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

You’re wrong. You just killed the community you’re claiming to fix. Your response to the problem with child pornography you created through negligence and willful incompetence is wide-ranging censorship.

I tolerated the overwhelming brokenness of this service because at least it wasn’t facebook, with the awful, money-guided conservative political agendas and censorship of that platform. The fact that staff ignored the literal child pornography for so long, allowed the site to be overtaken by bots and criminals until the app was pulled from Apple’s app store over it is reprehensible. The fact that your response has been weeks of bumbling followed by this is inexcusable.

“There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content.”

Yeah, Tumblr being a major one.

“We won’t always get things right”

YOU DON’T FUCKIN’ SAY!

How dare you. How very dare you.

To have the blatant audacity to destroy livelihoods, and blogs and content that not only have taken people months and years to build up to their current point but also have a beneficial effect to a wide part of the community (by way of mental support (in the LGBT community, people with body issues, sexual health issues, etc)), under the guise of “making Tumblr a more positive, inclusive place”…….no, fuck you. You don’t get to decide and dictate what legal-aged, law abiding ADULTS choose to look at and create. This is a democracy. If we wanted to be run by a dictatorship we’d go to North Korea or Russia.

You have totally contradicted yourself by nuking 90% of your userbase, all the while deluding yourself by saying it’s a “positive step”.

Tell me again how having major restrictions on what can be posted allows for “diversity of expression”, and is a “welcoming community”…?

All you had to do was do your actual job and do the shit we’ve been pestering you for YEARS to do (remove the kiddy pr0n and pr0n bots). But no, you chose to keep making stupid little aesthetic alterations, and rely on poorly constructed algorithms that get it wrong 99.9% of the time….

Come about midday December 17th, the only traffic going through your servers @staff will be the occasional tumbleweed. May rats piss on everything you eat.

The Australian Government could certainly learn a thing or three from you lot about total and utter incompetence at doing your job……