Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.
Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).
Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.
So what is changing?
Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.
Why are we doing this?
It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.
Bottom line: 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.
So what’s next?
Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.
Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.
Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.
Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.
Jeff D’Onofrio CEO
Blocked and reported
That’s the same bullshit thing a lot of fanfiction sites went for years ago. This isn’t only censorship it is also done in a lazy way with using machines. No training by humans can create an algorithm that will find the harmful stuff and keep the other art on this site intact and I can tell you why: Those who “train” it have biases they teach the machines. That’s the reason why. There is no objective way. You can ask an AI expert on this problem, they will tell you the same. The only thing this will do is create a mass exodus of artists of any kind. So Tumblr is killing itself.
like notice how nowhere in that lil staff update did they mention getting rid of nazi or white supremacist content. they still get to keep theyre racist and neofascist userbase while appearing to do something useful
Minors being exposed to pornographic material on this website is pretty horrid but tumblr could’ve either been explicitly a no-pornography zone from the start OR, in the current version of reality, it can implement a legitimate filtering system ADMINISTERED BY HUMANS RATHER THAN RUNNING A SINGLE POORLY CODED BOT WRITTEN IN PHP, the current solution directly affects the survival income of a very large amount of people and is the laziest and cheapest one they could implement.
Silicon Valley style “all our moderation is done by bots who occasionally get updated by one person” moderation is a fucking blight upon the internet and is not going to become any better or going to stop giving random false positives and fucking over people who haven’t done anything harmful because its a fundamentally capitalist solution based on minimizing the costs of operating a massive social media platform. This entire mess could’ve been averted if this website wasn’t operated on the basis of “spend as little money as possible on keeping it clean”, except now they’re swerving from “don’t do anything” to “just have our bots delete immense amounts of the website basically arbitrarily, while we continue to not actually do anything”.
I’m just reading up on this NSFW ban and I would like to say firstly, this is targeting sex workers. Banning any nude content “regardless of age” is their excuse to expand on the shadow banning and blog deletion they’ve been hitting SW with for the last year.
The first purge, while quick and heavy handed, did get rid of some popular pedo blogs and CP artists, but there’s still a ton of porn blogs with stolen porn and porn bots that crop up in everyone’s notes consistently. If they were truly trying to get rid of problem blogs, all those bots would’ve been first to go; but we already know they get money from that so why would they get rid of them?
The first exclusions of “real-life genitals or “female-presenting” nipples” very clearly affects sex workers. This means that people can still draw nudity, because that section (1) says real-life genitals and (2) doesn’t include illustrations. The second half does include illustrations, but that’s relative to depicting “sex acts”. Which means people can still draw sexually charged content so long as no one is really having sex or being depicted as having sex in illustrated works.
The contention that erotica and illustrations can be covered as “art” and be protected under their idea of free speech is literally giving fandom creators a pass. So many issues within fandom-related content is written fics that include terrible shit like abusive relationships, age gaps, rape in various forms, raceplay, and etc. If that is still not going to be considered “adult content” that should be banned from the site, then half the people whining about being pushed off tumblr are still protected.
Half the child porn on here from fandom-related content isn’t explicit sex acts. There are a bunch that are sexually charged or are intended to be sexually stimulating, like those aheago heavy-breath BDSM adjacent anime renderings of whoever, but don’t actually fall into the realm of a sex act. They also have not addressed the fact that nothing even remotely sexual or suggestive should be permitted if it contains children, real or fictional.
Y’all can keep digging your heels in claiming that this is for the good of children, but nothing that they’re saying is really indicative of them making moves to ban and prevent the content that is most likely going to be seen by children.
Sex workers and most adult bloggers who create sexual or pornographic content set their blogs to explicit, block anyone who is underaged, and use sites that require age verification when sharing their explicit full-length content.
These new guidelines are punishing sex workers while still allowing people to post most of the offending content children would be/are already being exposed to. Some of y’all need to put on your critical thinking hats.
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