A better, more positive Tumblr
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
1) Y’all ever heard of announcing shit like this with like, a banner at the top of the main page or something else like that rather than with a post on your blog that nobody ever follows?
2) This is going to reduce a hefty section of your user base, and screw over people using this as part of their art advertisement, and punish everyone that wasn’t a bot, posting CP, or posting beastiality.
3) Given previous fuck-ups you’ve done, we all know you’re going to punish queer content first and regularly bunch it in with NSFW content even when it’s not, because you’ve done that before.
And we’ve already seen from experience that their algorithm is screwed and will pick up on the strangest things. And that their appeal process is tedious and disheartening. Honestly, this would be less bad if those things were going to get fixed and data could be restored, but we’ve seen what happens when Tumblr tries to “fix” things, so it’s safe to assume most data lost during teething problems will be difficult to get back. (And I’m normally someone who tries to stay away from “the sky is falling!” pronouncements, but if you’re worried, please do backup. It’s good data practice anyway.)
Also, bluntly? I don’t want Tumblr to move towards being a “family-friendly only/what about the minors” space - which it never has been and was never created to be. It was created to be a “you can find pretty much everything (as long as it’s legal)” space. Explicit content has been allowed from the off. I don’t see much of it because it’s generally not my cup of tea and I don’t tend to post it. The exception is pornbots, but persecuting reasonable users who tag correctly isn’t going to fix those. More staff and human control will help fix those. But those are expensive, so despite the mention of them, I doubt they’re going to happen, looking at precedents.
Stuff like this will lend validity to the children who’ve been wandering on and yelling that Tumblr is a child/teen space and that all 25+ adults (or whatever’s in fashion this time) need to stop abusing them by simply using the same blogging platform as them. And bluntly, I come on to Tumblr to talk to other adults. (Sorry, on the off-chance I have any younger followers. But I’ve never had any of you come into my inbox talking about reading any of my NSFW stuff or accusing me of grooming you. So I don’t mean you.)
We need better safeguards, and child pornography has been a terrible problem on this site, but this is… not the way to do it.
And, as they try to address (badly) in that post, this will also make discussions about safe sex, consent, safe kink and the sexual parts of LGBT+ culture way trickier. We’ve already lost great blogs like pervocracy, who’s been an excellent voice of reason. And yes, things like this always “magically” seem to hit the LGBT+ community and same-sex and trans content. Wonder why.
I want fewer kids to get hurt. I want random unaskedfor porn off my dash. However, I do worry about how well this will be implemented and the kind of site culture this could lead to, and we’ve seen from experience that Tumblr half-arses huge changes like this and they go… wonkily.
I’m glad they gave advance warning (even if it wasn’t hugely advance) and I’m staying on. But I am wary and I do think this was an organisational cockup.
…Tumblr, please don’t delete me for using the word “cockup.”
