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
Some things:
The new policy says this: “Don’t upload images, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human
genitals or female-presenting nipples —this includes content that is so
photorealistic that it could be mistaken for featuring real-life humans
(nice try, though)”
This is a pretty straightforward sentence that doesn’t require clarification - it just makes it hard to believe this second sentence:
“Certain types of artistic, educational, newsworthy, or political content featuring nudity are fine.”
Why don’t I believe this sentence? Because I have been a member of several social media websites with policies that contain this sentence, and then remove, punish, or ban the artistic output of creatives. I don’t mean pornographers. I mean fine art photographers. I mean traditional artists like illustrators and painters. The phrase “certain types” is just vague enough to allow an entity to say “sure. certain types. not your type, though.”
“As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve” I’d like to see some data that indicates tumblr is growing accounts run by actual humans, and that engagement is not down, account creation is not down, and ad revenue from click-throughs, rather than “eyes on ads” is up.
‘cause lemme tell you: My follower count stalled two years ago, and it has only been bots since then. Likes are down. Reblogs are very down. And if the things I read in posts from the staunch few who remain here are any indication, we all hate tumblr advertising, and use some means of hiding it, unless we’re on mobile, in which case we ignore it.
“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.”
Again, I have to go back to that earlier sentence noting that “certain types” of nudity are allowed. If my photography falls under “adult content”, then a) the standard by which tumblr determines what is “adult” and what is “artistic” is not shared by me or any artist I’ve ever spoken to on tumblr, and b) there is a veritable dearth of websites on the internet that allow you to share fine art nude photography without being forced to censor it or having it removed. I can think of two. I left both of them in favour of tumblr eight years ago. c) this policy is inherently unwelcoming to a large number of tumblr users, and their forcible removal from this platform only serves to decrease the number of active users.
If you don’t like porn, say you don’t like porn, and find a means of doing something about it without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
If you’re being forced to comply with FOSTA and SESTA - but for some slimy disingenuous reason will not outright say so, then reread those laws, and read this post, while you’re at it. There are means besides blanket policies to eliminate corporate culpability in sex-trafficking. Use them.
If you want to protect the children, tweak the existing NSFW infrastructure so that it’s mandatory instead of opt-in. Use the machine-learning you’re obviously planning to use to tag nsfw content instead of deleting it.
Heck, use one of those old-timey prove how old you are screens to ensure that access to “adult” content is blocked to minors.
I promise you, I have no great love for pornographic content, or what I would otherwise call “adult content” by my own standard. It’s not my cup of tea. But I don’t trust you, @staff to have a reasonable standard based on these wordings. I’ve been burned enough times by every other social media platform.
I just want a place to share creative, and artistic photography, with an emphasis on expressive nude portraiture and figure modelling. You have been that. Admittedly, simultaneously plaguing creators like myself with responses from users who came only for adult content. Ironic.
One can’t help but feel that if a company is willing to command its users to excise nipples and genitalia from their social media identities, the employees of that company should therefore also be commanded to excise the nipples and genitalia from their person. Otherwise, how can we trust that the company believes in the standards they set? How can we take any of Jeffy’s above statements to be anything but the lying hand that precedes the stick?
I have had 3 mineral posts flagged as adult content today. They contained a tourmaline, a muscovite, and a galena. On Friday I had 3 fossil posts flagged as adult content, including a fossil fish, a fossil tooth from a mastodon, and a Tyrannosaur vertebrae. I’ve submitted appeals for each. This has been getting worse over the past month, apparently most of geology content is now only for adults.
My cats understand and will obey a number of verbal commands, one of which is “go away”. I don’t use it often, but if they’re bugging me and I’m trying to work or doing something that could be dangerous for cats, I can tell them to go away, and off they go - they’ll only keep pestering me if there’s a serious problem they need me to look at.
That said, their idea of a serious problem that requires my attention is somewhat eccentric. Previous instances have included:
There was an unfamiliar car parked across the street
Their water bowl was four inches to the left of its usual position
One of them had puked on the stairs and they didn’t want to walk past it
It was raining
One of them saw a weird bug
These are all very important things that required your attention. They’re doing a good job.
Dogs really aren’t much better. I teach all my dogs the command “show me”. How it works is if the dog needs something but I’m having trouble understanding what exactly they’re trying to tell me, I say “show me” and they lead me to whatever the problem is. Usually they lead me to a real problem (like a toy that got stuck under the couch, their water bowl is empty, etc). But sometimes they want me to fix things like this-
They pulled the covers off my bed and now they want me to put the covers back
They put their ball on top of the ottoman but the ottoman won’t throw it for them
The cat is sleeping and won’t chase them
A flower fell off the potted plant
The cat is sitting in a box and they don’t like it
One of them lost their bandana
The cat won’t take the toy they’re trying to give her
The cat DID take the toy they gave her and now they want it back
Did you know there’s an outtake from the 2000 Grinch movie where Jim Carrey leans in real close to Jeffrey Tambor’s face and then rips off Tambor’s prosthetic nose with his teeth
this post is a roller coaster, not in the way that people call wild posts “roller coasters,” but in the way that i knew something was up when i started reading the first paragraph, it was like the track slowly rising up, the wording just tipped me off, i knew there was going to be a serious drop that was going to give me whiplash, but when it arrived i still wasn’t ready for it
