The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 12.4 Tumblr Ban Highlights Huge Problem, Ariana Grande Pete Davidson Bullying, & More

Episode Date: December 4, 2018

Latest episode of The Philip DeFranco Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sup you beautiful bastards, hope you're having a fantastic Tuesday. Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco show and let's just jump into it. And the first thing I want to talk about today is a story that involves Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande, but it's also much bigger than that. And for those that don't know, Pete Davidson is a comedian, he's on SNL, Ariana Grande, arguably one of the biggest musical stars out there right now. They were dating, they got engaged, they then broke up. And also during this time, Pete Davidson put himself into several controversies. And Pete made news this week because he put out an Instagram post where he really opened up saying I've kept my mouth shut never mentioned any names never said a word about anyone or anything I'm trying to understand how when something happens to a guy the whole entire world just trashes him without any facts or frame of reference Especially in today's climate where everyone loves to be offended and upset it truly is mind-boggling I've been getting online bullied and in public by people for nine months.

I've spoken about borderline personality disorder and being suicidal publicly only in the hopes that it will help bring awareness and help kids like myself who don't want to be on this earth. I just want you guys to know, no matter how hard the internet or anyone tries to make me kill myself, I won't, I'm upset I even have to say this. To all those holding me down and seeing this

for what it is, I see you and I love you. And following this, Ariana Grande posted his statement and included her own saying, "'I know you already know this, but I feel I need to remind my fans to please be gentler with others. I really don't endorse anything but forgiveness and positivity.

I care deeply about Pete and his health. I'm asking you to please be gentler with others, even on the internet. I've learned through my own mistakes not to be reactive on social, so I do understand. But you truly don't know what anybody is experiencing ever, regardless of what they choose to display on social media or how they may appear In public I can promise you that so please that whatever point you're trying to make go

I will always have irrevocable love for him And if you've gotten any other impression from my recent work you might have missed the point and while following Pete Davidson's post there was a Lot of support for him there were also people that were unmoved people leaving and supporting comments like before you play the victim remember your quote Dark humor about Manchester. Yeah, those people aren't here anymore and you chose to make fun of that I don't care if you joke about your own dad That's your choice, but the joke about something that had nothing to do with you and is still weighing heavily on so many people I don't feel bad for you What I would personally say to people leaving those comments and people of that mindset is there's an obvious difference there

Dark humor generally tries to make someone laugh from an otherwise just plain horrible unthinkable situation Whereas the other thing is people online telling you to go kill yourself, that you're horrible, just plain harassment. And I will tell you, as someone that has been on the receiving end of that, not, in no way to the same extent as Pete Davidson, but as someone who has experienced that, that never gets normal. Yes, it happens, depending on who you are, you make peace with it, maybe you use it as the fuel to continue on. But it doesn't excuse, justify, or validate the incoming harassment. And I think thanks to social media making everyone feel accessible,

but at the same time, everything is still distant and disconnected, like you're not necessarily as attached to your words. More often than not, people are inclined to say the worst sort of shit that they would never say to Pete Davidson's face. And personally, I commend Pete Davidson for opening up like this and being vulnerable.

It's one of the reasons I have a hard time being vulnerable on the internet. I know that anything I say where I'm trying to connect to someone, it's gonna be used against me. It's going to be seen as a weakness that's going to be exploited by those that do not like me. But he's still putting himself out there in the face of that

so he can connect to other people that are going through something similar. And I think this story also connected with me, not only because I've been the recipient of the pile on, but I've been on the other end of it. I'm constantly trying to call into question my actions so that I can hopefully grow as a person. But with that said, that's the story,

that's my personal takeaway, and I pass the question off to you as far as how you feel about it. And then let's talk about a quick update around the yellow vest protests and riots out of France that we talked about yesterday. If you didn't see, over the past month, hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets,

initially to protest fuel tax increases. There were also a ton that were injured, arrested, there was tons of damage. But the big update around this is that it appears that the protest has been successful. According to the reports today, French President Emmanuel Macron will suspend his plan fuel tax increase. And I will say, Macron doing this, it makes me wonder how effective he will be in the future. Because as we mentioned yesterday, Macron said, I will never accept violence. No cause justifies that authorities are attacked, that businesses are plundered,

that passersby or journalists are threatened, or that the Arc de Triomphe is defiled. Adding, I will always respect debate, and I will always listen to opposition, but I will never accept violence. And while it can be debated that it wasn't the violence or the chaos that we saw on the streets that made it so that Macron made a 180,

that it was because he met with opposition leaders and realized, you know what, this is the right way forward. At the same time, this about face could be seen as a validation of everything we witnessed over the past three weeks. And so it'll be interesting to see as far as public perception is concerned, if he is seen as someone that, you know what, after enough he is willing to work with the people, or if people will see this as an indication that Macron doesn't have a backbone, that he's not willing to stand even though people are opposed initially. And so with that, I wanna ask you, do you see this as something that undermines Macron or do you see this as him willing to listen and change?

