zak-helling:

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

“A better, more positive Tumblr”

And by that you mean censoring artists rather than taking care of the porn bot and pedophile situation that caused the problem in the first place.

Y’all’s policy says that you have to be 13 years old or older to use this site, right? I get that 13 isn’t “adult”, but it’s grown enough to understand you’re going to see some stuff, hence why y’all gave us the ability to filter out NSFW content and go on safe mode.

“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.”

Like what? Porn sites? Go on, say it. You want everyone to just go over to explicitly porn sites, don’t you? Instead of, I don’t know, using the mature content filters? Meanwhile just this week you allowed one ad to go around for a pornographic streaming site like it was no big deal, so this policy change ain’t worth the screen space you’re printing it on. And if it was such a big deal, why not go after the actual offenders, such as the porn bots???

Now, I have to ask: what is “adult content”? In the guidelines it is defined almost exclusively as sex and nudity - sorry to all the female nude models who used this platform to learn how to love yourself and express the love of your body, looks like you’re going to have to settle for Pornhub if you want to get out there at all - so does that mean strong language is not adult? And if it does, what’s the extent? Can I only swear once per post? Can I say “damn” or can I only say “darn”? Some people think that LGBTQIA+ matters are “adult”, does that mean we’re next for the chopping block? Are all the resource blogs going to have to take on a hetero-cis normative to keep certain cis-het people from getting offended? Even if it’s not sexual at all, can we not post guides on how to tuck safely to alleviate dysphoria in trans-feminine individuals? What if we want to show how to bind correctly and someone wants to show where the nipples should be? Even with vague cartoonish anatomy, is that inappropriate? What if there’s no hint of anatomy at all? Are photos of happy same-sex couples or trans/non-binary/intersex individuals going to be taken down due to the possibility that someone finds this material to be adult?

While on the subject, let’s look at your other guidelines, shall we?

You say you don’t allow hate speech or terrorism, and yet you allow abuse of asexuals and other sexuality minorities. You seem okay with entire blogs explicitly dedicated to victimizing lesbians and encouraging physical and sexual violence against them. Then of course there are the proudly racist blogs and those who encourage anti-Semitism. This is both hate speech and terrorism, if you’re a member of the group the violence is directed towards.

You say you don’t allow harm to minors, and yet I hear about a lot of pedophiles on this site. That wasn’t resolved fully, and not even attempted until recently. And with your reliance on automation, it seems more will slip through the cracks, because how is a robot to tell whether “I love kids!” means you love them in a parental or human way versus a romantic or even sexual way?

You say you don’t allow violent content and threats, and yet it seems repeat offenders go unpunished. I have seen gifs of actual rape on this site, and nothing is done about it regardless of complaints made about the individuals.

You say you don’t allow deceptive or fraudulent links, but it seems, more accurately, you don’t allow any links. I’ve heard within the month that posts with ANY links are getting hidden away.

You say you don’t allow URL/Username “abuse” or “squatting”. What does this mean? What happens if we have a lot of side blogs? I have a blog where I reblog nature photography, I have a blog where I reblog writing prompts and advice, I have a blog where I reblog animal photos gifs and videos, I have a blog where I reblog LGBTQIA+ things (including advice, news, and general nonsense), I personally have a lot of blogs and I use all of them rather frequently. Am I going to get in trouble because I have too many? And what happens if I’m away for a bit, maybe because I get sick or I’m just afraid to delete a blog because of all the times people have reported deleting side blogs only for their entire blog to be deleted? What then?

You say spam doesn’t belong on Tumblr, AND YET MIGHT I REMIND YOU OF THAT PORNOGRAPHIC STREAMING SITE YOU ALLOWED TO ADVERTISE ON HERE JUST THIS WEEK???

“Mass Registration or Automation. Don’t register accounts or post content automatically, systematically, or programmatically.” Dafaq does this even mean? Don’t post content automatically? Like what a queue does? Can we not use the queue feature anymore? Care to elaborate???

Your anti-harassment enforcement is lackluster, as I’ve said already.

So yeah. You gonna step up on these other policies first, or are you gonna go after just one group in particular and hope it solves all your problems?