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
@staff don’t pretend you’re doing this out of good will and concern. Don’t pretend you’re doing this competently.
You are doing this as a reactionary step to cover your own backsides.
Your user base has been complaining about bots and child porn (that is actually illegal under US law. Not fan fiction or fan art that is completely fictional, and in no way depicting real people or photorealistic) for months now, if not years.
You refused to act. Instead you arbitrarily deleted blogs that you received complaints about without checking the legitimacy of the complaints.
You refused to do anything about the bots posting adult content and tagging it so that people saw it if they wanted to or not (and believe me. Nobody wanted to see the porn bots). You didn’t act until the App Store and google play removed the app from their stores.
Your actions show a fundamental lack of care. They show laziness and disregard for the happiness of your user base.
You have shown a total lack of competence regarding which content gets flagged already. You flagged all content that had any reference to marginalized gender and sexual identities not that long ago.
This app is ruled mostly by a mob mentality. You do nothing about targeted harassment, suicide baiting, threats of harm, and massive smear campaigns designed to bully individual users. This harassment often includes a mass report directive, where the users who are bullying report the blog they’re targeting repeatedly until you delete it without bothering to corroborate any of the claims being made. I have seen this happen. I have seen you force users to jump through hoops to get their blogs back after you removed them for NO. GOOD. REASON.
I might almost believe that you were legitimately trying to help @staff HOWEVER as soon as you made this announcement blogs that do not break the adult content rule (that hasn’t even gone into effect yet) started getting flagged as containing adult content.
Yet again you are completely and utterly incapable of doing what you set out to do. You have tags that aren’t inherently related to adult content blacked out already (yaoi. A genre. A genre focused on queer content. Good job.) and your flagging system is already completely not functional.
The mob mentality on this website WILL abuse your new system. Soon you will have no user base at all. You’ll be just another dead social media attempt, like MySpace or live journal. Nobody wants to stay on a platform that reneges and changes their TOS because they’re too lazy and incompetent to remove bots and actual child porn. Nobody wants to remain on a platform that punishes it’s users for its staff’s incompetency. Nobody wants to stay on a platform where the mob can take advantage of the staff’s lazy, poorly managed system to kick anyone they want off of the website. Nobody wants to stay on a platform that punishes users who did nothing wrong but allows targeted harassment and threats of harm to persist.
Get fucked, @staff.
deadgirlmakeup