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

tbh, this new policy doesn’t affect most of my Tumblr experience. What I take issue with is how utterly hypocritical it is.

I’ve seen more “adult” pictures since joining tumblr last year than I care to count. All of them were from pornbots on my dash. The bots hijacked popular tags Tumblr suggested should be followed by default, indiscriminately targeting diy and handmade and artists and music and science. They showed up even if browsing in safe mode. Every random follower with a weird name? More porn in their header or bio. The mobile app was especially lousy with them. Trending links? Always porn, none of it legitimate. There was no recourse besides flagging and blocking, but doing that still meant you usually had to see the same photo twice.

Then the pornbots flooded popular posts. Even when they targeted topics younger users were more likely to frequent – cats, Disney, cartoons (a problem also common on platforms like Instagram), K-pop, you name it – there was no response from staff and no indication they had any intention of dealing with it. Some users attempted to reclaim posts from the bots by reblogging the ridiculous things they’d commented, but it wasn’t enough to keep the bots from essentially killing any discussion in the comments, because who wants to waste time scrolling past endless suggestions to “gEt lAiiD 2nite!!1” to find one real person? And when the mobile app was removed from the app store, it seemed the number of bots actually increased.

I’m here for cute stuff and fashion and crafts and languages and fandom, but I’m going to focus on that last part. Full disclosure: Some of the fandom blogs I follow post adult content. They are all excellent about tagging and warning for exactly what they post. They use the read more option to hide anything explicit, they list the tags they use so it’s even easier to blacklist any content you don’t want to see. I have never seen actual users try to get more views for their NSFW content by spamming popular posts, or using unrelated tags to get their post into Trending, or trying to lure unsuspecting minors into viewing their work with misleading graphics; all tactics I’ve seen used by pornbots. The only times I have ever been exposed to any “adult” content from any of the blogs I follow that I did not knowingly choose to view was if the Read More option was not functioning, e.g. after reblogging - which is a problem caused by Tumblr and is not the user’s fault.

The statement above pays lip service to a problem that needed to be dealt with a long time ago, one that Tumblr’s users recognized and repeatedly asked to be fixed. Tumblr did not “allow” spam and pornbots in the first place, but they took over anyway. There is no reason to expect it won’t happen again.

This isn’t really about cracking down on CP (although it should be, because that is something that absolutely doesn’t belong anywhere.) This isn’t a victory for antis. This isn’t about comfort or safety. What it is is an admission that Tumblr has been misleading its users for a very long time. It knowingly allowed users under 18 while passing itself off as a site for those 18+, then refused to act when those under 18 had adult content on their dash again and again. They made it look like the user had a choice in whether to block content they didn’t want to see and offered a purportedly safe browsing mode, but their site’s programming repeatedly failed to actually support the choices users were making. All those settings to customize the user’s experience turned out to be little better than digital placebos. And instead of responsibly fixing their programming and owning up to their failures, they’re trying to hide behind ideals and morals.