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Censorship Social Networks The Internet

Tumblr Will Ban All Adult Content On December 17th (theverge.com) 317

Tumblr, the underground social media site known for its pornographic content and tight-knit community, will be instituting a major change to its guidelines in a couple of weeks. The company said in a blog post today that it will permanently ban adult content from its platform on December 17th. The company flatly stated that "adult content will no longer be allowed here." The Verge reports: Banned content includes photos, videos, and GIFs of human genitalia, female-presenting nipples, and any media involving sex acts, including illustrations. The exceptions include nude classical statues and political protests that feature nudity. The new guidelines exclude text, so erotica remains permitted. Illustrations and art that feature nudity are still okay -- so long as sex acts aren't depicted -- and so are breastfeeding and after-birth photos.

After December 17th, any explicit posts will be flagged and deleted by algorithms. For now, Tumblr is emailing users who have posted adult content flagged by algorithms and notifying them that their content will soon be hidden from view. Posts with porn content will be set to private, which will prevent them from being reblogged or shared elsewhere in the Tumblr community.
"Blogs that have been either self-flagged or flagged by us as 'explicit' per our old policy and before December 17, 2018 will still be overlaid with a content filter when viewing these blogs directly," the blog post reads. "While some of the content on these blogs may now be in violation of our policies and will be actioned accordingly, the blog owners may choose to post content that is within our policies in the future, so we'd like to provide that option..."
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Tumblr Will Ban All Adult Content On December 17th

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:23PM (#57742698)
    Why would they put the gun to their head and pull the trigger?
    • by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:26PM (#57742712)
      They're scared of enforcement of SESTA/FOSTA by the Republicans' mutaween. Rock. Hard place.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Democrats voted for it just as much as Republicans. Censorship of porn is a bipartisan love affair.

      • They aren't scared of enforcement from SESTA, they got banned from Apples App Store due to child pornography. https://m.slashdot.org/story/3... [slashdot.org] it appears their solution is to ban all porn in an effort to get back in the app store.
        • They need to implement end to end encryption, so nobody can see what they are doing. If you can't get your app on the iphone you'll jailbreak the iphone or get android. If you can't share your porn on tumblr you'll go elsewhere for that.
      • by nwaack ( 3482871 )
        Umm no, Dems voted for that too. The congress critters on both sides of the aisle love this as much as liberals love spending other people's money.
        • Spending other people's money is also a bipartisan thing. They just disagree on where to spend it. Democrats love expansive social programs, but Republicans love to throw money into America's already-bloated military budget, and both love to subsidise influential industries such as media and agriculture.

      • What are these âRepublicans â you speak of? Theyâ(TM)re gone now. Tumblr is afraid of being targeted by Pound Me Too.

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        You sure it didn't have anything to do with them 'deleting' front-facing pages that were serving child porn, but leaving the CP accessible if you knew the URL's? Or...didn't you hear about that?

    • They were removed from iOS appstore outright because their porn filters were not good enough. Thatâ(TM)s likely to have more impact on business.

  • by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:27PM (#57742724)

    Honestly, what other use does tumblr have?

  • by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:33PM (#57742778)
    One of the nice things about Tumblr is that it served as a nice home for exactly the sort of people who liked the kind of content you would often find on Tumblr. If you're not familiar with the website, it has a reputation for featuring the kind of erotica that tends not to be published on more mainstream porn sites. So now you're going to get a lot of furries, adult-baby fetishists, and all manner of other sexual oddities looking for new homes. That's right folks, 40-year old men that like jerking off to erotic My Little Pony art, coming soon to a web community near you.

    If the government should subsidize anything it's Tumblr and 4chan. You'd be hard pressed to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it keeps those people from being somewhere else for most of the day.
    • by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:36PM (#57742798)
      Bring back USENET!
      • I miss my ASCII porn!
      • by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:59PM (#57743038)
        Back? It never went away.
        • by tepples ( 727027 )

          Usenet "went away" in the sense that major home ISPs have ceased operating news servers for their subscribers' use.

      • by nawcom ( 941663 )

        Bring back USENET!

        alt.binaries.* never went away, you just need to pay for a provider as no one is going to give you access to petabytes of data covering thousands of days of retention for free. Then there are the websites that index the content and provide generated NZBs, most of the decent ones being private these days. Binary content on usenet is very much alive and active.

    • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:39PM (#57742826)

      So now you're going to get a lot of furries, adult-baby fetishists, and all manner of other sexual oddities looking for new homes.

