yahoo ever understood what they bought and what Tumblr was. That fundamental issue is the core of lots of problems." This ban, and the effect it is having on marginalised communities who have nowhere else to go, is the final result of that misunderstanding. Tumblr was never a neat, conformist platform like Instagram or Facebook. Banning adult content cannot change that and all Tumblr can do now is cling onto those users who don't know where else they can take their content.
Opinion – We need to change the conversation around censorship
Debate: Is banning books ever justified?
Staying sex-positive during a global pandemic
For whom and for how long?
The Sensuality of Female Loneliness
© OSPL. All rights reserved.