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
Goodbye, farewell
and amen
The decision to
leave Tumblr was on my mind long before the infamous Tumble Purge that happened
on 19th November, 2018 and resulted in termination of unknown number
of blogs all over the website. Majority of them were NSFW blogs, but many other
communities reported losing their members, including bodybuilding community,
LGTB community and of course our true crime community. Some people wake up to
the empty dashboard because most of the blogs they followed became casualties of the Tumblr Purge.
I have complained
about the site censorship before. Posts are being taken down either because of
a complaint filed by one person or because the algorithm the Tumblr uses detects
something that they believe violates their content policy. I had a post taken down for NSWF when my blog was a news blog about crime! Posts are not being reviewed by actual human
moderators (that Tumblr apparently doesn’t have) before being removed, and that’s the first time I have
ever seen such a policy on a website. The
policy is not only not reasonable, but it
also doesn’t help to effectively eliminate the content that violates the
content policy, otherwise the app wouldn’t disappear from the app store. For
instance, Russian site vk.com automatically takes down a profile after numerous
complaints from different people which make sense because it means that chances that
someone is falsely reporting are
pretty low (not praising Russian websites here, I’m sure you all can think about similar examples
of websites from all over the world).
But if it does happens and your page is unfairly terminated, you can contact the
site support that will respond
your within hours and help you to solve
the problem. I know that some people
were lucky enough to experience communication with Tumblr support, but I
personally never managed to get a single response from them. My last attempt to
contact them took place about a month before the Tumblr Purge when my post was
terminated for hate speech. I sent a message
to the Tumblr support explaining that covering hate crime is not hate speech, it’s raising awareness. I
received zero response whatsoever. It was like talking to a wall. I could write
them a novel and still wouldn’t be graced by their
attention.
When my blog
was terminated, I was determined to
fight for it because of the three years of the hard work that I put into it.
But coming back was something that I was very conflicted about. After the Jeff
D’Onofrio statement posted on 3nd December, I realized that coming back is not
an option at all. The statement made me feel
like all of sudden I travelled back in time and woke up in the Nazi Germany. First of all, the statement equals erotic, porn and child abuse. Second,
the statement urges you to “speak freely
about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and
your personal journey” while essentially
banning any forms of sexuality, claiming that it will help to “to
create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves”. Third, is
that Tumblr promises something that victims of the
Tumblr Purge never got. Most of us didn’t get heads up, chance to appeal
or preserve our content. We were just
suddenly gone as if we never existed. Now, how ironic is that?
I can go on and tell about SFW posts being flagged
as explicit, about what happened to some
other websites after they banned adult content (spoiler: they are dead) or
about Tumblr forgetting that site’s user base is lifeblood of their success. The bottom line is that Tumblr failed to
detect child porn, was taken down from
the app store because of it and didn’t find a better way to deal with it other
than punishing its users.
I created my blog because I wanted to raise awareness and fight injustice.
Continuing to use this site for me
simply means supporting censorship which
is essentially supporting injustice. I want to thank everyone who made almost
three years of my crime reporting possible. It literally meant the world for me
and it was very hard to come to terms that it’s
all gone. I will continue to do what I did, but I will have to find another
way. Maybe someday you will hear about me again.
