Tumblr Restricting Porn Eliminates the Platform's Greatest Value

Effective December 17, Tumblr will no longer allow any form of pornographic visuals on the platform, regardless of the user’s age or settings. This controversial decision essentially eliminates many vibrant, sex-positive communities that have grown on Tumblr thanks to its formerly open-minded approach to porn, and raises an important question: Where will people go to find their porn GIFs in 2019?

Tumblr announced the policy change on Monday via blog post only a few days after Apple removed the Tumblr app from the iOS app store following a controversy with child pornography. Though Tumblr claims that the two events aren’t related, the timing seems important here. In barely two weeks’ time, algorithms will scrub the entire site of anything deemed adult content.

“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,” the company said in an official statement. One 2017 study found that almost half of Tumblr’s 130 million users at least encountered pornographic imagery while browsing the platform’s feed, with more than a quarter of them encountering porn through accident.

Is Tumblr looking to grow its users by eliminating the chance of discovering porn altogether, focusing instead on its other primary demographic of “teen angst”? Whether or not that’s true, plenty of users, especially women, don’t seem to be too happy about it.

Many users flock to Tumblr for more “soft-core” and “artsy” pornographic imagery that’s less ostentatiously targeted to men, according to one piece in Glamour from 2017. And partially because the majority of Tumblr users across all age ranges are female, a significant portion of Tumblr blogs about porn are curated by women for women.

Whereas most traditional porn tends to cater to the male perspective, usually crossing the border into full-on misogyny, Tumblr offers offered a safer space where women could curate their own clips, GIFs, and videos of sex. If Tumblr was the best place for any type of porn, it was GIFs, a peculiar medium of porn that doesn’t really thrive anywhere else.

“You’re exerting control in what moments you choose to magnify, [and] you become the director or the postproduction editor of your desires,” Monica Torres, co-founder of women’s website High Strung, told Glamour. But after Tumblr erases thousands, perhaps millions, of GIFs, everything will change.

Tumblr’s comprehensive definition of “adult content” is comprehensive enough that most kinds of potentially arousing GIFs will likely meet the new standards for deletion:

“Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples,” the new policy reads. “[As well as] any content — including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations — that depicts sex acts.”

There may be a few exceptions. The platform will permit “female-presenting nipples” if they’re depicted in “health-related situations” such as breastfeeding. Erotica in text or art form will also remain allowable.

“There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content,” Tumblr correctly said in its official statement. “We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.”

Yet another problem with Tumblr’s new policy is that it could, effectively, wind up scrubbing a multitude of adult content from the web, some of which might be important to people’s portfolios and ability to line up work. If you’re worried about losing your Tumblr archives, Jason Scott, the proprietor of TextFiles.com, explained how anyone can use the Wayback Machine to preserve any specific blogs that might become inert after December 17. You have two weeks.