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
Even if I want to *make this site clean* and delete all my nsfw stuffs, I can’t because you fucking block the search result in my own fucking blog
I want to get the paper version of the Lethal Protector novel but I also want a eBook. Why can’t I get a kindle version when I bought a paper version? Blu-ray gives you a digital download link too =“=
So in another fantastic and well planned out move by @staff@support‘s resident circus show of sewage for brain brogrammers, a large and varied assortment of blogs have been completely fucked by the new changes, and it is completely unknown as of now what the criteria for your blog to be targeted is, or which combination of fuckups you’ll encounter. You may get all of them, like I have, or only one of them!
As of now, I cannot search my own blog.
For those of you unaffected, when you search a blog, it should come up like this.
Furthermore, I’m unable to search tags in my own sidebar
though I can search them on my individual user page!
Finally, none of my recent posts are showing up in ANY tags. Searching both the tumblr search and the tumblr tagged for my own god damn salt tag #ori salts returns posts that aren’t mine, and have nothing to do with the tag.
“But have you contacted staff? I’ve contacted @staff, and they gave me this generic fucking response.
Literally didn’t give me two seconds of their day and just copy pasted off of their help page. I have a strong feeling that they don’t give a fuck and have no intention of fixing this.
My blog isn’t marked explicit, so there’s no reason why everything should be hidden from the site. For those of you experiencing the same or similar issues, let me know in the notes.
What I’ve come across seems to be a common denominator, but so far I’m just spitballing based on the evidence brought to me, so take it with a grain of salt.
It seems that one of the criteria for being hidden against your will with zero knowledge or warning is being a good and respectful tumblr user, following guidelines, and marking/reblogging/liking posts with any of their arbitrarily picked blocked tags! If you repeatedly tag/reblog/like things like the ns//fw tag, you might just get a nice hidden flag on your blog.
And no, I don’t mean that your blog is forced to explicit, or that somehow your visibility has been set to hide you.
This is what the slide looks like when the slide is on:
And this is it off, yet on a blog that is still inexplicably hidden:
If your blog has been flagged for explicit activity, that blue slide will be faded, and you’ll be unable to click it to turn it off.
This is NOT what is happening here.
This is some secondary explicit flag that @staff has decided to completely and arbitrarily hide from users, and you only know if you’ve been hit by searching for your blog, your tags, or your art, and finding out on your own!
Fun times!
The amount of tags that have been silently blacklisted is way more than you might think
Both the furry tag and the CHRONIC PAIN tag are gone, making any content tagged with them hypothetically poisonous. We literally cannot know how many other non-sexual tags have been targetted without trial and error, since tumblr wont fucking talk to us. And the ‘if you reblog shit you can be removed from sesrch’ is still just a theory. Because they wont Fucking Acknowledge Shit.
I’m also only viewable from the dashboard now, nowhere in tags, and obviously i do draw the porn? But fuck man, this is Ridicuous. They’ve thrown up a ceiling for how large blogs can grow on their platform. And like fucking tumblr ims, its fucking Spreadable
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 