krywaiidaddi:

feelingprettygaytoday:

krywaiidaddi:

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

I think you guys don’t really understand what your communities are. Tumblr has become a pretty safe place for people to explore their sexuality, express their sexuality and discovery things for their private lives that they would have never otherwise. This decision destroys that. It DENIES its users access to full explore the taboo side of their lives. It DENIES its users the right to post themselves for body positivity. It DENIES its users the right to share their passions that THEY CANNOT share with the people they live their daily lives with, be it because of social stigmas, fears, anxieties, xenophobia, homo and transphobia. 

This decision is an amputation of @tumblr users rights instead of tumblr taking up a challenge that every government and society has shunned away from. Teaching the fundamentals, teaching people that sexuality and “lewd” things are ok and normal behavior, but showing people what respectful limits and consent is. The community has made a move to reinforce positivity, to teachs its members what consent is, and that it is safe to express yourself. What tumblr has decided is a fundamental choice towards regression instead of choosing to support its communities in leading healthy behavior for positive global growth of the existing younger generation, it is choosing to return to a social norm where we hide our problems instead of facing them and cultivating growth.

@staff I would urge you to reconsider how your actions will affect the community and the generation your platform has the opportunity to teach. Make change by effective change, don’t make it by regressing. If you don’t understand adult content creators, then reach out to some of them and talk, there are multiple blogs willing, and many people who want to invoke change, but for a positive, not to return to a place and society where they are shamed.

You’re right. And I knew you’d say something 🙂 At least you tried.

This really caught me off guard - but I’ll be more surprised if they reconsider. It’s just way too much fun to tell other people what they can and cannot do and feel good about yourself while you do.

It’s just such a shame.

The thing is this, tumblr already has options to remove sensitive content, infact in alot of cases the options are enabled by default, it’s just not able to moderate itself effectively or have a decent image recognition software set up in order to help flag and remove images of under age individuals. Tumblr has massive problems don’t get me wrong. But the +-5.4M it would cost to licence or develop a proper solution which would better humanity, and remove the content that is getting them blocked on the applestore, they have chosen to commit business suicide and redirect towards a market that has already been claimed by Pintrest and instagram :/