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 is seriously the dumbest financial decision Tumblr has ever made. Forget losing advertising because of plummeting traffic. Just count the human hours they are going to have to spend reviewing the MILLIONS of protest responses to blogs and posts being withdrawn and chasing down and individually reviewing all the porn blogs that will STILL find a way to pop up.
Also, what gives Tumblr the right to define acceptable “positive” female-presenting nipple situations? Just for an example, for women who have dealt with infertility, multiple miscarriages, etc., does that mean that their nipples cannot be seen as something healthy, beautiful, and positive? Are female-presenting nipples ONLY positive when associated with their basic biological functions?
I’m also certain Tumblr didn’t think through the “positive” gender reassignment aspect. I’m just going to sit back and laugh as their beleaguered IT and review staff have to chase tens of thousands of transgender porn blogs that “positive gender reassignment blogs” – and more power to those porn blogs.
Tumblr had ONE set of differentiators: edginess, progressiveness, openness to ALL sides, and willingness to test limits. With that gone, I’m pretty sure this will turn into just another lame set of mommybloggerwannabeinstagrammers.
I’m off to find where everyone is heading, and I’ll be off there, too.
I’ve been seeing all these posts about everybody putting their two cents in on this whole NS|FW thing and I feel it’s time I put my own personal two cents in as well. So here we go. I’ll try and keep it concise.
I found this site when I was a Sophomore in highschool. I can’t even truly remember what brought me here. Maybe it was other friends talking about it, I’m not sure. I was 15 at the time when I joined the site. There was no “Safe Mode” per say when I joined so I had freedom to search and look at whatever I pleased. Over the next two years I was on the site, I made friends, found new fandoms to join, learned more about my sexuality, and just had a safe place to come while going through the hell that was highschool. And it was great. I was so happy those two years being able to come home and literally scroll for hours catching up on all the “clean” and “dirty” stuff that had been posted. I can’t thank tumblr enough for giving me such a safe and wonderful place to come and be myself.
But it was around the beginning of Senior year when “Safe Mode” was seriously rolled out. I remember getting on here one night to find some “dirty” stuff to look up just for the hell of it cause I had a stressful day but nothing came up. I searched around and found out the problem. I contacted tumblr @staff and they said that I couldn’t turn off “Safe Mode” until I turned 18. Well I was 18. I even provided a picture of my drivers license to prove it but they said that the date of birth I had provided on the site was wrong. Well my birthday is June 30th and I had this whole shebang happen on September 26. I WAS 18. Why would I put down a birthday that made me YOUNGER than I actually was?? Anyway. They told me I had to wait until the next year to turn “Safe Mode” off. That New Years was the best I’d had in a while because it was finally 2018 and I could update my app and TURN OFF SAFE MODE. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent just enjoying the site again having full freedom. I was SO ABSOLUTELY HAPPY to have “Safe Mode” OFF and be in contact with all my friends again.
And now this has happened. Me and everybody else have been forced into a permanent “Safe Mode”. I get why. It’s because of the whole Apple Store thing with the CP. But this isn’t how you handle it. You’ve literally just killed yourself tumblr. I no longer feel welcome here. I can’t find half the stuff I want to search and most of it is just fanfiction. Not NS|FW. Just a few minutes ago I searched something that used to always have TONS of posts. Well it only had three this time. THREE! It’s just..unfair. You aren’t targeting the problem. You’re just targeting everything. You’re dropping a nuke and hoping it with take care of the issue, not caring about the causalities. This site is meant for “Mature 17+”. Says so on the app store. Meaning it is meant for mature people. Who can view mature content. Cause quick story, I grew up with violence. And no. I’m no taking about abuse. I’m talking about how my older brother had me watching Predator and Scarface when I was about five years old. And how I’d seen V for Vendetta and War of the Worlds by age seven. I’ve seen every Fifty Shades that’s come out. And as a CHRISTMAS TRADITION my family piles up on the couch Christmas night and watches all the Alien movies cause nothing says Christmas like facehuggers im|preg|nating people and having aliens burst out of their chests. So trust me. I can handle seeing a di|ck. I can handle a nip|ple. I can handle s|e|x. Don’t take my freedom away. We’ve already got to deal with Net Neutrality and Article 13. Don’t put this new stress on everyone else too. I’m already afraid of the world we’ll be living in, in the next few years. I’ve even already started investing in flashdrives to save art, pictures, and videos offline like it’s the apocalypse because in reality it is. It looks like we’re nearing the end of free speech online and maybe even in the world. So please rethink this ban. Target the real threats. The nazis and CP accounts and po|rn bots. Not the accounts that are posting mature content in appreciation of it or the ones posting it to make a living or the ones posting it to be themselves. It isn’t right and you know it…