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

They can't be this fucking stupid that they would kill their own company in a matter of seconds

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the art for this song is taking forever so here have a phone-recorded wip

everything you didnt wanna know about say and arc

I hope you read the character descriptions I’m not gonna repeat information from them. I just kinda happened to have these saved I guess. Shrugs.

So like. Say is minding her own business in this one really shitty run down city then here comes a mass murdering fucko named Arc. He couldn’t fucking give less of a shit about humanity. He immediately becomes infatuated with her. She doesn’t really like him. Over the course of The Chattering of Teeth and Lack of Common Sanity, Arc convinces her to join in on the constant slaughter. She of course hates what she’s become but there’s not a whole lot she can do.

So this is where things get weird.

“SHORT STORY SHORT Arc literally fucks everything up he leaves the remains of corpses around the back alleys where Say lives which draws the attention of the police who come and investigate and, using latent blood detection, find Say’s room’s floor is basically covered in blood stains so they assume she left the carnage and, when she’s brought in to the station and they draw a blood sample from her (this is in the fuuuuuuture and they use blood samples to keep record of criminals) they’re like WOAH SOMETHING IS SUPER WEIRD ABT THIS KIDDO so they send her to a laboratory that specializes in species classification and research and basically Say’s worst nightmare comes true because the scientists literally determine her a non-living thing because there’s no evidence that her species can reproduce, henceforth they don’t even treat her close to a human, suddenly knocking her out with anesthesia and doing dissections on her without consent. And all this happens because Arc basically framed her AND IT GETS WORSE Say finally manages to escape the place place and, when she tracks down Arc, he had already fucking destroyed a majority of the city’s population (leeeeet’s just say he robbed the city’s defense station and got himself armed with bombs and guns) and he had himself in a tizzy with the armed forces. He did some shit, Say did some shit, Say tried to behead Arc, she didn’t quite get him because his neck healed and so he returns the favor and actually succeeds in beheading her.”

–GHOST

Carnes’ art of Say

Say eating (TW: gore)

Their short lived, non-canon redesigns (heights are still canon)

Say and Arc in their regular designs (tw blood)

Just some doodles of the two

All of the above art is by ghostie-p era GHOST.