A better, more positive Tumblr

staff:

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

edited for clarification: tbh, this new policy won’t affect my Tumblr experience. What I take issue with is how hypocritical a response it seems. 

I’ve seen more ‘adult’ pictures since joining tumblr last year than I care to count. All of them were from prnbots 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 prn in their header or bio. Trending links? None of them legitimate. Flagging and blocking barely put a dent in the bots. The mobile app was especially lousy with them, which is one reason I deleted it.

Then the prnbots 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 that 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. Who wants to waste time scrolling past endless suggestions to “gEt lAiiD 2nite!!1” to find one real person? Bizarrely, when the mobile app was removed from the app store, the number of bots seemed to actually increase.

I’m just here for cute stuff and fashion and crafts and languages and fandom, which means I end up following a pretty diverse group of users. Fandom-wise, some of the blogs I follow do post mature content, written or fanart. They’re 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. The only time I’ve been exposed to content I didn’t actually want to see is if the Read More broke, e.g. after reblogging.

Fandom won’t be affected by these new guidelines, as fictional characters - and NSFW depictions of them, written or illustrated - aren’t considered to be true ‘adult content’. I’m only mentioning fandom as an example because it turns out they aren’t the only ones who have been doing something right. Apparently, there’s a whole other side of Tumblr that I’ve never once interacted with, one that feels unfairly targeted by these changes. Which brings me to this: 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 aggressively used by bots.

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 as an issue and repeatedly asked to be fixed. Tumblr did not “allow” spam and prnbots in the first place, but they took over anyway. There is no reason to think it won’t happen again. And if the bots are any indication, there is no reason to think they’ll be proactive when it does. 

This isn’t really about cracking down on CP (although it should be, because that is something that absolutely doesn’t belong anywhere.) And I’m not so sure it’s really about comfort or safety, either. What it is is an admission that Tumblr has been misleading its users for a very long time. It knowingly allowed users under 18 to maintain accounts while passing itself off as a site for those 18+, then refused to act when those under 18 were exposed to adult content on their dashes 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.

One final thought. I feel like a lot of the backlash could have been avoided if Tumblr had come forwards and said something like this instead:

“We know many of you joined because of the flexibility of our blogging platform, but recent events have led us to reconsider what kind of content we can support. Right now, the site is inundated with so much pornography that we can’t actually keep track of it all. It’s not just the bots - we hate those too. The biggest problem we’re facing is the illegal pornographic content that keeps filtering in through the cracks. Not only has it inconvenienced our users, it’s been a huge drain on our staff’s resources. As such, we’ve made the hard decision to no longer allow any adult content on Tumblr starting in January 2019; artistic nudity will still be permitted, as will illustrated and written erotica. (Here’s a link that explains what we mean by adult content.)

We’ll also be implementing some new moderation tools to help us fix up the site, and we’re excited to announce that the first one - an updated algorithm - launched last week. So far, it’s flagged thousands of blogs hosting illegal content to be removed from our system. Unfortunately, it still has a few bugs. Some of you may have been falsely flagged as explicit. If you’re missing posts or tags and feel this was done in error, make sure to report it to the support team and they’ll do their best to resolve the issue. We believe the algorithm has a lot of potential and we’ll be continuing to improve it in the upcoming months.

We think these changes will ultimately make Tumblr a better place. We welcome any feedback you may have on the wording of our new guidelines. We’ll also be creating individual feedback pages for the communities we think will be most affected by these changes so that we can make the transition as smooth as possible for everyone. And to those of you whose blogs will no longer meet Tumblr’s guidelines, just remember - it’s not you, it’s us.”