@staff why exactly are female presenting nipples banned but male presenting nipples not banned? There is nothing inherently sexual about nipples save for what society has made them to be. Also in regards to your post saying you want tumblr to be a “safe space” why did you make it 17+ in the first place? There is already an option to block adult content. You did that with safe mode. What you are doing now is censorship. But what does it really matter. Not like you’ll read this, it’s not like you actually care about your users. You care about money. I joined tumblr, at first, to interact with my friends. Now, I’m gonna be leaving(and not just because my content is adultish). I mean ever bit of offense when I say you are the same, if not worse, than deviantart. At least there, the users are cared about.
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
We asked you for months to fix the porn bots problem.
I go to my blocked list and it’s still full of active porn bots.
What you are doing right now is not solving the problem, it is blatantly lazy and purely reactionary to getting kicked off of the app store. You can claim that you are trying to better the community all you want, but it sure is convenient that you want to better the community as soon as your profits are in danger.
Along with that, you bring up the child pornography issue simply to say “look at all this good we are doing” while also not so subtly equating adult content and child pornography to justify your move, but it’s nothing more than a deflection if it has nothing to do with your policy change, even though it is an important persistent problem that we have also been asking you for months to do something about.
What you are doing right now in taking away any NSFW content is going to be devastating to a large percent of your user base who have created entire platforms and careers making NSFW content of consenting adults. You will also be losing a large percent of your user base who used your site for those creators.
And you know it’s true, because you’re marking posts criticizing this move as sensitive, pushing your censorship to another level from just blocking NSFW and ship tags.
I don’t even really post much NSFW content, but the way you are handling this so ridiculous and is driving so many people I follow off this hellsite that I’m looking at making other media platforms too.
You did not fix the problem, and yet you want to congratulate yourself on a job well done as you remove a large part of your user base and what they came to your website for.
Anyway @staff come at me with that sensitive content flag if you can actually manage to do it without fucking up your entire post since you apparently don’t know how to do shit on your own website. Also since you want to follow in Live Journal’s footsteps here, because you clearly don’t know your history, I hope something comes out to replace you like AO3 did after Strikethrough.
@kate882 pillowtalk(I believe is what it’s called) will be the replacement to tumblr
2009 – GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 – FFN forums deleted
2011 – Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 – major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 – Quizilla shuts down
2015 – Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 – Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 – Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 – Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
2010 ish (?) – deviantART purges adult fanfiction (I only very vaguely remember this one, because I’ve never been a dA user and it happened during my fannish hiatus, but there is some incomplete info on Fanlore. If you remember more about what happened, please help edit that page!)
Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).
If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.
This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.
I wanna bring something up about deviantart. It does allow the posting of violence, small amounts of sex, gore, and other things. How do I know this? I’ve done some testing on a throwaway account.
As a reader, as a writer, and as a fan I can’t think of a single website that has given me more happiness than Archive of Our Own. Thank you so much to everyone who works so hard to make it such a wonderful place.
Today is realy good day to reblog this.
Yupp, there are times when I feel the need to go there and I ALWAYS find gems that sooth me, comfort me, cheer me up, excite and inspire me! I REALLY love that site and very grateful for its exsitence.
Now more than ever we should reblog. This site will have a shit ton more traffic after tumblr is done with us
In response to the NSFW ban being enacted by Tumblr Staff, on December 17th 2018 I propose that we all log off of our Tumblr accounts for 24 hours.
The lack of respect and communication between staff and users is stark. Users have been begging staff to delete the porn bot outbreak, which has plagued the website for well over a year. The porn bots oftentimes send people asks and messages, trying to get them to go to a website full of viruses. They also spam advertisements on others posts.
Users have also begged that Tumblr ban neo-nazis, child porn, and pedophiles, all which run rampant on the site. The site/app got so bad that it was taken off the app store.
However, instead of answering the users, Tumblr has instead taken the liberty to ban all NSFW content, regardless of age. But users have already run into issues of their SFW content being marked as sensitive and being flagged as NSFW, not allowing them to share their work.
Not only does this discriminate again content creators, but it also discriminates against sex workers. Disgustingly, the ban will be enacted on December 17 which is also International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
This ban is disgusting, and while I (and plenty of others) welcome porn bots and child porn being banned, the Tumblr filtration system is broken. It tags artistic work’s nipples as NSFW (when it is art), it tags SFW art as NSFW (when it is not), and does not stop the porn bots, neo-nazis and dozens of other issues.
This ban is discriminatory. This ban is ineffective. This ban is unacceptable.
To protest, log off of your Tumblr account for the entirety of November 17th. Log off at 12 am EST or 9PM PST and stay off for 24 hours. Don’t post. Don’t log on. Don’t even visit the website. Don’t give them that sweet ad revenue.
Tumblr’s stock has already taken a hard hit. Let’s make it tank. Maybe then they will listen to the users.
Reblog to signal boost! We must force change.
I’ll most likely be doing this. I encourage you to do the same.
I don’t know if it will really change anything, but give it a shot. Let’s show Tumblr we are not happy with their constant fuckin’ shitty choices.
Don’t log in for ANY reason on D-Day. No reason. A full 24 hours. Go take a self-care day. Eat some fancy snacks, drink a soda, sit in the tub for a few hours.
