A better, more positive Tumblr

staff:
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
This move feels incompetent at best, and insidious at worst. What would have been ideal would have been listening to the communities’ complaints from the very start, and cracked down hard on problematic circles (like the ‘MAP’ community that was allowed basically free reign to promote their ideals) and committed to dealing with the rampant spambot (mostly for porn but not just for porn) issue, but that didn’t happen. Fine, what’s done is done. However, banning all not-safe-for-work content in the wake of finally facing some consequences is like deciding to amputate an infected leg instead of trying to cure it.

A large portion of Tumblr’s user base are within the nsfw community, and many of them rely on this platform as a source of income (whether as sex workers or nsfw artists). They have been following the rules set by Tumblr, they have already been flagged by Safe mode, and they are not the issue, yet they are being punished for no reason. I say this as someone who has safe mode on and doesn’t like seeing nsfw content on her dashboard, but even I know that this is unfair and not actually solving the problem.

That is not to even mention the actual filtering method that will be used itself. What constitutes as artistic, and what constitutes as pornographic? I can think of many Tumblr-specific ‘aesthetics’ that can be argued for both (e.g. lovecore, pale/nsfw, etc.). Is there a point where a photograph is ‘professional’ enough to count as contemporary art, or is it arbitrary? With the track record that Tumblr’s automated system and its followup human review has, the filtering will not even be that accurate, and plenty of non-pornographic or even non-nsfw content will be flagged, and kept flagged, anyways.

I can’t help but feel like this is part of a larger scheme by Yahoo to make this site more profitable to its advertisers. Parties in positions of power do this all the time, to use an issue to further their own agenda. Governments use terrorist attacks to sweep in legislations of ‘protection’ that are in reality to secure more rights to surveillance and less to privacy. Tumblr (and Yahoo) is using this issue to finally get rid of a part of their community that has been a thorn in their side in terms of advertisability. Previously they have discouraged nsfw (and as a casualty also non-nsfw) artists from the site by removing full-resolution image options, among other tactics that have lessened but not completely removed the (rule abiding) community. Youtube is another site that has been doing this by removing profit from any video content that they deem is not fit for advertisers, a move that they largely put into place after Pewdiepie’s Nazi fiasco. They do so in a covert way to appeal to advertisers while at the same time being able to tout ‘freedom of speech and expression.’

Look, I get it. What company wouldn’t want to turn a profit, especially one that hasn’t been doing so well for a while? Tumblr has plenty to benefit from this asides from advertisability (they may get unbanned from China if there is no more porn). But if you wanted to remove all nsfw content from the get go, just say so. You speak of transparency but then pull a move like this that is so obviously not just about the CP and spambots; how can you expect us as consumers to respect you when you are so hypocritical and tone-deaf? How can you expect Tumblr as a platform to grow when none of its issues are ever dealt with in a concentrated, actual effort, but rather by sweeping it under the rug or, as I said, cutting the leg off?