Then in unnecessary news story of the day, we look to Slate and specifically a person by the name of Ruth Graham decided to take aim at Sully. If you don't know, that was George H.W. Bush's service dog. They put out a piece titled, "'Don't spend your emotional energy on Sully HW Bush. He's a service dog who has been with the president for six months, not his lifelong companion. With standout excerpts like, Sully is not a longtime Bush family pet letting go of the only master he has known.

He is an employee who served for less than six months. And the photograph, in other words, is not proof that Sully is a particularly quote good boy or that quote we don't deserve dogs as countless swooning tweets put it on Monday. On its own it says almost nothing other than the fact that Sully was at one point in the same room as the casket of his former boss. This is simply a photograph of a dog doing something dogs love to do, lie down. And my personal question is, Ruth, what was the point of this article? As you pointed out in your own piece, Sully arrived there over the summer to help the former president who used a wheelchair because of symptoms of Parkinson's disease with tasks like opening doors and picking up objects. And so at the core of this story you have an amazing service animal that is there to support someone that is in need. Most likely they were together a lot for George HW Bush in very trying times.

So to think that human being and service dog can have a meaningful connection over six months is so weird. And I'm not one of the people that are outraged by this story, but I'm one of the people that are outraged by this story, but I'm one of the people that, once again, I'm questioning why? Who looked at that picture and people praising the dog and thought, you know what? Fuck those people for feeling something. This feels like such a weird choice to make, although I will say, I searched her name on Twitter because I was like, okay, what the hell is the situation about? The first thing that pops up is another Slate article that she wrote titled, Yes, adults should be embarrassed to read young adult books. And it opens up by taking aim at A Fault in Our Stars, which of course is a John Green book. And so it kind of feels like maybe her shtick is to kind of crap on things that people are enjoying?

But I don't know. There's really no end to this story. I just saw it and I was like, what the hell is this? And I'm going to talk about this controversy coming out of a New Hampshire school this week. And this whole story is built around this video. Hey, KKK, KKK, let's kill all the blacks. Burn the girls on their front yard and hope they don't come back. To a song about the KKK set to jingle bells. I'm always amazed in 2018

how stories are still able to surprise me. Now reportedly the students that were filmed are 11th grade students. And according to the school superintendent, these students were given an assignment to select some event during the American Reconstruction period and make a jingle out of it. And so these two students selected the Ku Klux Klan.

The superintendent also issued a letter to Perrin's apologizing for what he called an incident of extreme racial insensitivity and said, "'Administration from Dover High School and the district "'are working with students and the school community "'to respond immediately and effectively "'to this racial insensitivity.'" But at the same time, both the superintendent

and the principal said on Monday that they believed that these students didn't act out of malicious intent and were addressing the assignment as given to them. Monday that they believe that these students didn't act out of malicious intent and were addressing the assignment as given to them. But they also said that whether the assignment was appropriate or whether the students work was vetted along the way will be part of the administration's review process. Adding that the decision of whether to discipline the students has yet to be made, but also later saying that the teacher has been put on paid leave. As far as my personal reaction to this, I'm just, I'm one, left confused. What history teacher's like, you know how I'm gonna teach, you know, the Reconstruction, one of the darkest times in American history right after the Civil War Christmas carols and two

I'm really left hoping that there's a lot of Context missing that there's a part of the song that mocks the KKK There's something else because as is on display just seeing two kids sing about the KKK and killing all the blacks in school and this Eliciting laughter it feels weird and disgusting, and I've seen people argue, you know, what if they did this around the Holocaust? But I'm sharing this story today because I'm very interested in your personal take.

