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
Ok. This is a big one. Little old Jeff here thinks he’s a bit spesh, that he has so much power simply by providing the digital infrastructure for people to post their opinions online. For fucks sake dear brother of Vincent (awesome in Daredevil btw!), how on earth are we going to differentiate between you and your boring cousins Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest and Pocket?! You used to be the cool uncle. Even old aunt SAS herself (short attention span), yes, Aunt Twitter is now officially more interesting. You literally killed your mojo, man! You became what we all swore we wouldn’t become when we grew up: conservative like our olds, forlorn and pining for a world that the present one has moved on from. What? Don’t tell me you don’t remember our innocent but determined pinky swear not to become old fuddy duddys when dad would drive us around and he’d turn on the radio, seemingly just to tell us that the music these days was not as melodic, pretty or generally as easy to listen to compared to that of his generation. Well let me remind you, many of the biggest cultural advances of the last 200 years (if not looking further back still) have been as a result of different aspects of our sexuality crawling out of the huts and husks built from mud bricks of shame and masks of self-flagellated flesh fabricated and fashioned by religion(s), and becoming a thing to celebrate instead. Things like the long journey to bra burning, white guys dancing with their hips Elvis-style, gay and lesbian and other people of an alernative sexual persuasion or gender identity to that which is but common finally being given equal rights to officially love the person they fuck regardless of what’s between their legs. Madonna and her Sex book which not just pushed the envelope of sexuality in to the mainstream, it pitched it like baseball and it stuck like a shot put! And just when it looks like we might finally be able to stop feeling ashamed of our sexuality, that we could all actually live harmoniously with our little freaky sides allowed to express itself without fear of harm or embarrassment, shame or even self loathing thanks to the internet and mainstream sites such as yours that trafficked in pride and acceptance and not demonisation and false modesty as you have with what was a very important forum for self expression and connection and love (in its many endless forms). You have re-shamed us of our sexuality, our free body, free soul, free mind and free heart. You have told us our sexuality as humans is dangerous, something that’s best left hidden and unseen in its exquisitely explicit form. You’ve banned physical love from your once very cool website. Shame on you, Mr D’onofrio! Shame! It is censorship like this that many motivations to hurt others are born from. Rape, pedophilia, fat-shaming, slut shaming, pro-choice shaming are all encouraged by hiding our sexuality. In essence, you have made tumblr more dangerous, more incitedul of hatred and more encouraging of murdering, raping violence due to what you wont show rather than if you hadn’t become such a draconian power and shown us the respect to make our own choices as adults. Just sayin’...
