a gentle societal mindfuck :)

A better, more positive Tumblr

isa-ghost:

viostormcaller:

kisstheashes:

viostormcaller:

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

The main reason why this doesn’t make sense is because this is a website mainly for people of “mature” age (17+), on the app store anyway. So adult content here is created by adults, for other adults. So the main demographic should be adults, anyhow. I understand there ARE minors on this site, and that’s fine, but you have to remember who you created the site for. Anything a minor wouldn’t want to be exposed to should fall on the creator by tagging work for minors to blacklist so they aren’t exposed to it, if that’s you guys’ concern. It’s in part why you made that feature, no?

I 100% understand the concern with child pornography, because that is illegal and EXTREMELY abhorrent and deserves to be completely eridicated not only from tumblr but the earth in general, but you’re equating pornography of consenting adults made by adults, to that, which is confusing. Then there’s the bots issue, but this will not get rid of the bots, because bots don’t know common sense. They’ll still find a way or a loophole to be on this site anyhow. Shutting down an entire demographic for your own mistakes and overlooked issues isn’t the way to go about this issue, I feel.

I don’t know. This entire thing doesn’t feel right, like it’ll do more harm than good to the adult content creators of this site. But, then again, most tumblr updates seem to do that.

And of course, once this is over and done, you’ll go straight back to ignoring us about the other actual issues of this site and how it runs. I love this site, but the way you guys go about handling things on here is just as bad as how Youtube handles things on their platform.

What I find absolutely goddamn ridiculous about this is that it’s not going to hurt the bots. From what I’ve seen lately, bots mostly have pictures of women in clothes that show cleavage but not actual nudity. So they’re gonna wipe out a whole demographic for literally nothing. Way to go Tumblr

Oh my god that’s super fucking true

That’s the loophole, I realize. Nothing will change in terms of bots then, because according to the guidelines the bots aren’t doing anything wrong. So they won’t be eradicated at all, and we’ll still have the problem with bots.

What tumblr is doing isn’t solving any problems, it’s just slapping a bandage on a broken arm.

@staff is useless and we’ve known this forever now. They never listen to problems the users actually report, they only put on lazy fixes to much bigger problems.

(via julian--devorak)