Do you personally feel that people are blowing this out of proportion, yes or no? If someone is at fault, do you think that it is both the students and the teacher, or just one or the other? Let me know what you're thinking in those comments down below. And then let's talk about the great Tumblr purge,

which is what I'm calling it, because sometimes I like to be a little bit extra. So to start things off, if you don't know what you're thinking in those comments down below and then let's talk about the great tumblr purge Which is what I'm calling it because sometimes I like to be a little bit extra to start things off If you don't know what tumblr is it is a site that was founded in 2007 allows people to post blogs videos Gifts and pictures and it's been known for its open attitude towards content allowing nearly anything that was legal on the site But the big news we got yesterday is that tumblr announced they would be removing all adult content by December 17th And as far as what qualifies as adult content, they wrote, "'Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, "'or gifs that show real life human genitals

"'or female presenting nipples, "'and any content including photos, videos, gifs, "'and illustrations that depicts sex acts.'" But at the same time, they also allow exceptions to this rule. They mention breastfeeding, birth and afterbirth moments, also mentioning a variety of written content. They also go on to explain that they are using an algorithm to identify adult content, both in the future and already existing on site. And actually, on that note, they also admit that the algorithm may flag things incorrectly. And if you're interested in the rest of the deep dive specifics on this, I'm going to link down to their post down below. But as far as the reason for this change, this seems to be a part of an effort to clean up the site since it was bought by Verizon in 2017. And in fact, the CEO of Verizon Oath,

which is Tumblr's parent company, said that they have no interest in adult content, adding, "'There are no shortage of sites on the internet "'that feature adult content. "'We will leave it to them and focus our efforts "'on creating the most welcoming environment possible "'for our community.'" Also, before this, back in August,

Tumblr announced that it was banning all hate speech, revenge porn, and posts that exalted school shootings. But with this latest move from Tumblr, a lot of people are pointing to Apple. If you didn't know, the Tumblr app was actually banned from the iOS app store back on November 16th after Tumblr was found to be hosting child porn. And so there's been a heavy focus on the Tumblr app

for this horrible, extreme kind of content, but also that focus on the Tumblr app doesn't help because Apple has been known to ban apps for having not safe for work content. And as far as my reaction to this move and this story, I'm left wondering if Tumblr is killing itself. Well, we don't know the exact finances, the complete inner workings of Tumblr.

It does appear at least based on what's out there that adult content was a big pull for them. Back in 2013, TechCrunch reported that a full 11.4% of Tumblr's top 200,000 sites were porn related. But also with that, more than 23% of sites that were sending traffic to Tumblr were porn related. So category wise, the adult industry was the largest source of traffic to Tumblr. That was in 2013. More recently, a study done by researchers in Italy found that only 0.1% of users actually uploaded adult content.

However, they also found that nearly 22% of Tumblr users liked or reblogged that content. So essentially, you're talking about a company making a move to ban content that was actively engaging one fifth to one fourth of their audience. And at the same time, based on the number and type of posts that have been flagged after this change, it seems like they're also needlessly harassing a lot of their users. It's been really fascinating just scrolling through all these posts of people taking screenshots

of just completely in no way adult content being flagged. And so really to me, this seems like Tumblr's jump off a cliff moment. And it's really just a question of if they will land safely or with some bruises, but then be able to continue on, or if it's to their death. And based off of situations like the one around the iOS store, you could also argue that, you know,

they're not just jumping, they're being kind of nudged and prodded along, but however stressful or hard their situation is, ultimately they are the one that is making the decision here. With that said, I pass the question off to you. What do you think is in store for the future of Tumblr? And also, if you're one of the people that have been using Tumblr,

either for consumption or putting out your content, is this going to affect you? Also, what I'm really interested in from a creator standpoint is where people are going to go from here if they are going to be negatively impacted. And actually, on the note, for my fellow creators out there,

I think that, you know, even if you don't produce adult content, you should look to the situation as a reason for why you should diversify and also own your audience elsewhere. At the end of the day, we end up just being at the mercy of these companies. It's just something to keep in mind.

And that's where I'm going to end today's show. And of course, remember, if you like this video, you wanna show that support, hit that like button. If you're new here, hit that subscribe button and make sure you get your five Philip DeFranco shows a week. And also remember, until Christmas break, getting morning news videos on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

which actually, on that note, if want to watch this morning's morning news video You can click or tap right there to watch that or if you miss yesterday's Philip DeFranco show you want to catch up you can Click or tap right there to watch that. But with that said of course as always my name is Philip DeFranco You've just been Phil'd in I love yo faces, and I'll see you tomorrow