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

Why the are you discriminating against female-presenting nipples? If you’re going to target nipples, you may as well target all nipples. Nipples can be shown in non sexual ways! What if I want to share the properly credited work of a tattoo artist who helps vagina-owning breast cancer survivors by tattooing realistic nipples on their reconstruction? What if I want to share that I’ve gotten my nipples pierced? Suddenly I’m not allowed to do that because I have female-presenting breasts, but my brother-in-law can bc he’s male?

Yes, I agree that content and tagging abuse has gotten out of hand, but how about enforcing tagging of NSFW and such? And come on! I get that misleading links can be harmful but now we can’t even RickRoll? That one is generally harmless! Try evaluating links for malware instead of banning it altogether.

I’m a freshman business major and I can already see that Tumblr is about to implode. Your terms are vague at best, self-destructive at worst.

The more I think about it, the more it infuriates me. Certain tags where people share there experience with health issues are being dumped but self harm tags remain untouched. Harmless content, even cute content, is being flagged, but I still see bots suggested to me in my feed.

Content that has been flagged “sensitive” as adult is being deleted rather than just marked sensitive.

Literal Nazis are left untouched but queer folks are having to appeal their blogs being deactivated with no warning.

The Tumblr system is abusing automated taxonomy tagging instead of what it should do, and take note of folksonomy tagging. The system would be able to better gauge where to place that content.

Banning sexual content also bans sex ed content, which is desperately needed in the US. People learn more from this site than they do in real life.

People need a safe place to express their healing after rape. Or a fantastic sexual night with someone they fancy. Or questions about sexual topics. Or to share stories they’ve written or art they’ve made pertaining to consenting characters.

And what about the healthy BDSM community on here? What about those exploring it? Or exploring their own sexuality? I would have killed myself after the abuse I suffered if I had not learned on this site what asexuality is.

But I’m probably going to lose my account for sharing such things, and for openly typing such things, after the Dec 17 enactment of the “updated” though still desperately vague terms.

I’m going to turn on my inbox to full blast and make it so anyone can message me so I can tell you where to find me if you want to see what I’m up to after the 17th.

I may make an effort to clean this blog up before then. Maybe not. Cause the flagging seems arbitrarily done at this point.

Yours truly,

Constantine