      What a giant opportunity for someone to scoop up the 99.9% of Tumblr users posting erotica, and quickly switch them to a new platform...

      • by zlives ( 2009072 )

        wish i had the resources...to make that happen while also being able to block illegal/child porn (which is tumblr ban cause)

        what is interesting that tumblr will be able to block nipples but couldn't block child porn the same way?!!

    • by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:57PM (#57743006) Journal

      You know? One thing I've come to realize over the years is that because the most important sex organ in the body is the brain, fetishes tend to span practically anything you could imagine.

      Societal norms and peer pressure tend to keep a lot of them in check. (In general, folks are never very comfortable when they're stuck being in proximity to others who think and act too differently from what they're used to.)

      But yes, they're always going to seek outlets for their "special interests" -- and I think it's a good and healthy thing to provide people with those outlets.

      It's interesting to me how certain fetish interests have gotten enough mainstream exposure so it's more socially acceptable to provide gatherings for them, while the rest are still hidden away. (If your thing is BDSM, for example? Most of that has become "trendy" enough that even back in the 1990's, most major cities had at least one nightclub with a "fetish night" with that as the theme.)

      I'd never advocate government sponsoring anything like Tumblr. The less government spends my tax money on "projects du jour", the better off I am. But this recent legislation that cracks down on all of this has gone way overboard.

      And yeah, I fail to see much attraction to using Tumblr for the G and PG rated content? Truth is, they're "yet another photo/video gallery" service otherwise. SnapChat, Instagram, etc. All performing the same functionality for people, more or less. Tumblr got a foothold BECAUSE they were known not to censor your content much.

    • I don't think that's quite the case.

      Of all the social media sites, Tumblr is by far the closest to "just show me the feeds I picked, screw everything else". You see 3-4 algo-suggested, and 1 staff-suggested, blogs off to the right, just the title/description/avatar and not mixed in with your feed like Twitter does. Other than that, it's literally whatever you chose to see. Which is what people actually want out of social media, honestly.

      And I really doubt much of the squicky porn resides on Tumblr. I mean,

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      If you have to ask where that home is, you're not really in those communities. Tumblr is not and has never been a mainstream site for those, there are plenty of open and uncensored sites for those.

  • Damn it! (Score:4, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:34PM (#57742782)
    *Now* where will I go for porn on the Internet? I guess it's back to looking at extra-curvy pieces of driftwood.
  • I wonder why they don't just have an adult section - break the site up into 2 aspects. Otherwise, I'm sure tumblr will simply be a thing of the past.
    • by zlives ( 2009072 )

      because, morally speaking, "they" don't see a need for the adult site. god created sex for procreation only, not for entertainment.

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      One downside of doing something like that is it shows weakness, and the types of groups that want sex hidden away tend to be REALLY into these kind of dominance games where any compromise means they are winning and they double down to make life worse.
  • Thanks apple... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    for making the world a more boring place again

    https://9to5mac.com/2018/12/03/tumblr-adult-content/ [9to5mac.com]

  • While it seems apparent many people here aren't aware of it, there are huge troves of content on Tumblr which isn't affected by this in the least.

    I'm not saying this is the right decision - or the wrong decision - but the idea that Tumblr exists just for porn is silly.

    • by zlives ( 2009072 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:57PM (#57743008)

      lets see if the usage statistics back your statement in about a month...

  • by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:49PM (#57742912)
    Larry Flint would not be amused. He has an opinion linked here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dt... [twimg.com]
    • I thought the line between curation and censorship involved whether the interfering party had A. a government-granted monopoly or B. market power (as defined in antitrust theory) [wikipedia.org] over the dissemination of information. To what extent does Tumblr have either, other than sharing a parent company with RF spectrum licensee Verizon Wireless? The Larry Flynt editorial you linked mentions Google, Facebook, and Apple, which are far more likely to have market power than Tumblr.

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      We seem to be in a no-win situation when it comes to these tech giants.
  • by raftpeople ( 844215 ) on Monday December 03, 2018 @04:53PM (#57742962)
    Ghost Town
  • (Crickets chirping in background...)
  • ...my wrist!
  • Can they ban breast feeding and after birth photos too? Leave those to sites dedicated to them.
  • I wasn't that deeply hooked into Tumblr, but today all I did was reblog a post with a screen capture of the ban, and delete everything else.

    Have fun fighting it out with Pinterest and Etsy, that's all the content you're going to have left!

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