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
I believe you guys have the right intent but you are going about it completely wrong. Tumbler has been a place where anyone can express themselves and come together in a way they may not be able to otherwise. It made it easy to find people with other or similar sexual or kinky interest. It was an easy place to discover new things that were great and most of all it allowed people to express themselves and the things they were into. I mean you guys are basically going to make yourselves the new Myspace. By that I mean of course no one is going to use it. I understand wanting to make it a safer place but you guys should have really considered at what cost? It’s not just that its pornography and people can get off, which I mean of course is a big part, but its about people being able to make art and show off their talents. Being able to explore new things that again they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. There are other sites that show porn of course, but none like Tumbler where people could make their own personal porn or hell even sometimes art. I even read an article where it said women loved the porn tumbler because it was the normal every day shit that people had to see and deal with. It was personal to what they wanted to see which was true for everyone. I mean hell when Playboy said they were no longer going to show nudity in their magazine they lost a lot of people and even later on admitted it was a mistake. You are taking away people’s access to be able to express themselves and explore their likes and dislikes all because you guys don’t agree with it, which you of course have every right to do sense it is your website, but you guys are making a terrible mistake by doing this and I hope you realize that before its too late. I mean hell all someone has to do is make a similar site to this which will allow people to do that and they will become very big. The thing I don’t get is you already had the safe mode on, which I get why that wouldn’t always be enough but why didn’t you just make another but similar website that allowed people to have adult content. I mean all you would have had to do is put that link in to tell people “hey we are doing this thing and will no longer allow adult content on this site, but we are transferring everything to this site so those who still want to, will be able to have their fun.” You guys talk about how you can express yourself and so on but you are completely taking that chance away for so many people all because you don’t agree with it but yet I’m sure people will be able to post shit about violence or show violent things to an extent, which is crazy. There are much worse things posted on this site then porn, but because you guys have this “morality” complex you think porn all of sudden is bad and shouldn’t be on here, which was one thing I’m sure helped build you cite to what it is today.
